The Comic Spot
"Daily Strips"
by Chris Lambert
 The paperboy drops the daily newspaper on the front door, I rush to the screen and throw it open, grab the bundle of black and white newsprint and pull out the section that contains…the funnies. Yep, that’s what I did as a kid and almost every day to boot. Strange though I never got around to cutting out the strips and saving them until I was in my late teens.
Back then the adventure strips (which are hardly even around any more) took about six weeks to finish a tale. So do the math, take the seven installments in a week, times six weeks, and you can find that you can tell a decent enough story in 42 strips. Now if you can condense three separate strips to one page, then you’re looking at an almost 15 page comic book story that you’re reading. That’s not bad I guess, for a free comic that’s coming in the paper that your folks are going to buy anyway for the news and the sports and such.
But it’s too bad that the adventure strips have all but been replaced by the gag-a-day type strips like Beetle Bailey and the like. I’m not picking on Beetle mind you, personally I still read him every day. What I’m saying is that the diversity is gone from the dailies, and I wish that they’d return.
There is also the size of the comics to contend with. Recently I took a commemorative stamp (I realize that it was slightly larger than normal) and compared it to a Peanuts Classic (which I know was shrunk slightly smaller than normal) and guess what? The stamp was bigger than a panel of the comic strip.
We’ve got to change this around somehow. Write to our news editors write to the syndicates, heck get our congressman involved. Believe me, if they can get involved in Baseball steroid scandals, they can deal with our American heritage of comic strips and not let them vanish from sight. Of course if they do vanish it will be because they’ve shrunk so small we can’t see them anymore.
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My Favorite Panel
by Chris Lambert
Keeping with the theme of strips, my favorite panel is a recent one from a strip entitled, “Pearls Before Swine.” I always enjoy when the rat or the pig go ballistic and start screaming as in this last panel from a December, 2009 strip
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