ROBERT GREENBERGER: Strip show
Johnny Hart passed away the other day and in one of the obituaries I read, it stated Creators Syndicate intended to keep his strips, B.C. and Wizard of Id, still going. It seems Hart had been receiving help from family for some time now and much of his work exists as digital files for repurposing.
Upon reading it, my first thought was, ”Why?” The strips stopped being funny some 20-25 years ago and were coasting on momentum. B.C., which Hart wrote and drew, also was delving into his religious faith with increasing frequency over the years and was far from entertaining.
All of this brings up a host of issues regarding newspaper comic strips and their future. It used to be that the comic strips were a selling point, a way for papers to distinguish themselves. After all, the news, stocks and sports score were the same so why buy the New York Daily News if you also read the New York Post? The News knew comic strips were a key and filled page after page with the best strips possible. The Sunday edition was wrapped in the comics’ section – growing up, the Sundays were started with the latest Dick Tracy on the front and Dondi on the back and in between, there were more than a dozen other features.
The first generation or two of comic strip creators were a fertile, wonderful bunch that gave us enduring figures from Little Orphan Annie to B.C. As a result, as people aged, moved out of their parents’ home and started subscribing to a hometown paper, the comic strips remained a tool to entice and retain readers.
Whenever newspapers conduct reader surveys to figure out which features to drop in favor of new ones, the old standbys still score strongly because of that ingrained habit. Locally, the comics editor at the Connecticut Post admitted that “the blue-haired old ladies” threatened to cancel their subs if beloved strips vanished. And with circulation dwindling, papers have to hold on to every last reader.
The problem, though, has become that many strips have outlived their entertainment value and continue to run only out of habit. B.C. and Peanuts and Marmaduke and many others stopped being entertaining and fresh and interesting decades ago. When the creators have retired, or died, others have continued the features, recycling the same puns, gags and stale humor.
Some of the younger, hipper, creators recognize that such recycling is a kiss of death these days. Jim Davis gave Jon Arbuckle a girl friend in Garfield and Cathy Guisewite married off her pathetic Cathy a few years back, each mining new strip possibilities. (more…)
Long-time comics writer Gary Friedrich has sued Marvel Comics, Sony Pictures and their Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, Relativity Media, Crystal Sky Pictures, Michael De Luca Productions, Hasbro Inc. and Take-Two Interactive for copyright infringement over his version of Ghost Rider.
Grindhouse executive producer Harvey Weinstein has been on a spree explaining why the movie tanked last weekend. Without revealing the fact that the reviews and word-of-mouth generally noted people’s tastes running towards one of the two movies on the double bill and against the other – with little consensus on which is better – Weinstein said the three hour running time was a major deterrent to sales. Certainly, film exhibitors agree.
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Forget that god awful looking CGI pup we’ve seen in the movie trailers. The one, true Underdog will be collected on a three volume DVD box set this summer. Released by Genius Products, under license from Classic Media, the $29.98 collection will feature digitally re-mastered episodes with Wally Cox (the voice of Underdog) sounding better than ever. Not only that, the DVDs will collect the 1960s television series as originally broadcast so fans can delight in the additional escapades of Hunter, Go Go Gophers, Klondike Kat, Tennessee Tuxedo, King and Odie, Tootie Turtle and Commander McBragg. The release date has been listed as both July 24 and August 6 while the god awful-looking CGI movie opens on August 4.
Okay, okay, I’m sorry. I know I promised, at least implicitly, to deliver Who Knows What Evil Lurks – Part 2 this week. But that will take some time and maybe digging, to write and, honestly, I have the luxury of neither. By the time you read this, I’ll either be at or returning from Juaniata, Pennsylvania, where I’ve been invited to be the guest of Jay Hosler and maybe shoot off my mouth in public a bit. I’ve been busy doodling notes for said mouth-shooting; hence no dissertation on lurking evil.
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