The Best Comic Strips

The top three comics strips in the history of American newspapers are Pogo, Peanuts, and Calvin & Hobbes, in that order.

Pogo

Pogo, by Walt Kelly, ran from 1948 to Kelly's death in 1975. It featured Pogo Possum, his friends Albert Alligator, Churchy La Femme, and Howland Owl, as well as a variety of other anthropomorphic critters in Georgia's Okenfenokee Swamp. It melded slapstick and farce with pointed satire.

The virtues of the strip were many. Kelly, a former Disney artist, had an extraordinary gift for physical and verbal humor. In the expansive canvas of the Sunday strips, he indulged in wild fantasies of pratfalls, piefights, comic confrontations, and other classic elements of physical comedy. His daily strips were scarce less constrained, though they concentrated more on story and continuity, featuring pyrotechnic verbal shenanigans and ever-convoluting plots that fed on themselves for weeks or months at a time.

Kelly had an ear for wordplay that made the strip's extensive dialog pop and sizzle. Like his contemporary Al Capp's Li'l Abner, Pogo was drenched in a kind of Southern dialect, but whereas Capp's characters' cornpone made them sound illiterate and uneducated, Pogo's characters' ungrammatical speeches were alive with novel coinages and cleverly-structured wordplay. Unsurprising in someone who understood the music of language so well, Kelly was a poet and lyricist as well; Churchy La Femme's appropriation of "Deck the Halls", retitled "Deck Us All with Boston Charlie", was an annual tradition.

Indeed, Kelly loved traditions of all sorts, if only because they made for easy strips. Every Christmas, he printed a new illustration of his characters celebrating the season that doubled as the Kelly family Christmas Card. His characters also enjoyed the October Classic, but never completed a game. And Churchy La Femme's fear of Friday the Thirteenth was a recurring gag.

Kelly's characters often had distinctive speech patterns. P.T. Bridgeport, a familiar visitor to the swamp, spoke like a broadsheet advertisement. Kelly hit upon a key innovation to illustrate some of his characters' speech. Bridgeport's speeches, for example, were drawn as broadsheet advertisements instead of traditional word balloons. Deacon Mushrat spoke in balloons with Gothic lettering. The vulture and undertaker Sarcophagus MacAbre spoke in black- bordered rectangles.

It's worth mentioning here that, although Kelly was certainly the creative center of the strip, the strip's lettering was done by a long-time assistant (with the exception of P.T.'s, whose speeches were so elaborate that Kelly did them himself); other assistants, of whom Kelly had only a few in a long career, did most of the inking on the strip. It's another example of the distance between Pogo and Li'l Abner, whose creator used writing and art assistants and had little to do with the strip once its popularity was assured.

Pogo was also brilliantly drawn. I've always been struck by how alive his linework was, expertly turned linewidths and shadows effortlessly creating perfect cartoons. Time in the Mouse Factory and a brief career in comic books (where Pogo first appeared) honed Kelly's talent for cartooning to a fine degree.

The final element in Pogo's success was Kelly's hand at satire. His defining foray in the field came in 1953, when he introduced Simple J. Malarkey, a wild cat who invaded the swamp and bullied his way into leadership of the bird watching club. (Bird watching regularly served as a metaphor for anti-communism in Pogo; the strip's native communists were cowbirds.) 1953 was, of course, the climax of Senator Joe McCarthy's red-baiting efforts; Kelly's portrayal of him was as provocative as any sequence in Doonesbury. It also lasted several months, as opposed to Doonesbury's maximum of two weeks.

Throughout the run of the strip, Kelly used satire, primarily political satire, to fuel his stories. In 1952 and 1956, Pogo's friends ran him for President; in 1960, in an effort to out-young the (unnamed) John F. Kennedy, Owl backed Fremont, the Boy Bug.

If you're like me, when you were young, you first noticed art styles on the newspaper comics page. At a distance, it was easy to recognize that some strips were dark and some were light. Compare Dilbert's open panels and thin lines to Apartment 3-G's fully-rendered, carefully-shaded details. From the beginning, I knew that Pogo was special: it was a humor strip (particularly to a youngster who could not yet appreciate its satire), but it was nearly as dark as the soap opera strips. Now, as I read through strip collections, I can see ever more genius, from the gags and absurd plot complications, through the marvelous and creative art, to the sophisticated political satire.

That Pogo is nearly out of print now is distressing. Fantagraphics printed eleven volumes of the complete daily strip from 1948 to 1953, but that's apparently stopped, and they never printed any Sunday strips. The older strip collections are long out of print; were my father's not so well-loved by repeated reading, they'd be worth a fair chunk of money.

Peanuts

I don't think you can have any credibility about comic strips if you don't acknowledge Charles Schulz's Peanuts as one of the medium's finest achievements.

Started in 1950 and continued until shortly before Schulz's death in early 2000, it broke new ground, defining a new genre of gag-a-day strips and establishing a spare style of art that has become a genre hallmark.

Peanuts' greatness, for me, rests on three foundations. First, the strip was uniquely Schulz's. For fifty years, no one's pen but his touched the strip; no one's thought but his informed its execution. He had assistants and ghosts, but only on the ancillary material, the TV specials and books and tchotchkes. The strip was his; it spoke with his voice, and whatever craft it had was his alone.

