Ban the Beetle? Keep Cathy?
Free Fred from the doghouse?
Readers responded in droves last week to the tinkering on the daily comics pages and the request, in my last column, for their opinions. More than 275 sent e-mails and made phone calls, plugging their favorites and sending others to the showers.
The results? Frankly, if I were Rex Morgan, M.D., I’d be worried. Several readers said he’s D.O.A.
Does Sally Forth really have mold on her? That’s what one reader wrote.
Beetle and Cathy still have strong support among those who took the time to write or call. World War II veterans, in particular, said the paper should renew Beetle’s tour of duty, though support for Beetle came from across the age spectrum.
“One of the things that makes Doonesbury such a great strip is that it is timely; one of the great things about Beetle Bailey is that it is timeless,” wrote Michel Huber of Philadelphia.
Rina Mitchell put in a word for keeping Cathy: “It still makes me laugh. Sometimes I think she is hiding in my house and using my life for her comic strip.”
Readers were reacting to news that the paper was considering eliminating those two strips. From the response, it looks as if they are safe for now.
As for Fred Basset, his devoted fans are, well, like a dog with a bone. They want him back, and they told me so over and over again.
“I’m hoping he’ll return with a fresh bone to bury one day soon,” wrote Jean Bell of Ocean City in the same gentle language found in the strip.
I’m sorry to say it looks like fans of Fred will have to keep up with him in the Sunday comics. The paper remains reluctant to return him to the daily.
If you’re coming late to this, the fuss was generated when Fred was pulled from the daily comics on Aug. 5, and Get Fuzzy was put in his place. Many readers told me they thought Get Fuzzy is mean and not funny.
And that takes us to the heart of the conflict. Humor is so subjective, and what is funny to one reader can be lost on another.
In choosing the 31 comics that run daily, the paper wants to appeal not only to middle-aged and older readers, but to younger ones as well. To make room for new cartoonists with promise, other strips are pulled, and that can cause considerable angst among faithful readers.
Lucy Shelton Caswell, journalism professor and curator of the Cartoon Research Library at Ohio State University, was not surprised that readers reacted in passionate terms – “heart-broken,” “devastated” – to losing Fred.
“Readers make friends with them. They visit every day, probably at the same time, along with their first cup of tea, wearing their favorite bathrobe,” Caswell said. “That’s why they respond so strongly.”
For some, these connections go back to childhood, she said.
Reader Gloria Endes of Philadelphia, a comics-page devotee, said she admires a cartoon artist who “can make me laugh or think.”
The best, she said, “are masters of irony, satire and psychology. Doonesbury can skewer a politician in just four panels and with not more than five sentences. Sometimes, the cartoon requires the reader to be astute. No one can understand Non Sequitor who is not aware of the irony of history.”
Readers chose many ways to cast their votes: One mailed tearsheets marked in red ink: KEEP!, KEEP!!! and NOT FUNNY. Another graded every strip, from A-plus to F-minus. Some readers told us to move Doonesbury and Boondocks to the editorial page, and add a politically conservative comic such as Mallard Fillmore.
For better or worse, readers want to have their say.
Even if change sometimes does not come easily to the comics pages, their evolution is constant. A look back at comics that ran in the daily Inquirer in 1979 showed that only three – Funky Winkerbean, Hagar and, alas, Fred – had endured with us into this century.
