The Way I See It: Comics have entertained readers for a century
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Through wars, depressions and social upheavals, the comic pages of the newspaper here and elsewhere have given readers something to smile about every day for the past century.
We all need something light in our lives, and through a wide range of different strips the daily antics of Snoopy, Dennis, Hagar and Garfield have given us a chance to hit pause on the real world through thousands of editions.
Long before I worked at a newspaper, I read the comics page. As a newspaper employee I became well aware that a lot of readers take the antics of their favorite characters very seriously. Run the wrong day strip or run them out of order, and the phone will ring.
I took a look at some old editions of The Marietta Times to see just how long comics have been part of the newspaper. The paper, prior to the 1920s, was much smaller. Type was smaller, headlines were smaller, everything was smaller as the editors worked to squeeze as much as they could into a four- or eight-page edition. None of the early editions of The Times had comics.
Comics first started appearing in American newspapers in the late 1800s with a strip called the Yellow Kid appearing in a New York newspaper in 1895.
The Sept. 23, 1920, edition of The Times featured a single strip named Bringing up Father. The strip, later renamed Jiggs and Maggie, ran for 87 years, ending in May 2000.
The strip is typical of many comics where the characters in the strip outlive the artist that created and drew them.
The companies that sell comic strips to newspapers had salespeople at one time that would travel around trying to get newspapers to buy different comics that were likely more profitable to the syndication company. I remember one standing in our conference room tapping his fingers on our different comics and repeating "dead comic, dead comic" repeatedly. If he had succeeded, you would not be reading classics like Peanuts in The Times today. Created by Charles Schulz, the strip has been in reruns of the 17,897 installments since the artist died in 2000 and Schulz the only person to ever draw Peanuts. Most strips are taken over by a different artist when the creator can no longer produce the strip.
Looking over the comic pages from The Times for each decade since the 1930s, it is clear there are some characters that have been part of area families for a very long time.
By 1930 The Times had six strips in the paper with five others joining Bringing up Father. None of the strips made it to the modern era.
The Times of 1940 carried eight strips including Blondie. Blondie was introduced to the world in 1930 and drawn by Chris Young. He passed it onto his son Dean in 1973, who continues to draw it with some help from others. It reports on the antics of Blondie Boppadoop and her husband, Dagwood Bumstead. The couple were married in the strip in 1933, which means they have now been married for more than 90 years. Blondie still appears in The Times, which of course means that Dagwood has been here longer than I have, and likely makes it the longest running feature of The Times.
By 1950 Blondie was joined by 14 other panels, including Lil Abner, the Red Ryder and Donald Duck, drawn by Walt Disney himself.
In 1960 the page had Dick Tracy, Joe Palooka, Beetle Bailey, Archie and Buzz Sawyer as well as the Ohio Adventure with a cartoon look at the historical past, which likely featured Marietta folks in it at some point. The Peanut gang had joined The Times by 1970; the panel on Sept. 24, 1970 featured Snoopy trying to kick a football with sidekick Woodstock. Family Circus, Beetle Bailey, Trudy and Dr. Kildare had also joined the mix of 15 strips in The Times.
Beetle Bailey and Winnie the Pooh were part of the Times by 1980, as was one of my all-time favorites, Shoe. The overall number was 10 strips with part of the page being taken up by the Bridge column, horoscopes and the crossword puzzle. The number of strips returned to 14 by 1990, which now also included Calvin and Hobbes, Hi and Lois and Garfield. The square panel of Dennis the Menace also appeared.
Newspaper pages have never gotten any bigger, but for better or worse, by 2000, we were running 16 strips, including the strip For Better or Worse. That number dropped by one by 2010. The 2026 version of the comics page carries 14 comics plus the crossword puzzle. On days that we do not publish, such as the postal holidays, we give you an extra comics page.
In a world where the news can be downright scary, it's nice to know we can always turn to our long-term friends on the comics page for a smile each day.
Art Smith is online manager of The Marietta Times and The Parkersburg News and Sentinel, he can be reached at asmith@mariettatimes.com