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| The comics page | | Date Created: Feb 13, 2005, 11:36 AM |
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Sunday morning. The comics section. Haven't seen it for quite awhile. The Daily Communist... 'er, Camera is too old school mainstream media (i.e. it's a heavily leftist bias printed daily -- "newspaper" doesn't describe it well). More on that another time. But recently they came out with a deal that was too good to pass up. A certain household member signed up with the people pushing the paper at the local King Soopers. The deal is they'll deliver it every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for a year for $20 And they'd deliver it to our front walk rather than the head of the driveway (OK, we have a 500 foot driveway). Well this morning they actually did it. So I got to read the funny pages Sunday morning. Haven't missed it and today didn't change my mind.
It occurred to me that the comics are having the same problem as the movies and the music. The Oscars are coming up and you just can't convince me that the movies up for Best of the Year are that great. The Grammy's are always a joke but truly the quality of recorded music at the industry and awards level has never been lower. The comics would seem to be another area of artistic expression, but they seem to be worse than ever.
Now comes word that Gary Trudeau of Doonesbury fame is getting a sort of cartoon Oscar -- The Freedom of Speech Award at the US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen later this month. The nexis of 60's radicals, liberal power politics, and media bias (including cartoons) has been dissected elsewhere, but Trudeau really is a poster child for talent of the 60's mired in liberal malaise today. And this started long before the '04 election.
Trudeau was at Yale a year or two ahead of my years at Princeton. He did a comic for the Yale Daily News back then called Bull Tails which he changed to Doonesbury (and toned down the Yale references) after college and went on to syndicated fame and married Jane Pauly to form a liberal media empire of sorts. And he was great back then. So what happened to him and the comics in general?
Trudeau, like a lot of artists, is at his best with interpersonal relationships and psychological issues that people relate to. Tracy Chapman is another artist that comes to mind with the same problem. As soon as they get into, apparently necessarily, liberal politics, there's nothing there and it sinks under the weight of disproven social schemes, wishful thinking, liberal guilt, inexperience with the real world, and Big Government politics. Too bad Trudeau didn't follow another Ivy League media talent of the same era, John Stossel, and gain a libertarian perspective. He coulda been great. Now he's just another tired and tiring liberal with a national platform.
Will the comics wake up along with the movies and the music as the current generation starts to rebel against the real establishment that includes their universities and media as well as their government? Hopefully I'll be around to see it. It hasn't happened yet I can assure you.
The only comic of the last two decades that I really miss is Calvin & Hobbes
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