The Funny Pages on Veteran's Day
I'm one of the holdouts that actually still reads a physical newspaper nearly every day. I'm not shunning technology - I keep tabs on a ridiculous amount of websites also, but I like the ritual of sitting down with a newspaper, some coffee, and maybe even doing a couple of crossword puzzles. Naturally, I also like reading the comic strips, too (well, some of them). But over the last couple of years, I've noticed a trend in the funny pages. I present you with all of today's strips that pay tribute to America's troops on Veteran's Day:
Well, there you go. Hope you enjoyed everything that America's professional comic strip artists could manage to say to tip their collective cap to American soldiers (at least in the strips carried by Portland's "The Oregonian"). There's also a sort of military-themed joke in "The Family Circus," but no direct mention of Veteran's Day.
I'm not sure why it is that this bothers me so much. I'm not a veteran myself, and I don't really know what to say to veterans. "Thanks" seems too small, but I haven't come up with anything else that works better. Maybe one of the reasons that this bothers me is that I grew up on comic strips that would at least acknowledge real events from time to time. Not every strip did, and I don't think it's fair to expect them all to (even though I'm sure that the vast majority of cartoonists will manage to make a timely Thanksgiving or Christmas strip). But a lot of the cartoonists that I grew up reading were either part of World War II (60 MILLION casualties, 2.5% of the entire world's population) or Vietnam (58,220 US soldiers killed, plus up another 3.5 million in opposing forces), big wars that touched everyone's lives in one way or another.
I find myself very disappointed that no living strip cartoonist (again, in "The Oregonian") bothered to even acknowledge today's holiday. The only artists who were willing to show any gratitude at all for the sacrifices made on their behalf are gone now. This isn't even something that you could blame on the younger generations, there are plenty of strips in the paper not created by 20-something tyros with no respect for anything. In fact, most of them are not.
Maybe it would be less noticeable if that "Peanuts" strip hadn't run in the paper, everyone would just forget about comic strips occasionally paying tribute to those who deserve it. Even from the afterlife, Charles Schulz is making other cartoonists look bad.
There was an article in "The Oregonian" a couple of weeks ago, about "Pearls Before Swine" creator Stephan Pastis making an appearance to promote his new book. After portraying himself as a Schulz follower, he then has this to say about "Peanuts,"
I single out Pastis because he has the misfortune of being on record very recently complaining about this, but when you look at today's "Peanuts" strip and today's "Pearls Before Swine" strip, one of them is a throw-away joke and one of them is literally the only thing on the entire comics page that shows even a hint of gratitude for anything. If other cartoonists (not just Pastis, but every single one of the cartoonists whose work ignored the meaning of today, which is to say ALL of them) haven't absorbed everything that needs to be learned from "Peanuts" and Charles Schulz's work, they're not ready to take over those spots quite yet.There's one thing Pastis doesn't like about "Peanuts." Schulz died in 2000, but "Peanuts continues to run in newspapers around the world. Strips from the past are recycled, which annoys Pastis and others who would like to see new blood on the comics pages."Repeats are the worst, and 'Peanuts' was the one who started that," Pastis said. "The don't rerun the news, do they? They don't repeat any other part of the paper. Why do they do it in the comics?"
c.
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