Sunday Funnies

Alex Chun talks to a few comic artists about Sunday strips, and finds them pretty anxious about the future:

While strips such as “Boondocks” and “Over the Hedge” are making forays onto the small and large screen, respectively, the comics page is struggling to find its place in a post-“Calvin & Hobbes” world as its readership grows older and as its piece of newspaper real estate shrinks.

“I don’t think you’ll ever see another ‘Calvin & Hobbes,’ ‘Bloom County’ or ‘Doonesbury’ again,” says Breathed, 48, who received the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987. “The popularity of those strips was built on a young audience — great comic strips are not built on the backs of aging readers.”

Part of the problem, Breathed and other cartoonists say, is that newspapers, when choosing their comic strip lineup, put too much emphasis on the opinions of aging readers. As a result, stalwart strips such as “Peanuts,” which continues to run as a reprint since the death of Charles M. Schulz in 2000, and “Blondie,” which was created in 1930 by Chic Young, tend to remain entrenched on comics pages.

You can read the rest here.