The perennially popular strip set in Camp Swampy and starring the goof-off private and his nemesis Sergeant Snorkel currently appears in 1,800 papers around the world. His dad, Mort Walker, created Beetle Bailey in 1950 and is still penciling it at age 93. If there’s such a thing as comics royalty, Brian Walker is it. The strip currently appears in 1,800 papers around the world.(© 2016 King Features Syndicate, Inc. Enduring stuggle: Beetle Bailey, starring the goof-off private and his nemesis Sergeant Snorkel, was launched in 1950, making it one of the longest-running comics ever. I set out to ask some folks who would know. But what do these demographic and digital changes bode for the comics, an indigenous American art form that has entertained hundreds of millions of readers - including me - since the turn of the 19th century? “Print, how quaint,” they sniff.ĭespite such chattering, I believe we can say with assurance that print is definitely not dead and newspapers will endure, albeit as less of a fixture in daily life than in years past. Even some of my own contemporaries tell me that they don’t read the print newspaper. And reading the newspaper is not a habit with younger generations, who prefer to get their news online (ironically, often at newspaper websites) or via social media like Facebook or Twitter. Meanwhile, average daily newspaper readers are now in their mid-50s and getting older. The numbers tell the tale: In 1960, there were 1,763 total daily newspapers (morning and evening) with a total circulation of 58,882,000 in 2014, there were 1,331 with a total circulation of 40,420,000. But I am in increasingly diminished company, as newspapers have consolidated or shut down across the country and readership has dropped dramatically. Today, wherever I am, I still open the paper to the “funny pages” first thing to start my day with a smile. Over the years, some old favorites faded away, as did the Philadelphia Bulletin, but inventive new strips like Doonesbury, Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, and Mutts arrived on the scene and took the comics in wonderful, sometimes challenging, directions. I had favorites - Peanuts, Prince Valiant, Pogo, The Phantom, Blondie, Li’l Abner - but I would also get caught up in the soap operas unspooling in the likes of Brenda Starr, Mary Worth, and Rex Morgan, M.D. It was then that I fell in love with comic strips in all their glorious variety - humor, adventure, romance, you name it.
I would cut open the bundle, fish out a fresh copy, and settle back for some chuckles and thrills before heading out on my route. But above all, I got to see the funnies before anybody else.
Post dispatch funny pages how to#
I earned decent money for a 14-year-old I learned how to sell subscriptions and keep payment records I got to meet the neighbors (and their daughters). Looking back, being a paperboy was a formative experience. I did that until I landed a job bagging groceries at a local supermarket. The route was smaller, there was no Sunday edition, and it actually paid better. After two years humping the Bulletin, I jumped at the chance to deliver the much thinner Times-Herald. But I was usually on my own - come wind, rain, or snow. If the weather was especially rotten, my sainted mother would drive me around in the family station wagon.
It was heavy with advertising, especially on a week leading up to a holiday, and I would pile the papers on a Radio Flyer wagon that I hauled up and down the streets like an undersized tugboat pulling a coal barge upriver. Where I lived, we also had a local paper, the Norristown Times-Herald.įirst, I delivered the evening Bulletin (its slogan: “In Philadelphia, nearly everybody reads the Bulletin”) daily and Sundays. At the time, Philadelphia was a three-paper town: There was the Inquirer, the Bulletin, and the tabloid Daily News. You might say it was my first job in publishing. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, before I was old enough to get a work permit, I delivered newspapers in my suburban Philadelphia neighborhood.
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