Because of that, Peanuts had its second great strength. It was deep. Not in what it asked of you, though you could think about it as deeply as you'd like, but in what it was. Its characters may have been children and a very peculiar dog, but they had character. Linus was a Christian who believed in the Great Pumpkin, who had a security blanket and an intimidating older sister, but who fought bullies. These weren't contradictions as a shorthand for characterization; these were integrated elements in a whole character. Schulz's characters had inner lives of complexity that every one of his readers could see in their own inner lives.

And, it turns out, Schulz was a nice guy. The inner lives we saw were wistful, poignant, confused, hopeful, wishy-washy, and uncertain. They were the failures we're able to admit to, that we sympathize most strongly with, and our virtues all writ small. Almost entirely absent were the failures we hate to see in ourselves--hatred, cruelty, violence--and when these appeared, they were shocking and upsetting. Oh, Lucy bullied Linus and was the poster child for crabbiness--particularly in the strip's earlier days, she was a lodestone for these kinds of negative characteristics--but they were ordinary, typical sibling rivalry and the self-centered irritation we all feel.

Peanuts affected you. If you are given in any way to introspection, you were Charlie Brown. If you had an annoying little brother, you were Lucy. If you had flights of fancy, you were Snoopy. In one or more Peanuts characters, you saw yourself in a way you didn't hate.

Peanuts' third great strength was its art. As noted, Schulz's lean style was groundbreaking. It opened up the strip and let it breathe. Its emptiness invited filling.

Ultimately, it damaged the medium. Too many imitators used the lean style to conceal weak art, until it became standard. And comic strips shrank, because with weak art, they didn't need to be large. Today's standard, Dilbert's computerized Xeroxing and Cathy's undisciplined scribbles, descends from Charles Schulz.

But he is not to blame. He was not a weak artist, and his style was a matter of design. His lines had character. Linus's head was not duplicated from panel to panel. The curl on Charlie Brown's forehead varied according to the artist's desire. When Lucy grits her teeth in her batting stance, we feel something different in the art than we feel when she sits at her psychiatrist's booth. Schulz's art has subtle strengths.

In later days, when Schulz developed a tremor in his hands, he showed his true mastery of craft by incorporating that tremor into his art, a gradual evolution in draftsmanship that serviced the strip's daily impact. And as Schulz could feel his age creeping up on him, the strip and its art grew ever more introspective, more personal, more contemplative. I've written before of "The Creepiest Peanuts Strip of Them All" (June 19th, 1997; page 77, It's a Big World, Charlie Brown), and in many ways it exemplifies the latter days of the strip.

In fifty years, Schulz had his ups and downs, but the strip never dipped below good, and for most of twenty years, it was as good as the best strips on the page; for its last five, it was as great an achievement in art as it had ever been.

I would pay frankly enormous amounts of money for a complete chronological reprinting of the strip.

Calvin & Hobbes

Calvin & Hobbes falls third to the other two strips if only because of its evident and acknowledged debt to them. Bill Watterson's masterpiece is the latest and shortest-lived of my three honorees. It springs from foundations built by its predecessors.

But, oh, what it builds!

Nowhere else have comic strips seen such a gift for whimsy as Watterson's (though Barnaby comes close). In the simple device of a child with an active imagination, Watterson spun amazingly creative variations on comic situations. With only two main characters and less than a handful of supporting cast, it pales compared to the dozens of characters in either Pogo or Peanuts, but this was never a limitation.

In art, Watterson stands as an heir to Kelly, Barks, and other great cartoonists. He adds imaginative layouts and an impressive array of subjects to a detailed line. His hyperactive child hero inhabits a world in motion. Calvin regularly finds himself in backwoods drawn with a naturalist's eye or in planetscapes that meld science fiction with creeping horror.

In story, Calvin's explosive imagination is tempered by Hobbes' quiet insight and gift for language. Philosphical and frenetic, often in adjacent panels, Calvin's is an iconic childhood. Watterson has much to say about childhood and a superb mechanism for doing so.

Fortunately for comic strip fans, all of Calvin & Hobbes remains in print, easily accessible to new audiences.

Unfortunately, in the seven years since concluding his strip, Watterson has not apparently produced any material for other than personal consumption. It is a great shame that such a talent does not find more expression.

Why Not Krazy Kat?

Simply? I don't like it, and this is my list.

George Herriman's Krazy Kat is regularly included in lists of top comic strips, along with such other strips I don't like as Winsor McKay's Little Nemo in Slumberland.

But Krazy Kat in particular? It's surrealist, absurdist comedy, with extraordinary abstract art. How, given my tastes, can I not be ape for it?

Because I don't care. There's nothing in the strip that makes me slightly interested. Ignatz loves the Kat, so he chucks a brick at her? There's nothing there to care about, no inner lives or contemplative insight. For instance, I'm only moderately certain of my gender identifications of Ignatz and the Kat. Could be the other way around, or they could be gay, for all I can tell in most strips. The abstract backgrounds are nothing special to me; I have Maurice Noble's Warner Bros. work to compare to, and those have Bugs and Daffy being hilarious in front of them. The dialect? Perhaps if I lived in a Little Odessa, I might have more of a reaction, but there's not the joyful wordplay you find in Kelly, nor does it provide punctuation for the action as in the Katzenjammer Kids.

Informed opinions may vary.

Posted by Greg at September 16, 2002 11:55 AM