Walt Kelly on the decline of the comic strip

KANE: Was it literature or journalism that shaped your attitudes and made you focus on the things that you ultimately came to work with?
KELLY: I think that I've always had great respect for American cartooning and especially this medium that we have created, the comic strip, which is supposed to increase the circulation of a newspaper. And I'm indebted, as we all are who work in that end the business, to newspapers for having invented this delightful medium. As a matter of fact, there's probably one of the men right here that had most to do with the origination of the comic strip. And I have a feeling that maybe it's going on its latter days now. We have a few new faces in there doing bright, light things, but there aren't enough. The strips have become cluttered, I think, with stereotyped kinds of strips, many of them imitations of a success. It's a stencil. And I think we need new kinds of work, new kinds of people, new ideas.

[It's interesting to think that in 1969 there were people in the business who already thought the medium was in decline]