THE READER IS BEING GYPPED AND HE DOESN'T EVEN KNOW IT

"If comics can be so much, why are we settling for so little? Can't we expect more from our comics pages?"

That plea was issued by Bill Watterson, creator of the brilliant and much-missed comic strip CALVIN & HOBBES, in an address entitled 'The Cheapening of the Comics'. In it, he laid bare all the factors that conspire to make the modern newspaper comics page so bland, static, and mediocre. All parties involved, he said, were to blame: the syndicates, for demanding total ownership and for prolonging decrepit strips long past their natural lifespan; newspapers, for having steadily shrunk their comic strips down near to the brink of illegibility; and creators, for being eager to sell out, by licensing their characters eight ways from Sunday and by handing the real work off to assistants and studios.

Watterson delivered that address 15 years ago last month. He could deliver it again today and not have to change a word. Nothing he complained about has improved in the least.

In fact, on the newspapers' end, things have gotten markedly worse. Not only do newspapers continue to shrink the comics, but now they often distort them as well, squashing or stretching them in order to better fit their page layouts. It doesn't seem to make sense. As Watterson argued:

"The situation is ironic. All across the country, newspapers are going to great expense to add color photographs, fancy graphics, and bold design to their pages in order to entice readers away from the steady blue light of their TV screens. It is strange that after all that expense and work, newspapers refused to take advantage of the comic strip, the one newspaper graphic that television cannot imitate. When 20 strips are reduced and crammed into two monotonous columns on one page, the result is singularly unattractive and uneffective. Newspapers pay for their comics and then refuse to let comics do their job."

Are editors being short-sighted? Are they blinded by disdain for the medium? Maybe not. Maybe editors really can't fiscally justify giving comics any more space than they already consume. They seem to be losing confidence in the comics, a feeling that was made explicit by Amanda Bennett, editor of the Philadelphia Enquirer, in a New York Times front-page story on the subject:

"We're struggling with both the cost of the comics we buy and the cost of the newsprint we use to run them. We think readers still care a lot about the comics. Although in the long term, we're thinking of them in ways like stock agate, which had usefulness, but the usefulness is dropping off."

When confronted with attitudes like this, comics fans tend to accentuate the positive. The strip form will never die, they insist. It may just have to find a new home, is all. Perhaps the internet will save us, if only somebody can figure out a way to get paid from it. Hey, did you know you can read comic strips on your cellphone now?

''Newspapers pay for their comics and then refuse to let comics do their job.'' All this techie happytalk is besides the point. Think about it: newspapers have been bleeding readers for decades. In fact, the situation is probably worse than has been generally known, since many major papers, including the New York Times, have been caught this past year inflating their circulation figures. The biggest problem is that newspapers aren't attracting enough young readers to replace the ones who are dying off. Well, the whole reason newspapers have comic strips is to attract young readers, and they've been performing that function for over a century. But now, editors have concluded that their "usefulness is dropping off"? Jesus - what does that say about comics' appeal?

Even if you prefer long-form comics to strips, you ought to be alarmed by their decline. Newspapers are to comics what radio is to music - a delivery system that's cheap, constant and ubiquitous. Newspapers are the place where most people first encounter the comics medium and learn its basic grammar. What happens if that feeder system stops being effective?

Another reason to wish good health to the comics page is, cartoons are one of the few parts of the newspaper wherein it's permissible to pass judgments, to try to get at the truth instead of just reporting the facts (or, more commonly, repeating the spin).

This, of course, has been the traditional role of the editorial cartoon, but it's getting harder and harder to deny that editorial cartooning is a dying art. Ten years ago, there were fewer than 200 editorial cartoonists holding positions at newspapers. Today, there are fewer than 100. The culprit is syndication. Instead of paying a salary to a staff cartoonist, an editor can pay a few bucks to a syndicate and take their pick from a wide selection of cartoons - and if they like, they can avoid all the controversial ones, and save themselves the headache of reader hate mail. Consequently, you see fewer and fewer editorial cartoons that have any more bite than Jay Leno's monologue.

