Deck us all with Boston Charlie . . . ."

Readers of a certain age (i.e., older than dirt) will remember Walt Kelly’s long-gone Pogo, generally regarded by people who are knowledgeable about such things as one of the greatest comic strips of all time. Pogo was memorable for many reasons, one of which is that Kelly concocted his own nonsensical version of Deck the Halls entitled Deck us all with Boston Charlie. You know the tune already. And so, without further ado, here are the lyrics:

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,

Walla Walla, Wash., and Kalamazoo!

Nora’s freezin’ on the trolley,

Swaller dollar cauliflower Alley’garoo!

Don’t we know archaic barrel,

Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou?

Trolley Molly don’t love Harold,

Boola Boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,

Polly welly cracker n’ too-da-loo!

Donkey Bonny brays a carol,

Antelope Cantaloup, ‘lope with you!

Hunky Dory’s pop is lolly gaggin’ on the wagon,

Willy, folly go through!

Chollie’s collie barks at Barrow,

Harum scarum five alarum bung-a-loo!

Duck us all in bowls of barley,

Ninky dinky dink an’ polly voo!

Chilly Filly’s name is Chollie

Chollie Filly’s jolly chilly view halloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,

Double-bubble, toyland rouble! Woof, Woof, Woof!

Tizzy seas on melon collie!

Dibble-dabble, scribble-scrabble! Goof, Goof, Goof!

Earth Day greetings from Walt Kelly and Pogo Possum

Here's a rather famous Earth Day cartoon by the late Walt Kelly, creator of the long-gone but beloved comic strip Pogo. Kelly is believed to have first used the line "we have met the enemy and he is us" on the first Earth Day, in 1970. He revived it in a two-panel cartoon in 1971, and again in 1972, as the title of a collection of Pogo strips.

Kelly's message paraphrases the report that Oliver Hazard Perry sent to Maj. Gen. William Henry Harrison on Sept. 10, 1813, after Perry's fleet defeated a British fleet on Lake Erie during the War of 1812: "Dear Gen'l: We have met the enemy, and they are ours, two ships, two brigs, one  schooner and one sloop. Yours with great respect and esteem. H. Perry."

 

Farewell to Tom Toles, one of our greatest editorial cartoonists

This bit of news isn’t quite as catastrophic as everything else that has gone wrong (so far) this year, but it’s pretty damn close.

Tom Toles, one of America’s best editorial cartoonists, has retired after 50 years of skewering deserving simpletons (including Donald J. Trump) and focusing attention on important issues (such as climate change).

Toles, who spent the last 18 years at The Washington Post, won the Pulitzer prize for editorial cartooning in 1990 and was a finalist for that award in 1985 and 1996.

Sometimes (or maybe every day) it really does feel this way

"Pearls Before Swine," by Stephan Pastis

A comic blast from comics past: the Easter Beagle!

You're a good man, Charlie Brown (but no longer a young one)

It isn’t a memorable number for an anniversary, but today marks the 67th birthday of one of the most successful comic strips of all time.

As with so many great innovations, Peanuts got off to a slow start. The Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, Ca., reports that Schulz drew a weekly comic panel for the St. Paul Pioneer Press from 1947 to 1950 and sold comic gags to The Saturday Evening Post. “After many rejection slips, Schulz finally realized his dream of creating a nationally-syndicated daily comic strip when Peanuts debuted in seven newspapers on October 2, 1950,” the museum explains on its web site.

Seven newspapers!

By the time the award-winning cartoonist announced his retirement 49 years later, in December 1999,  Peanuts was running in more than 2,600 newspapers around the world. Schulz died on Saturday, Feb. 12, 2000, only hours before the final Peanuts Sunday strip appeared in newspapers.

Peanuts, which continues in reruns, is now viewed as “one of the most popular and influential (comic strips) in the history of the medium,” according to Wikipedia. Schulz drew 17,897 strips during his run. At its peak, Peanuts had 355 million readers in 21 languages in 75 countries.

Honoring "Calvin and Hobbes" on its 30th birthday

Talk about an important anniversary! Legendary cartoonist Bill Watterson launched Calvin and Hobbes 30 years ago, on Nov. 18, 1985. Now Andrews McMeel Publishing and GoComics, Watterson’s publisher and syndicate, have joined forces to commemorate the strip, which Watterson discontinued on Dec. 31, 1995, after a mere 10-year run. A new web site offers background about the strip, ordering information for books and prints and a daily Calvin and Hobbes from the archives.

Readers who are familiar with the strip about an uncontrollable, wildly imaginative young boy and his (ostensibly) stuffed tiger need no reminders of its greatness, both in narrative and artistry. To say that it’s a fine example of the art form is like saying William Shakespeare was a fine writer — true as far as it goes, but a heck of an understatement. As Christopher Caldwell wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, Watterson's gem “was not only the strangest American comic strip. It was also the funniest, the most touching and the most profound.”

