Confessions of a Comic Strip Reader

March 1992
Confessions of a Comic Strip Reader
By Bob Coskrey


I feel a certain emptiness on days that for some reason I don’t get to read the comics section of the newspaper. This happens very seldom, usually only when I’m out of town and just don’t have an opportunity to pick up a newspaper.

Life is quite serious. And this is exactly why we must be able to laugh at it. I think the psychologists call it a coping mechanism. Sometimes you not only need to laugh, but also to escape, and for me, reading the comics accomplishes both of these things.

When I read the headlines about the economy’s decline, people killing each other over chia pets, and the prediction that by the year 3,000 the earth will be 1/3 Styrofoam, and 1/3 asphalt and 1/3 water (polluted), I immediately search for the comics section where I am able to find a brief solace, fantasizing that there really might be a 6-year-old boy with a stuffed toy tiger that comes to life as a regular-sized one with the assistance of the boy’s imagination.

Yes, “Calvin and Hobbes” is my all-time favorite comic strip. Calvin is no ordinary child or even human being for that matter. He apparently has the intellect of a Mensan, but his cognitive precocity is vitiated by his 6-year-old emotional development. Calvin’s behavior can easily be characterized as fiendish. In 70s argot, he would have been described as “Dennis the Menace on acid,” but his most salient quality is his extraordinary imaginative powers, which frequently lift him beyond the tenets of his reality-grounded adult world into his own fantastic futuristic place, where he may confront teacher/space creatures as the courageous space man, Spif. Or, he may step back in time to the Paleolithic Period, where his mother/tyrannosaurus may challenge him to pick up his clothes. In between time and space travels, he hands out with his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, who fluctuates between helping Calvin perpetrate demonic pranks on a little girl named Susie and serving as his superego, all this, of course, while he’s in his real tiger transmogrification.

My fascination with Calvin may, in fact, have something to do with the fact that he reminds me somewhat of myself at that age: an imaginative only child, who enjoyed playing by himself, maybe a little too much, the only difference being Calvin is a lot smarter and somewhat more felonious than I was. I even had a stuffed toy animal, a white rabbit in a yellow and blue Easter suit named Georgie. In fact, he’s still up in my attic, where he’s been waiting some 46 years for me to resume our parlous partnership. “Bob and Georgie.” I don’t think so. It just doesn’t have good ring to it.

Prior to Calvin and Hobbes’ arrival, I guess my favorite comic strip was “B.C.” with the “Wizard of Id” following closely. I especially like B.C. when it features the ants because it’s sort of fun to imagine insects with names like Claude and Shirley. Not only do I usually like the contents of these two cartoons, along with the likes of “Show,” “Garfield,” “Hagar the Horrible” and “Foxtrot,” but I also think that the deadpan expressions the artists put on their characters augment their punchlines.

Many of them also have their perpetual whipping boy figures such as B.C.’s peg-legged Wiley, Clumsy Carp and the Snake, Shoe’s Professor, The Wizard of Id’s king, Sir Rodney and the Spook, Garfield’s John Arbuckle, and Foxtrot’s feckless father character. It’s mildly uplifting to realize while I’m muzzle-loading my face with Nutri Grain Wheat cereal and bananas every morning that at least today I won’t be pulverized by a fat broad with a stick or eat swill in a cell, and that even if I went to Hell and was sentenced to watch Dick Van Patton commercials for all eternity, I would never experience the infinite boredom of John Arbuckle.