No wonder comic strips are picking up the slack. Quite a few strips dabble in politics, but there are three major ones that are strongly political: DOONESBURY, MALLARD FILLMORE, and THE BOONDOCKS.

I'M ALSO USING THE S-WORD, THE C-WORD, THE P-WORD AND THE J-WORD!

Despite being 34 years old, DOONESBURY is still the most talked-about strip in America. This defies the usual pattern: a strip may need an interesting hook to get into the papers, but once safely ensconced there, they lapse into formula and strive above all else not to give offence. The papers are clogged with such competent but forgettable strips; almost nothing can kill them, and nothing but the onset of senility can make them interesting again.

The model here is BLONDIE. When BLONDIE debuted in 1930, the syndicate promoted it by sending suitcases full of lingerie to newspaper editors, followed by telegrams purportedly from Blondie asking if her things had arrived yet. Blondie began life as a glamorous, high-living flapper, and when her beau Dagwood entered the strip, he was the playboy son of a railroad tycoon. The strip was a hit, and when Dagwood and Blondie got married a few years in, it was a genuine media event.

Right after that, Dagwood got disinherited, and the strip left high society behind, soon settling into the mild, complacent, middle-class suburban domestic comedy that we know today. Making the strip duller paid off fantastically well: BLONDIE is one of the longest-running and most widely-read strips in existence, and the whole comics page is now dominated by mild, complacent, middle-class suburban domestic comedy.

'After 34 years, DOONESBURY is still the most talked-about strip in America.' DOONESBURY has not yet sunk into complacency or resorted to formula, and that by itself is remarkable. Part of the reason is that it has a very durable structure. Creator Garry Trudeau likes to joke that the strip has more characters than a Russian novel, and because he's built up such a large and varied ensemble, he usually has characters well positioned to comment on any current event. This allows him to integrate topical commentary into the strips and still have room to chart the characters' lives.

Other cartoonists have stolen a lot from DOONESBURY over the years - see BLOOM COUNTY, or any most any college newspaper strip from 1980 onwards - but few try to copy that structure, because it's really friggin' hard to pull off. The only cartoonist I know of to match Trudeau's achievement is the brilliant Alison Bechdel, creator of DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR. But Bechdel has the advantage of doing one long, dense strip every two weeks, rather than one short one with a punchline every day. On the daily newspaper page, Trudeau stands alone.

Trudeau has also done more than just about any other working cartoonist to batter against the archaic content restrictions that comic strips are still forced to labour under. To take one of the most recent incidents: a few weeks ago, DOONESBURY portrayed Dick Cheney saying, "Tell them to go f--- themselves!" Editors were peeved about not having been warned in advance about the implied obscenity by the syndicate, and some newspapers yanked the strip that day. Yet that dialogue is based on an actual remark of Cheney's that was prominently reported by every newspaper in the country.

One can only assume that the offended editors were worried about children being corrupted. But, as Trudeau has argued, "most children don't understand DOONESBURY in any event, and thus sensibly avoid it". Here's a telling anecdote: Kevin Kallaugher, himself a working editorial cartoonist, was once shocked to discover that his college-age son had never even heard of Trudeau or DOONESBURY.

NOTHING LIKE THIS EVER HAPPENS IN BEETLE BAILEY

Trudeau caused a much bigger uproar earlier this year, writing about the Iraq war. He never was as aggressive as Aaron McGruder was in THE BOONDOCKS, but he may have managed to cut deeper.

Trudeau, of course, got his start opposing the Vietnam War. He learned a lot about what worked and what didn't, and when the first Iraq War approached, he was ready. As Bob Fiore put it back in The Comics Journal #141, "what the anti-war protesters who are trying to stay on the good side of the troops don't realize is that, aside from a Dear John letter, the worst thing you can tell a soldier is that his sacrifices are useless. That's something Trudeau does understand."

Trudeau had his jock character BD, who had also served in Vietnam, reenlist; and he covered the war largely from the soldiers' perspective, taking pains to keep things authentic, even giving over a Sunday strip to the cartoons of a real airman stationed in Saudi Arabia. Fiore noted that Trudeau seemed to have "decided to become the Bill Mauldin of the Gulf War".

