Stagnation

[pasithea]

Ugh... I just read an obit. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070408/ap_en_ot/obit_hart John Hart, creator of BC and Wizard of Id died.

This makes me sad but not because he was a great artist or anything. Indeed, I don't think either of those strips has been tolerable since the early 80s and it may be only that in the early 80s I was merely young enough to just enjoy reading for the sake of reading and not for it's content.

At any rate, why this makes me sad is that his family plans for the strips to live on. Using the huge archive of his work they have stored from the past fifty years, they can continually re-edit and recaption and splice together old panels and keep the strip alive. Zombies that will continue to devour the heart of the comics page for centuries to come. Worse, made by committee to appeal to their largest possible fan base.

Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, and many others are the same way. Undead corpses reaching out with their withered hands to suck every penny they can find from the american public.

What a sad country I live in. What a sad world I live in. Nothing is new, nothing is original. It's all just corporate logos remixed and resold again and again. How does mainstream america put up with itself?

Comments

[paka.livejournal.com]

It's just kind of... Hart is by sheer chance a great example. I loved his comics when I was a kid. But about the time I got older and stopped reading comics in the newspapers is about when he started really getting obnoxious. Still, even having a real live cartoonist who changes his opinions to something I hate is 'way better than an infinite re-hash of the same old salable comic strip.

[paka.livejournal.com]

Another thing that gets me is by comparison, Hagar the Horrible was something Dik Browne always intended as a potential job for his kids after he went. So it's kind of got that redundant thing, but an actual human sits down and draws the darn thing. In some ways this seems equally ghastly, but in others it seems a lot better.

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

At least we know that Calvin & Hobbes is highly unlikely to suffer a similar fate.

I dunno, a whodunit with a dance number

[frith]

Is this truly the age of sterility or is old age rubbing our noses into mass market inertia? Pop culture has been copying itself for longer than I can remember. The money makers and wanna-be hipsters recycle what worked before. It sucks but I guess imagination dies without incentive. That or most people are too dumb, naive or insecure to care.

[yetanotherbob.livejournal.com]

Now there's a strip just begging for that DFC treatment. If they can retread it, it can be fun for the whole family!

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

WOOT!!!!!!!!!! OH DFC how I've missed you!
Despite the rampant homophobia, I thought the DFC was the first time in it's long and tedious history that Family Circus had EVER been funny.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

I would compare BC surviving it's creator to Chick Tracts before Dennis the Menace (who is going to hell according to my zany American protestant beliefs!)

I can't bring myself to read the Sunday funnies anymore ever since I discovered all the people publishing comics on the internet. I find even stereotypically really bad comics better than the hackishness that creators syndicate vomits into newspapers.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

A fair point. I just baaaaaaarely remember when the newspapers weren't all owned by one supermegaglobalcorp. The comics weren't nearly as sanitized back then though there was still a lot of crap syndication.