Could you pass the microscope . . . I'm trying to read the comics

I’ve complained about this at least once before, but when a crisis of such magnitude threatens the very existence of civilization as we know it, it’s important to keep the issue front and center. I speak of the Incredible Shrinking Sunday Newspaper Comics Section, which is now so tiny that Tom Thumb himself would feel right at home perusing it.

I’m not going to weigh in on whether size matters in other realms. (This is a family blog, after all.) But when it comes to the funnies, one of America's greatest contributions to the arts, size is everything. So I grabbed a ruler last Sunday and laid it out on The Boston Globe. The results were heartbreaking. While each page in the news sections is 12 inches wide, the comics section is now only 11 inches wide. That’s on top of the fact that the Globe’s Sunday comics section dropped from six to four pages a while back.

We all know that newspapers have fallen on hard times, as measured by plummeting circulation figures and advertising revenues, but the real proof  rests in the fact that they can’t even afford to do justice to the best part of the paper anymore. I assume the Globe is saving a signifcant amount of money by running comics that are small enough to be mistaken for postage stamps, but it’s a hell of a way to cut costs.

As far back as 1995, when Bill Watterson discontinued Calvin and Hobbes, one of the most glorious comic strips of all time, Watterson lamented  “the constraints of daily deadlines and small panels.” And that was 16 years ago, before reading the comics required a magnifying glass - or a microscope.