Ol' Gampy Has a 'Memberin!

Allow me to indulge my inner Andy Rooney for a moment. (Kids, Andy Rooney was a curmudgeonly commentator on 60 Minutes with eyebrows that could buff out the scratches on cars.) I know I’ve spoken before at length about my aversion to nostalgia. This morning, though, I am going to grant myself a brief wallow in those syrupy waters.  

It’s Sunday and I just had a flashback to a favorite childhood ritual; pawing through the thick Sunday newspaper to get to the comics. For those too young to remember – although I’m not sure anybody reading this Substack could possibly be young enough not to remember this, or Andy Rooney for that matter - during the week, most newspapers would carry half a page of comics, usually near the TV listings and the crossword. But on Sundays, they’d put out a full-color comics section. It was like an extra dessert for having survived another week of scraped knees and poison ivy.

Today’s spirit animal.

Every kid I knew loved the funny pages, even though one of the ironies of the comics section was that almost none of the strips within were actually, you know, funny. Did anybody ever actually laugh at “Beetle Bailey” or “Hagar the Horrible”? Did “Family Circus” every provide much more than a shake of the head and a wry utterance of, “Oh, Jeffy”?

Oddly, there were also “serious” comics like “Prince Valiant” and “Mary Worth,” which were basically radio dramas with pictures. Was anybody really jazzed about the comings and goings of “Apartment 3-G”?

Most of the comics felt anachronistic, relics from the childhoods of the paper’s older readers. No doubt they wanted their own Sunday morning nostalgia fix after a lifetime of toiling away in the Betamax factory or whatever people did back then.

Which was why it felt so revelatory when the occasional new comic would hit the syndication market. “Calvin & Hobbes,” for example, felt modern and funny and thoughtful. The Scotch tape industry must have experienced a renaissance from all the people posting “The Far Side” cartoons on watercoolers across the nation. Even poor, downtrodden “Cathy” could provide readers with the occasional “Ack!”

Ack!!

If I had to guess, one of the benefits of including a comics section in the newspapers of yesteryear (and for the shrinking numbers of newspapers that still exist), was that a kid like myself might happily devour his sugar cereal in front of the funny pages and then, if the maze on the back of the cereal box had already been solved, might pick up the sports section to see how the Mets did, which might lead the eye to a story about a new movie or a big national headline. “My God,” that child might think, “Leonid Brezhnev died?” Next thing you know, you’ve got yourself a newspaper reader.

(Kids, Leonid Brezhnev was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR from 1964-1982. The reason I included him in this piece is because, he, too had a set of eyebrows with which you could mop a gulag.)

I’ve long since transitioned to digital news services, but I have to admit that I do miss the mess of the various Sunday newspaper sections scattered across the kitchen table. I miss passing sections back and forth with Martha when we were a young couple and a New York Times subscription felt like the height of sophistication.

“Are you done with the travel section?”

“I’ll trade you for the Sunday review.”

Tres chic.

Michael Showalter made this NY Times parody:

But the New York Times never had a comics section, the snobs. Why not? They couldn’t trade the ballet review for a “Hi & Lois” every now and again? Comics were always understood to be lowbrow entertainment because most of the time that’s what they were. But then you’d find that British guttersnipe “Andy Capp” beside the Pulitzer-prize winning “Doonesbury” and you’d have to wonder if maybe people weren’t selling the form short.

There’s a reason people are more likely to stick a comic on the fridge than even the most thoughtful analysis of, say, Ukraine’s ammunition woes. A couple panels of art, some little joke, a twist, or just a moment of recognition: “I also hate Mondays, you indolent feline!” Comics are social. Or, they used to be.

Today’s comics feel specialized, if that makes sense. One doesn’t stumble onto them in the same way we once did. They’re the stuff of graphic novels and nerd passion and they’re treated as high art in a way that the stuff printed on newsprint never was. Comics are prestige now, niche. That’s not to say they’re not also awesome; they are. But they require an investment the Sunday Funnies never did.

If yesterday’s comics didn’t take the form seriously enough, today’s comics culture takes it way too seriously. I see people debating things like, “Who was the greatest inker of the Grant Morrison ‘Bat-Man’ era?” and I’m like, “When I was reading comic books, I didn’t even know there were different jobs.” I just thought one person created the comic, did everything, and once they started, that was their job for life. After all, that’s what Charles Schulz did. And that guy was the best.

I definitely don’t miss my childhood or the crappy little townhouse in which I grew up. I definitely don’t miss the arguments, and I don’t even miss the sugar cereal because usually we were forced to eat fucking Product 19. But I do miss the feel of newsprint between my fingers and turning the pages to get to “Bloom County.” Just a small reflection on a small Sunday morning in May. Ack!!