Rick Marschall on how bad comics are now and how they used to be

MARSCHALL: Talking about newspaper strips, there are a number of times I've heard it said by writers, by artists, by syndicate people, "Why are strips so lousy these days?" A lot of people are in a position to do something about it. Yet they sit there and complain, and it gets worse and worse...why is it? I can't explain it. Doonesbury isn't drawn well, but the writing is strong. So you can say that. But 99 percent of the strips coming out are drawn poorly, are written just horribly, edited poorly, and there's no excuse for it. The quality's gone out the window. No one seems to care. Merchandising has taken over. And as far as management goes, they look at pajama contracts instead of editorial quality. And if they can sign a contract for a t-shirt over a drink, and if some litle creature looks cute to a guy who doesn't know good writing from bad, well, all of a sudden, the bottom line makes the whole thing look like a success, and then it snowballs. Chickens will come home to roost. The stuff still is crap. It's embarrassing.
MacDONALD: Do you see any kind of shake-ups-coming?
MARSCHALL: No, I don't. Things are being done by prescription. I use the description of the comic strip syndication business becoming a Newsweek coverstory industry. Newsweek will do a story on the baby boom, and then it seems like three months later, every syndicate has come out with two strips on the baby boom. Or working mothers, or cats, or something. It's worse that the sitcom situation on television, where one moderate success spawns a dozen execrable imitators. It's just shameful.

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MARSCHALL: One thing that strikes me about a lot a of the early strips, and a lot of the early great strips, is that a lot of them were one-premise strips. Jiggs and Maggie--she's a social climber, he wanted to play cards with the boys. That's it. Katzenjammer Kids was a one-premise strip. Take Flash Gordon, one of the all-time classics--it had probably about the worst-written script you could imagine. If you really get down to it, Dale Arden was a twit, the stories were insipid, but why were these strips praised, even in retrospect? Why were they popular? There are a lot of reasons. One is that the artist's syndicate itself respected the strip. They took a lot of time, they took a lot of care, the artwork had a lot of detail, the Sundays were full-paged, the colors were great, they were in-register, the paper was better, and whether the strips were one-premise or complicated, you had a situation where on Sunday morning, people bought the paper just to get those comics. They fought over the comics section. When they opened it, this darned thing was larger-than-life, full-paged, gorgeous color, it popped out at them, and they could get lost in a single comic for 10 minutes. Just enjoying it, whether it was funny, whether it was an adventure. They got into it--it was part of their lives, and they were part of the strip's life. How much can you say that about strips today? I don't want to name any names, but a lot of the humor strips are badly drawn, and the ones that are well-drawn are so streamlined and simplified that they're sterile.

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But the onus is not on the cartoonists alone. It's on the local editors, and mainly the syndicates. They're too willing to compromise, and not view the comics as something unique. It's one of the few things that newspapers can offer that television or radio can't. It's almost like they're embarrassed by the comics, so they make them smaller.