There has never been a more worthless, mean-spirited, philandering little libertine than “Andy Capp.” Yet oddly, I have the urge to have a couple of beers with him—probably at Big John’s. This does not speak favorably for my sensibilities, I’m afraid, but luckily I have been able to blame it on Andy’s composite similarities to some drinking buddies of the past. I am also intrigued, I will confess, by the mystery of his hat hiding his complete identity. Will we never see the rest of his face? Oh, I read some other comics, such as Doonesbury, Mark Trail and Blondie. But Doonesbury is really more of a satirical cartoon on American politics and lifestyle. Mark Trail is actually a nature lesson taught by a blatantly asexual forest ranger, who lives in the forest with his 250-year-old St. Bernard, Andy, and calls on his ironically named girlfriend Cherry, only when he has a hankerin’ for some home-cooked vittles. Blondie, a misnamed strip, whose bungling protagonist is actually Dagwood, Blondie’s husband, has been in the paper ever since I can remember, and I continue to read it, even though most of the time it’s not even funny, for the same reason that I still like to walk through a dimestore. I can remember my mother and other family members laughing at Dagwood’s goofball antics over 40 years ago. With everything else in life changing at a seemingly accelerated rate, as I grow older, Blondie is one of its few constants. The Bumstead family, dogs included, look just like they did in 1948. And even the humor is the same. It was simplistic then and it’s simplistic now. So I will continue to read this strip even if it gets worse. To repudiate it now would b like serving my nostalgic umbilical cord.

Of course, there have been numerous strips, some even worse than Blondie, by today’s more sophisticated standards, that have disappeared over the years: Maggie and Jigs, Terry and the Pirates, Mandrake the Magician, The Phantom, Mutt and Jeff, Dondi, Henry and Nancy. It’s just as well that they have all ceased to exist, since if they were still in print, I would be compelled to read them.

One that I do wish would return is the metaphysically hip and occasional risqué Bloom County, with its strange little neurotic penguin character, Opus, and psychotic Bill the Cat. There were times I didn’t understand it, but it was always interesting.

There are a lot of comics that I don’t read because I have no emotional linking with them, and I doubt I ever will, unless maybe some of them are still here 25 or 30 years from now.

While I’m at this, I may as well tell you that I read Mary Worth, which I think also means that when I retire, I will spend more of my afternoons watching soap operas. I feel a need to explain why I like to read this strip, because I am haunted by the feeling that no male in the Western Hemisphere even glances at it. I could lie and say that Mary reminds me of my late grandmother, but I can’t do that. I can only say that I haphazardly read her once about eight years ago and have kept up with the stories ever since. Maybe I should check my testosterone dipstick more frequently.

I have purposely saved one cartoon for last, The Far Side. And that is because it is so completely different from all the rest. What makes this creation so distinctive, of course, is author Gary Larsen’s nonpareil sense of humor. He’s sort of the Miles Davis of cartoon artists with a comic mind that seems to function in another dimension. Today’s offering is a perfect example: A large python relaxing on a TV-fronted sofa with an even larger pig stuck down his throat. He helplessly mutters, “damn!” to himself, as the telephone rings. Even his characters are extraordinary, with the children all looking like fat, buck-toothed, bespectacled little nerds, the women, cow-sized with beehive hairdos, and tacky 60s-looking eye glasses, and men all resembling Larry “Bud” Melman. I keep looking for information about Larsen, a brief bio in the newspaper, an interview, but I never see anything. I’m very curious about what sort of environment and or chromosomal interplay created this individual. A talk show appearance would be neat, too. What does he look like? Could he possibly be Larry “Bud” Melman?

And so, there you have it—from Calvin and Hobbes to Blondie to the Far Side—I have confessed my pitiable dependency on the comics. I have shown you that without my daily escape into Stripsville, life is just too oppressive, too onerous, too damned serious!

Dwindling readership: Get one, Bob!

Me (pitifully): A paper, you want me to get a paper?

Dwindling readership: No, a life!

Joke Busters

Recently my wife, Barbara, and I went out to dinner at a local downtown restaurant, where we witnessed something that I have never seen in my 65 years of frequenting restaurants and, unfortunately, it was something extremely annoying. About 20 feet from our table was a long table of 15 or so people, who were merrily celebrating the birthday of an elderly gentleman (Yes, somebody in my demographic group). They were laughing, eating, and drinking, but they were certainly not loud of obtrusive whatsoever. About 20 minute into our meal, I noticed a large man in a coat and tie, who was sitting at a table with a woman about 6 feet from the celebrants, start up a conversation with a couple of these people. Eventually, I made out that the man had established that they had mutual friends and he started talking to the whole table, in general.

