I stopped into a restaurant for lunch the other day. As I was sitting there enjoying my sandwich, I noticed a man — let’s call him Mike — at the next table drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, which is a rare sight these days.
After a few minutes, a friend of his went over to say hello and they chatted for a minute before Mike launched into a complaint about how thin the newspaper was and how the Funnies section was missing. That’s the word he used: Funnies.
I had never heard them referred to that way — they were always the Comics. And frankly, very few of them were amusing.
Sure, there have been comic strip creators who found fame and fortune with their words and ink (e.g. Charles Schulz, Garry Trudeau, Bill Watterson, Cathy Guisewite, Gary Larson, Jim Davis). They were fortunate to work in the decades when so many people looked for their content in daily newspapers.
But as the print business has waned dramatically in the internet era, their reach — and corresponding income — must have dropped off tremendously. I would think that today, it’s nearly impossible to sell a new comic strip to one of the syndicators (King Features, Andrews McMeel, etc.). Incidentally, those companies offer their strips online, often for free, but who’s getting rich by giving it away?
We have raised an entire generation that has never even touched a newspaper — let alone shared the joy of lifting the images off the page with Play-Doh. Okay, that joy only lasted for about three minutes, but we boomers were very bored children.
It’s not only the comic strip creators whose career paths must be impacted. Those same pages that held The Funnies were also the home of Sudoku, Crypto-Quote, Double Crostic, and other games. For a long time, I was a Jumble addict, but I can’t even remember the last time I came across it. Besides, my morning puzzle play is now consumed with Wordle, the Spelling Bee, and Connections, all in the NY Times Games app.
There are people creating online content like webcomics or on Instagram and TikTok, but as someone in the industry said, print meant dollars while digital means pennies.
Oh, wow. I just realized I’ve identified a modern career option worse than being in radio.