For Gulf War II, Trudeau went further. BD, as a reservist, was called up, and this time, he didn't escape unscathed. On April 21st, 2004, after a couple days of setup, Trudeau revealed that BD lost his left leg in an ambush. The effect was wrenching - BD was part of the strip's original cast, and it seemed unthinkable that he could be hurt so badly. A few papers decided the series was too graphic for the funnies page, and spiked it. A few more ran most of the series, but censored or spiked the one where BD woke up in the hospital after the amputation, because the first thing he said was, "Son of a bitch!" (Newspapers' priorities can be hard to explain.)

Shortly thereafter, Trudeau made one other controversial gesture. On May 30th, 2004, the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, he filled his strip with a list of the names of all the military casualties of the Iraq War. In both cases, some conservatives, like Fox News host and moral arbiter Bill O'Reilly, accused Trudeau of "using someone's personal tragedy to advance a political agenda". This is a response that Trudeau no doubt banked on, and it helped him implicitly make the most telling point of all: what kind of country had we become, when simply to acknowledge that soldiers get killed and maimed in wartime has come to be seen as a partisan act?

'Trudeau caused an uproar earlier this year, writing about the Iraq war.' The Iraq War has provoked some of Trudeau's best work in years, but it should be noted that DOONESBURY's weak points haven't gone away. Although Trudeau often takes vacations and sabbaticals to recharge (a privilege otherwise unheard-of in the business), there are stock devices he's been overusing for more than a decade now. Among these are: the breaking of the fourth wall; the use of floating icons to stand in for presidents and other government leaders; and the deployment of Duke, the Hunter S Thompson parody character, as an all-purpose scoundrel.

There are two truly damning things you can say about modern DOONESBURY. The first is that Trudeau's lampoon of George W Bush hasn't been very distinctive. It's not bad, but it's something a lot of people could have done. Which is strange, since Trudeau was actually a classmate of Bush's at Yale, and knew him socially. Further, DOONESBURY absolutely owned Bush the Elder. Trudeau perfectly caught his preppy goofiness, his desperate need to prove his masculinity, and - albeit through the silly device of an evil twin - a little bit of his mean streak, as well. But in trying to capture Bush the Younger's voice, Trudeau mostly just falls back on the same somewhat-forced malapropisms that everybody uses.

The second damning thing is that Trudeau no longer has any touch for writing young characters. Maybe that's inevitable with the passage of time, but still, that's one hell of a comedown for a guy who was once hailed as the voice of his generation, who's been credited with creating the first teenagers on the comics page not in the ARCHIE mould.

Today, the kids in DOONESBURY exist mainly to illustrate trends. Mike Doonesbury's daughter Alex is a computer geek; Joanie Caucus's son Jeff became an intern at the CIA (which is preposterous, but at least it gave him an identity); and Zonker Harris' nephew Zipper is, well, a pale copy of Zonker, only he's naturally spacey rather than herbally enhanced.

Since DOONESBURY's characters age in real time, someday these kids will grow up and have to carry the strip, but it's hard to see how they'll manage. Maybe once they reach adulthood, they'll have grown real personalities.

BUT WHY A DUCK?

MALLARD FILLMORE was billed from its inception in 1994 as the "conservative DOONESBURY", and creator Bruce Tinsley never misses a chance to snipe at Trudeau. It was smart marketing - lots of newspapers, wanting to ward off accusations of liberal media bias, carry both DOONESBURY and MALLARD FILLMORE for the sake of "balance". And balance is what they get, not just between 'left' and 'right,' but also between 'usually funny' and 'painfully unfunny'.

Tinsley's a pretty good caricaturist (though he does tend to give all his people enormous jutting chins), but that's about all there is to recommend his strip. My problem with Tinsley is not that he's a conservative, but that he's a strident, dogmatic conservative. His politics boil down to little more than an undying hatred of the '60s. This makes him boringly predictable and unfailingly one-sided.