Nothing untoward so far, and I guess you’re wondering why I was eavesdropping instead of paying attention to my lovely wife. Well, I can answer that easily: I was paying attention to Barbara, and we both like to eavesdrop. Just kidding about the last part, however, one of the great pleasures of my life is people-watching. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy going to NYC. And from a planning for the future standpoint, it’s a skill that will pay big dividends in my on-rushing nursing home days when that may well be my only pleasure. Two nurses in conversation: “Hey, that old Mr. Coskrey gives me the creeps, always staring at me. God, or rather Satan, knows what he’s thinking.” “Yeah, and they ought to make him keep his hands on top of that blanket in his lap, not to mention when he spills stuff down there so I’ll have to clean him, then whispers in my ear, ‘Who’s your granddaddy?’”

But back to the people in the restaurant, who, incidentally, were so far away, I could only catch pieces of their conversations, and so what if I were trying to listen in, these characters might have been terrorists, and I was just attempting to do my part in protecting the security of the American people. I mean, we are told to be vigilant. What’s the alert code color now anyway? Oh, that’s right, there’s no election till November, so it’s probably something like taupe, mauve or Dick Cheney death-grey.

The annoying part came not from the group at the table, but from the couple, and it unfolded when the man asked the group if they would like to hear a good joke. Fortunately, I could not hear it, but whatever it was, it made the group laugh real hard. Then when he finished, he introduced the woman at his table, who may or may not have been his wife, and she then got up, blurted out her prolonged joke, which also elicited much guffawing. But the coup de God Damned grace was delivered by this man a few minutes later, and this performance was a little more audible, at least to the extent that I could tell that it was a joke about a preacher wish a severe stuttering problem. So this dolt is in the middle of a restaurant filled with people, poking fun at a person with a speech defect, and he’s really selling it a bit too hard, creating a sputtering sound somewhere between Porky Pig and Howard Stern Whackpacker, John the Stutterer. There are several reasons why I found this whole scene patently offensive (Yes, I’m afraid those people may actually have taken out a patent). The first being that there may have been people in the restaurant who had stuttering difficulties themselves. How could a person who just invoked the name of Howard Stern complain about insensitivity? Easy, if Howard Stern offends you, don’t but a Sirius Radio and listen to him, however I did and do, by the way. But if you’re a person with a stuttering condition sitting in a public eating establishment (I must make a note to find out why we have to refer to restaurants as “establishments”), and this idiot begins his tasteless piece of crap joke, you are at his mercy, unless maybe you want to get up and pin his tongue to the table with a steak knife a al Luca Brazzi’s hand being united with the bar in “Godfather II.”

Secondly, what kind of creeps would even want to tell jokes to strangers eating in a restaurant anyway? Are they frustrated grandchildren of vaudeville performers? Is it a neo-improv-cabaret movement? Are they culinary retarded offspring of famous chefs desperately seeking validation from the dining public through other means? Well, whatever the reason, I’m afraid they won’t be able to drink from my desiccated empathy pool.

Lastly, people who want to make their marks in life by being freelance fonts of jokes created by someone else I find excruciatingly tedious, not to mention aggravating. They’re the ones who can’t carry on a conversation or even make an initial greeting without injecting, “Hey, did you hear the one about—?” For God’s sake, you people, if you don’t have enough imagination to come up with one joke on your own, then just shut up or maybe just start telling your pitiful life story. That’s bound to get a few laughs.

I have swon an oath that these restaurant cabaristas must be stopped. So the next time I see one of these perfidious clowns start a performance, I will take the food-cluttered stage myself and exclaim, “Ladies and gents, have you heard the one about the obnoxious, pathetic, 300 lb. jokester who traveled from restaurant to restaurant trying to entertain diners with stolen material so stale it could make pigeons choke? No? Well, here he is.” And before he recovers and begins his routine, I leap forward and make a citizen’s arrest, charging the faux comic with plagiarizing the “Readers’ Digest” joke section: “By the powers bestowed upon me by my English Major diploma, I hereby arrest you,” at the same time, of course, flashing my Literary License. So, readers, if you happen to see one of these jerky jesters the next time you’re dining out, who you gonna call? Joke Busters!