Frazz by Jef Mallett for December 26, 2018

Can you believe that back in those days, comics were meant for kids?

The Boston Glove says hi.

It’s like a Sci-Fi story with a self sustaining Lunar colony when a plague hits Earth, and they watch the cities go dark, one by one.

Millennials say #what’s a newspaper?

I recall there being enough to fill up two broadsheet pages in a daily New York World-Telegram & Sun in the early 1960s. But there are a lot more available on GoComics now.

The Boston Globe just cut their comics section from two pages to one. Very depressing.

I remember when the Sunday comics were an entire section unto themselves. And the Chicago Tribune had some different comics than the Chicago Sun-Times.I was a paperboy, so I got to read both.

From the days of the town crier and the broadside the news of events was important to whole populations. In a natural evolution, newspapers became the preferred source for factual news, whether local, national, or global. They were the watch dogs of history. Articles were very well written by people who took pride in accurate information delivered by excellent use of language and its mechanisms. Few of those remain and even fewer schools of journalism.

With the advent of electronic media, stories became shorter, with less detail and more so-called ‘graphic’ elements, along with the development of media stars. Both lacked depth. Then came the media slant: an attempt to persuade viewers toward a certain conclusion.

All this directed toward a global audience, many members of which seem to be more interested in the number of likes they receive from people they can’t know and with whom they have little in common than in finding ways to bring about positive change.

Would be interesting to see what breaking news will look like 25 years from now.

In any city I visit, my first go-to in the paper is the comics.

I missed Frazz when I retired and moved away from he city – an online search brought me to go comics.

Ah…the Sunday Funnies. Every child’s delight! (And Dads, too)

You know what else? Movie ads! Multiple pages of them. Some of the big new releases took up a quarter to half of one of those bigger pages. Listing theaters and showtimes and everything.

My local paper “The Observer Reporter” from Washington PA recently stopped printing Frazz. Perhaps Frazz may comment in a comic strip that “Yes, I still read the newspaper” and the need to continue the comics.

Not only many but big. Newspapers are really squeezing them in, nowadays. You have to take a magnifying glass to those “Find six differences between these two pictures” things.

Used to luv Saturday morning, lying on the living room floor, comics spread out before me….Prince Valiant, Rube Goldberg, L’il Iodine…..ah, those were the days!

I remember when the Dallas Morning News bought the Dallas Times Herald back in the early nineties, they combined both comic sections and ended up with 3 full size pages of comic strips, and kept it that way for quite a number of years. Oh, and that three full pages didn’t include a few strips, like Tank McNamara, that appeared in other sections of the paper.

Many have expressed nostalgia for the “golden age” of comic strips. But when I look at comics from before around 1950, I see that most of even the popular ones have aged poorly. Repetition being one problem among many.

Ah, Pogo! Who can forget Congersman Moop, and his aide, Feeble E. Merely, of whom it was said that he carried a tune like it was a concealed weapon. Or the three bats, Bewitched, Bothered, and Bemildred? =^________^=

Pogo was GREAT!!!!!!!

Same gag reappeared here in both “The Knight Life” and “One Big Happy”

I was the big comics fan in my family. I remember the comics being larger and more numerous. I’m glad we have online comics that can be unbelievably numerous and you can make them large enough to read easily.

PostsFrazz18 hrs ·

I could be remembering things wrong. It might be that every other strip (and editorial cartoon) on a given Christmas morning featured the “Is that all?” gag, or it might just be that every single Dennis the Menace, year after year, did that gag for Christmas. I’m not ruling out both.

My local paper has more comics now than it ever has. Some of them are almost printed large enough to read!

Bill Watterson’s retrospective book on Calvin and Hobbes showed two different Sunday comic pages. The older was an entire newspaper section in itself, with big, beautifully colored panels. The contemporary pages were very tiny, squishing as many strips as possible onto one page.