The serious side of comic strips

Deccan Herald had been the popular newspaper in the Eighties for Bangalore’s significant English speaking middle class. Now of course, sadly, TOI reigns in the state. Of course some Tamilians and avid news analysts still favour to ‘The Hindu’. The reason I write about these newspapers is not about their news coverage or quality but the comic sections that provide relief from the depressing news on the main sheet.

DH ran (and continues even now) a ‘Blondie’ comic that is almost 1/4^th of a entire page on its Sunday edition, apart from the weekly strips. Like all Indian kids curious about the US, I got to know about a typical American family through ‘Blondie’. The fact that, like any average middle class family in Bangalore, we did not own a car or any have spacious lawn in front of our tiny houses did not deter me in relating to the Dagwood family. Every Sunday, I would read about Dagwood going to work in a car pool, playing golf with Herb or mowing the lawns while Blondie maintained the house and worked as professional caterer. My dream was to have a couch like the one Dagwood slept on.

As we grew up the newspaper price wars started in our state. Our family like many others switched over to TOI. The leisure section in Bangalore Times became my everyday past time. One advantage of TOI is that they have a daily comics section covering many famous comics – Peanuts, Garfield, Calvin and of course Archies. But the picture quality and comic space has shrunk to an incredulous size. Sometimes I read the same comic strip reprinted on consecutive days. Obviously TOI thinks either comics are only for kids who look at the pictures or no one gets past the BT supplements models on its cover page. Though I love the collection, especially the indefatigable Calvin, I hate their utter disregard to the size of the strips. I’ll challenge anyone to a bucketful of icecream if they can read the Denis comic strip without squinting their eyes. I don’t mind reading only one comic on a Sunday that would extend to half a page.

Sometimes I feel, we need an Indian newspaper that dedicates an entire sheet towards cartoons. After all, everyone loves a laugh right? My internet search on the war of news publishers with comic space led me to Wikipedia. This is what Wiki says –

“Main article: Sunday strip

Sunday newspapers traditionally included a special color section. Early Sunday strips, such as Thimble Theatre and Little Orphan Annie, filled an entire newspaper page, a format known to collectors as full page. Later strips, such as The Phantom and Terry and the Pirates, were usually only half that size, with two strips to a page in full-size newspapers, such as the New Orleans Times Picayune, or with one strip on a tabloid page, as in the Chicago Daily News. When Sunday strips began to appear in more than one format, it became necessary for the cartoonist to allow for rearranged, cropped or dropped panels. During World War II, because of paper shortages, the size of Sunday strips began to shrink. After the war, strips continued to get smaller and smaller, to save the expense of printing so many color pages. The last full-page comic strip was the Prince Valiant strip for 11 April 1971. Today, most Sunday strips are smaller than the daily strips of the 1930s.“

I guess in the coming days, the section might shrink further or worse, will be published only in the internet edition. Its time the money making publishing firms shrunk some ad space for our beloved cartoons, isn’t it?