From about age 10 to
75, I would read the daily comic strips
in the newspapers, like The Daily News, PM,
The Los Angeles Times, or Newsday.
Every once in a while a strip would disappear. I learned later that was because the
cartoonist died or retired and the syndicate did not hire another artist to
take it over. I was fond of Crockett
Johnson’s Barnaby in PM (having a fairy godfather whose cigar
was a magic wand had a terrific appeal) when
it suddenly disappeared. Al Capp’s Li’l
Abner also disappeared as did virtually all of my favorite strips over the
years. What they shared in common was the silence accompanying their
disappearance. For reasons I don’t know,
there is no “obituary” notice for a dead comic strip or dead newspaper column. Sometimes a columnist is lucky and can write
a final farewell to faithful readers of some 20 or 30 years but more often it
is just the sudden unexplained disappearance.
I would sometimes realize a strip was gone and check back a few issues
and realize I had not noticed it gone on the day of its disappearance. A day or so later I would feel as if
something is gone but wouldn’t immediately recall what was missing. These are
tricks of the mind and even more insidious is our tendency to let the past
go. Just traces of the hundreds of
strips I read over the years remain in my memory (Dinky Dinkerton, Gasoline Alley, the Bungle Family, Brenda Starr).
The same thing happens with colleagues who die or who move on to other
institutions. Their memory fades from
day to day conversation. I once pointed
out in a Life Lines column that there
was a short life to fame for Nobel laureates.
Most people can name only a small handful of Nobelists. I used
my grandfather’s employer in Stockholm, a physicist named Gustav
Dalen. Who on earth remembers him
now?
I experienced the same disappearance for my column Life Lines which began in March 1997 and
disappeared from the print version of the TBR [Times-Beacon-Record] newspapers of Long Island. They carry a
supplement called Arts and Leisure
and my column appeared every other week until 2015. That comes to about 430
columns published. They were about 500
words in length. I have shifted to posting what would have been new Life Lines columns to Bloggerelof Blogs at bloggerelof.blogspot.com and I usually
let readers know of new postings on Facebook. I have done about a dozen of these since the
demise of my Life Lines column.
I t would be hubris to believe that a comic strip or
newspaper column can go on indefinitely.
Tastes change. Fresh outlooks are always in demand. Without our being
aware, our values, interests, style, and topics subtly permeate our comic
strips or columns. Just as subtle are the new ways a younger generation looks
at writing. If I pick up a book written
in the 1660s like Pepys’ diary it is strangely different in its vocabulary or
sentences (“betimes”, “my Lord”).
Victorian novels have a heaviness and wordiness in their long sentences.
A century from now what you write will look quaint and dated to your
descendants. Who signs off a letter with “your obedient servant”? But the pleasure of writing and communicating
to one’s own generation is sufficient justification to go on writing or drawing
cartoons. It is also a way, in our little victories in a difficult life, to say,
like a cave dweller some 20,000 years ago, blowing ochre pigment to reveal his
or her hand held against a wall, whether intended or not, “Look at me, look at
me, I existed.”
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