"Mutts" cartoonist Patrick McDonnell honors Jane Goodall

And now, a word or two from Mr. Natural: wisdom for the ages

One of America's best comic strips comes to a premature end

Here's some very sad news for comics fans: Richard Thompson is retiring his comic strip Cul de Sac as he continues his battle against Parkinson’s disease, according to The Washington Post’s Comic Riffs blog, which is written by Michael Cavna.

Cavna reports that the 54-year-old Thompson, “widely acclaimed among his peers as the best all-around comic-strip creator working today,” will call it quits on Sept. 23, ending what has been an eight-year run for Cul de Sac. 

“The last year has been a struggle for Richard,” according to his distribution syndicate, Universal Uclick. “Parkinson's disease, first diagnosed in 2009, has so weakened him that he is unable to meet the demands of a comic strip. For a time, he worked with another artist, but the deadlines became too much of a task.”

Cul de Sac debuted as a weekly strip in The Washington Post Magazine in 2004, and Universal released it as a daily in 2007.

In a recent interview with Cavna, which you can read here, Thompson had this to say about how he decided to drop the strip:

I’ve known for a year or more that I was working on borrowed time. My lettering had begun to wander off in 2009, but that could be fixed easily enough. But when Alice’s and Dill’s heads began to look under-inflated last winter, I figured I was losing control of the drawing, too. When I needed help with the inking (the hardest but most satisfying part of drawing the strip),well that was probably a tipping point. Parkinson’s disease is horribly selfish and demanding. A daily comic strip is too and I can only deal with one at a time. So it was a long, gradual, sudden decision.

In appreciation of Tintin

It has been said that Belgium has three great exports: beer, chocolate and the comic-strip character Tintin. With the American release next month of The Adventures of Tintin, a 3D film directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Peter Jackson, this is a perfect time to take a look at the work of the late Belgian cartoonist Hergé (real name: Georges Prosper Remi), who died in 1983. In an essay published recently, The Wall Street Journal provides an appreciative and thorough overview of the Tintin phenomenon, which is more widespread in Europe than here in the United States, where Tintin is not as well-known.

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.

Happy birthday to what may well be the world's most famous cat

Garfield, that portly, self-absorbed feline, is 33 years old today. The lazy, wisecracking cat isn’t one of my favorite comic-strip characters, but let’s give credit where credit is due. After a June 19, 1978, debut in some 40 newspapers, Garfield was running in more than 2,000 papers within a decade, “a level of circulation previously achieved by only two strips - Blondie and Peanuts,” according to the online comics encyclopedia Toonopedia.

Over 30 reprints of the strip have been on The New York Times best-seller list and 11 of them made it to the top, Toonopedia reports. “In fact, Davis has the distinction of being the only author ever to have seven books on that list at once, a feat he accomplished in 1982.” 

The National Cartoonists' Society has honored Garfield creator Jim Davis with multiple awards over the years, including the prestigious Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year (1989). Garfield appears in more than 2,500 newspapers nowadays, and it has been recognized by Guinness World Records as the most widely syndicated comic strip in the world. Not bad for a jaded, lasagna-loving kitty.

Eventually, they'll be so small you won't be able to read them

A full-page Gasoline Alley strip

It may be a sign of the times, and entirely beyond my control, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

My wife Liz was the first to notice the problem when she grabbed the newspaper last weekend. The Boston Globe has shrunk the Sunday comics, squeezing them into four pages instead of six and, presumably, cutting printing costs as a result. How far the mighty have fallen.

"When Sunday strips first appeared in newspapers, near the beginning of the 20th century, they were usually in the full-page size," according to a Wikipedia entry on comics formats. You read that right. Individual comic strips took up a full page in those days.

During World War Two, paper rationing and increased advertising in comics sections “led to fewer strips having a full page of their own” on Sundays. Many strips dropped to half of a page, or a third of a page. Nowadays, as cash-strapped newspapers plagued by circulation and advertising losses scramble to save money, “the funnies” are shrinking almost to the point of absurdity. Some panels are, literally, about the size of a large postage stamp.

With the advent and growing popularity of big-screen computers, maybe the day will come when the Internet will be the salvation of the comic strip. Still, it’s dispiriting to see this once-great American art form treated like so much filler, as the death watch for print-based newspapers drags on.

A full-page Krazy Kat strip

The Comics Curmudgeon: Making the funnies funnier

Wow! Here's a guy who's even more obsessed with "the funnies" than I am! (For my tribute to this glorious art form, click here.) Josh Fruhlinger is the creator of a blog called The Comics Curmudgeon, in which he offers his own (appropriately curmudgeonly) take on newspaper comics. Here's a recent Mary Worth strip, for example, followed by Fruhlinger's reaction to it:

From The Comics Curmudgeon:

I have of course been giving you near-daily updates on Mary Worth, since it continues to be amazing. Today, after belching forth the language-like utterance “I’m glad because I feel the same!”, Scott, his eyes suddenly glowing orange, thrusts his simian face into Adrian’s personal space. Watch as she playfully/desperately attempts to keep him at a distance. Save it for the honeymoon, tiger!

