Monday, August 30: The Scribbler
STRIP SEARCH
by James Lincoln Warren
In Saturday’s Los Angeles Times, there was a three inch column on page AA2 (in “LATEXTRA”, the section following the front page section which supposedly contains late-breaking news) stating that the Tribune Company, which owns the Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles TV station KTLA TV (which began operations in 1942 as “W6XYZ”, the first television station west of the Mississippi), after having consulted with its creditors, has delayed presenting its revised bankruptcy plan to the court. Most of you out there probably aren’t following the story, which began back in 2008, and which has recently been made more interesting by the fact that one of the proposals for saving the company involves having former Disney CEO Michael Eisner take over. Whatever happens, the Tribune saga has been held out for the last several years as evidence of the daily newspaper’s demise.
Even after having changed corporate masters and severely slashing its staff and budget over the last several years, the Times is still hæmorrhaging money. Its subscriber base, which at one time was well over a million, is now less than seven hundred thousand—and this without any serious print competition, since arch-rival Hearst’s Herald-Examiner folded (please excuse the pun) over twenty years ago.
Sigh.
I don’t know if this newspaper will survive or become yet another casualty of our post literate culture. I can tell you that although there’s still a lot worth reading in it, it certainly isn’t the excellent L.A. Times I remember from when I first moved to Los Angeles in the 1980s anymore. I’m pretty sure it will hang on a while longer, but if it goes, it’s going to take a lot of things down with it.
Like comic strips. News I can get anywhere in this digital age, but reading comics online just ain’t the same. It doesn’t smell the same, you don’t get ink on your fingers, and you can’t take in the whole collection of strips at once. You can’t fold it up your netbook and shove it in your pocket, then toss it away when you’re done.
Not that I’m all that crazy about most contemporary strips these days, but I learned to read by perusing Sunday comics pages and comic books, so they fill an important place in my heart. When I lived in Brussels during my junior high school years, one of the things I most coveted was the American comics in the International Herald-Tribune.
One of the things that has mostly disappeared from the comics pages is strips that aren’t gag oriented. About the only daily strip in the Times that still tells stories is “Rex Morgan, M.D.” — there’s also “9 Chickweed Lane”, but that’s still primarily a humor strip, although it has lately metamorphozed almost into a post modern “Gasoline Alley”.
There aren’t any detectives at all.
Remember Dick Tracy? Or Rip Kirby? How about Kerry Drake? If you are not, ahem, of a certain age, you probably won’t remember the last two at all.
And who could forget Secret Agent X-9? Well, just about everybody, I admit, although he survived from his inception in 1934 until last year. What really makes that particular comic strip noteworthy were the two guys who wrote and drew it during its first year: Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond, of Flash Gordon fame, who also gave us Rip Kirby, mentioned above, although when I read that excellent strip every day in the late 60s and early 70s, it was drawn by the marvelous John Prentice. (Raymond had been killed in an auto accident in 1956.)
And not just cops and private eyes. There were reporters. Yeah, OK, I hated Dale Messick’s Brenda Starr, who first appeared in 1940 and is still with us, because despite the redheaded bombshell’s occasional forays into crime, it was essentially an adventurous romance strip. But Steve Roper, on the other hand, was a true crime-fighting investigative reporter, and his buddy Mike Nomad was every inch the tough unlicensed P.I.-type epitomized by Travis McGee and Matthew Scudder — although the evolution of that particular strip is a strange tale. It started as a humorous Western.
Like so many newspapers, most of these strips are long gone, and there has been nothing to replace them. But wouldn’t it be cool if detectives came back to the comics page?
If there are any comics pages.
I know you are arguing for paper strips and I don’t blame you, but I also know there are new adventure strips on the web. I just don’t read ’em. (I read plenty of comic strips on the web, and wrote about them last year.)
Talk about the papers going away reminded me that I once read a book that analyzed every daily newspaper in NJ. It ended with a story that didn’t surprise me at all. When they asked New Jerseyans which was the best paper in NJ the largest response was the Newark News, which went out of business in the sixties. The old paper readers tended to be fiercely loyal.
I used to faithfully read Mark Trail, Rex Morgan, Rip Kirby (that one was probably my favorite), Steve Canyon, Dick Tracy and the others. Even Apartment 3-G, anybody remember that one? Haven’t read any of them in years, though. I sort of like some of the graphic novels but haven’t really gotten into those either.
Strip Search – jolly clever!
I so enjoyed the old story comic strips, a favourite being Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise. I remember Dick Tracy and, believe it or not, we still have Prince Valiant.
I agree with ABA, Strip Search is too funny.
I resented that Batman billed itself as “Detective Comics” when it was anything but. There are disadvantages of having strict parents and one result is that out of James’ list, Steve Roper and Mike Nomad are the only strips I recall from my grandmother’s Sunday newspaper. How awful not to have seen Rip Kirby, Kerry Drake, and Secret Agent X-9.
I do remember Prince Valiant, The Phantom, and a vaguely remembered strip of two uniformed quasi-military adventurers (police? border patrol? park rangers?) in what might have been Africa.
Many years ago, the Orlando Sentinel dropped Spiderman in some kind of reactionary huff, ironic in that Spidey adorned one of the downtown buildings and would later take up residence at Universal Studios.
Detective Comics was the original comic book to feature (as he was then known) “the Bat-Man”, just like Action Comics was the first to feature Superman. Those characters received their own titles only after their success. Detective, which debuted in 1937, was not originally a super-hero title, but an anthology of hard-boiled stories, and Batman didn’t grace its pages until issue #27 in 1939.
Having said that, up until the 1970s, Batman was primarily a detective, with a fully equipped forensics lab that we all know and love as the Bat Cave. His encounters with villains almost always hinged on his solving some clue as to the crimes. In many ways, particularly in terms of the 2-dimensional stylized artwork and the bizarre nature of the featured villains, Batman was really Dick Tracy in bat-drag.
When the film The Dark Knight came out, a friend of mine, Todd Livingston, opined that he wished that there would be a Batman movie that cleaved closer to his origins in the comics. I was in full sympathy and said, “Yeah, I’m not a big fan of the noir Batman. He was more fun in the fifties and early sixties before he became the anguished avenger.”
Todd replied, “No, it’s not that so much. Batman was originally a detective. That’s what made him so cool, outsmarting the Joker. Why don’t they make a movie where they show him as one?”
He’s right. The first Tim Burton Batman movie had something of that in it, but was spoiled by being so, well, Tim Burtonish, as well as Jack Nicholson’s completely undisciplined and buffoonish performance in the villain’s role.
The Alex Raymond Rip Kirby is available in book form, but not John Prentice’s version, which was every bit as good.
I believe the adventure strip I referred to above was Tim Tyler’s Luck.
In rooting it out, I was surprised to learn Nero Wolfe, Perry Mason, The Saint all had their own comic strips.
Leslie Charteris, creator of the Saint and the first President of the SoCal Chapter of MWA (an office I once held myself) took over Secret Agent X-9 very briefly when Hammett left. Alfred Andriola, the artist for Kerry Drake, got his start as the artist for the Charlie Chan comic strip.