One Big Happy by Rick Detorie for September 13, 2011

I guess James likes Lio.

I don’t know about James, but I was reading comic strips by the time I was three and a half, and went on to headlines.

They still print “Henry”?

That’s why I quit reading “Get Fuzzy.” Sometimes there were over a hundred words of dialogue! Any joke that takes that much exposition to pull off isn’t worth the effort.

I REMEMBER WHEN I WAS SITTING DOWN WITH MY FATHER TO WHOM HE ME WAS READING THE COMICS, IT WAS SOMETHING THAT WAS FASCINATING ME, WHEN GROW UP AND LEARNED TO READING, ALREADY AT ALL WENT EQUALLY.

I think the worst example of “tl;dr” in comics is “Tank McNamara.” You’d think a sports-centered comic would put actions over words most of the time.

Tank is not really about sports, but about those who control sports.

I used to “read” the funnies the way James does – the drawings pretty much told the story. Mayor Laguardia of New York read the Sunday comics over the radio including a description of the action. This was on national radio – not just New York. My favorite comic at the time was the Katzenjammer Kids. But I’m dating myself.

Wasn’t there a wordless comic called “’Fern’nan” or something like that?

If you check out some of the older comics (’30s through early ’60s) they were very wordy. Anyone remember Our Boarding House? Some of those Mutt And Jeffs and <Krazy Kat strips are pretty wordy, too.

paperbucket: Wasn’t that Gypsy Rose Lee’s gimmick? In the day of silent strippers (and far more tease than strip), she would recite atrocious doggerel that was unintentionally almost as funny as Ogden Nash’s intentional.

I just looked at the pictures too when I was little!