Leapin' lizards! It's the end of the line for Little Orphan Annie!

Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, which debuted in “the funny papers” 86 years ago, is about to go the way of . . . well, countless other newspaper comic strips that are no more.

Tribune Media Services, the syndicate that distributes the strip, announced in a news release this week that the carrot top with the blank eyes and the red dress “will take a final bow in traditional print form on Sunday, June 13, 2010. A new round of 21st century opportunities is being explored in digital and entertainment media.”

Gray died in 1968, but other cartoonists pitched in until Little Orphan Annie went into reruns in 1974. The strip was revived in 1979 and it has continued ever since.

In its heyday under Gray, Little Orphan Annie's story lines were "parables, folk tales, told with Bunyan-like simplicity, allegory and characterization," according to The World Encyclopedia of Comics. "Characters were easily identified by their names: (Daddy) Warbucks was orginally a munitions manufacturer; Mrs. Bleating-Hart a hypocritical do-gooder; Fred Free a wandering, kindly soul; J. Preston Slime a cynical two-faced reformer."

Reading between the lines, it sounds like Annie will get an extreme makeover and resurface somewhere else in unrecognizable form, once she abandons newspapers.

The Tribune Media Services release quoted Steve Tippie, a vice president there, as saying the focus “will be on bringing her more in line with current pop culture and shaping her development as a property that appeals to children and adults on a whole new level. We plan to grow Annie’s popularity by introducing her to new generations of audiences through new media and licensing applications.”

Writing in the Chicago Tribune, columnist Phil Rosenthal said June 13 “will be the first in generations to dawn without Annie appearing in a daily newspaper.” Rosenthal wrote that the final panel of the final strip “will end with Daddy Warbucks uncertain over what happened to Annie in her latest run-in with the Butcher of the Balkans. And, leaping lizards, what about her dog, Sandy? Arf."

Gee whiskers!

This exit, Cul de Sac: Proof that the comic strip is far from dead

If you’re a cartoonist who is publishing a collection of comic strips in book form, you can’t do any better than to get Bill Watterson, creator of the legendary Calvin and Hobbes, to write the foreward.

That’s just what happened to Richard Thompson back in 2008 when Andrews McMeel Publishing released the first collection of Thompson’s strip, Cul de Sac. A second collection was issued last year.

Set in the sometimes frightening suburb from which the strip takes its name, Cul de Sac revolves around self-absorbed spitfire Alice Otterloop, her older, misanthropic brother Petey, their parents and Alice’s friends from the Blisshaven Academy, a preschool.

Four-year-old Alice is inquisitive about her world and perplexed by her surroundings, yet she rules her small domain. She is highly imaginative, frequently outraged and always keenly observant, in the endearingly daffy way of a young child. Her friends often reflect on their surroundings with comments that seem surprisingly mature, yet cockeyed.

In one strip, for example, Alice asks her father why a sapling in their yard is staked. When he jokingly tells her the tree must be held in place so it won’t chase her, Alice stares at the tree, sticks out her tongue and angrily announces: “You can’t get me.” To which one of her friends responds: “Taunting the inanimate is cruel.”

“I thought the best newspaper comic strips were long gone,” Watterson writes in the foreword to the first collection, “and I’ve never been happier to be wrong. Richard Thompson’s Cul de Sac has it all - intelligence, gentle humor, a delightful way with words, and, most surprising of all, wonderful, wonderful drawings.”

Impressive praise, considering the source.

A well-deserved tribute to one of the great comic strips

The U.S. Postal Service has a habit of issuing postage stamps that honor important but often obscure people in the arts, which is probably a good thing if it focuses attention on the lesser-known who deserve to be better-known. 

But this year, the USPS will be commemorating a work of art that is worthy, well-known and wildly popular: the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. 

Launched by cartoonist Bill Watterson in 1985 and discontinued a decade later when Watterson called it quits, Calvin and Hobbes is beloved and sorely missed to this day, as a quick perusal of the humor section in any bookstore makes clear. 

The strip focuses on the often extraordinary adventures and fanciful musings of six-year-old Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes, who miraculously comes to life whenever the two characters are alone together.

Watterson’s strip has been widely praised for its characters, dialogue and storylines, but above all for its dazzling artwork, which elevated it to the front rank of great comic strips.

As Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman wrote when The Complete Calvin and Hobbes was published in 2005, Watterson's strip combined "the richly conceived characters and efficient drawing of Peanuts with the visual virtuosity and linguistic playfulness of Pogo and Krazy Kat" in a strip that is still missed by millions of people. 

The postage stamp to be issued this year is part of a set that also honors Beetle Bailey, Dennis the Menace, Archie and Garfield. All of them deserve recognition, but none more so than the masterpiece that was - and is - Calvin and Hobbes.