Trudeau was able to thoroughly roast Clinton and his besotted boomer supporters, but if Tinsley has ever made a joke at Dubya's expense, I missed it. Bush didn't even appear in MALLARD once during the whole year 2000. The strip reads as if Tinsley is getting his talking points dictated to him directly by Rush Limbaugh. Hell, maybe he is - Tinsley admires Rush so much that he named the strip's little kid character after him.

Not that you're ever likely to see little Rush long enough to learn his name. Unlike his bête noire Trudeau, Tinsley doesn't believe in leavening political commentary with character-driven humour. MALLARD has very few recurring characters, no storylines, and almost no non-ideological punchlines.

The strip's premise is that Mallard, a conservative duck, has been hired by a TV station's liberal news department (Tinsley would say that's redundant) to fill their species diversity quota. So Mallard gets to spar with his woolly-headed boss and the air-headed anchorman, and that's about all the chance for conversation he gets. Mostly, he just rants directly at the reader. And, of course, Mallard is never, ever wrong. He may be the only cartoon duck who's crankier than Howard.

Unless you're a fellow dittohead, Mallard's insufferable. Liberals are savvier about this kind of thing. Take the aforementioned Alison Bechdel, for example. Like Tinsley, she made her strip's main character, Mo, a mouthpiece for her hardcore political beliefs. The difference is that she also made Mo a figure of fun. Mo is the living, breathing (or rather, hyperventilating) embodiment of liberal guilt, a hopeless neurotic who despairs of ever living up to her own impossibly high ethical standards, but nevertheless hectors her friends when they fall short. By lampooning Mo's self-righteousness, Bechdel makes her rants funny to more than just her fellow travellers - and still gets her point across. It's a trick that Aaron McGruder also uses well with his character Huey in THE BOONDOCKS.

"BECAUSE I KNOW YOU DON'T READ THE NEWSPAPER"

THE BOONDOCKS is a young strip, just five years old, and McGruder, the creator, is under 30. That by itself makes him an oddity on the modern comics page, where most of the strips aren't even under 30 years old. Add in the fact that McGruder's black, and he becomes almost a statistical impossibility. After 'senator', 'strip cartoonist' is the least diverse profession in the country. It's so overwhelmingly white that they still think golf is funny.

The main characters of THE BOONDOCKS are radical Huey and his gangsta-wannabe younger brother Riley, transplanted from the South Side of Chicago to a lily-white suburb with street names like Timid Deer Lane, and there's no question that McGruder intended this as an assault on the mild, complacent, middle-class BLONDIE-verse.

McGruder's career will be a good indicator of whether the newspaper comics page has a future. He's had great success so far, and he's gotten away with saying some genuinely outrageous (and necessary) things, even right after 9/11, when Trudeau was hanging back. But a New Yorker profile of McGruder from earlier this year suggests that his interest in the strip is flagging. He already has an assistant to draw the strip for him. (Trudeau has an assistant too, but at least he still pencils DOONESBURY.) And even so, he still struggles with deadlines. He's had fewer storylines in the strip lately, instead resorting more and more to one-shot topical gags, too many of which are delivered by the family TV, with the characters just acting as the audience.

Most of all, he's chafing against the space and content restrictions of newspaper comic strips. And who could blame him? He just co-wrote a graphic novel, he has a BOONDOCKS animated TV show in development, and he's working on screenplays. None of those media have the same immediacy as the daily strip, but they do offer much more opportunity to stretch.

Besides which, as BLOOM COUNTY creator Berke Breathed likes to joke, the health-breaking daily grind eventually leaves all strip cartoonists looking like Keith Richards at 4am. It's not as if the money's that great, either, unless you've got characters that can be licensed out for a greeting card line - and it's hard to picture Huey Freeman shilling for Hallmark. So who needs the hassle?

If McGruder leaves the world of newspaper comics behind, editors may breathe a sigh of relief, knowing they can relax their vigilance of the funnies page a bit, and other cartoonists may just be grateful that another slot has opened up. But it might prove Bill Watterson's worst fears correct.

Chris Ekman is a political cartoonist.

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