Since most newspapers are now rerunning Peanuts, why not continue the trend and print re-runs of Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side?
(If the administrator doesn’t think this belongs in General Questions, I’ll move it to Great Debates…)
Some newspapers do rerun Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side. My newspaper, The Stars and Stripes does. Perhaps you should write a letter to the comics editor requesting that they add these strips to your paper.
Knowing how temperamental and egotistical Bill Waterson (Calvin & Hobbes) can be, I’d say that he’s already struck a deal with his syndicate that no newspaper can print a re-run of one of his old strips unless they give him a full page and ten million dollars.
You can see Calvin & Hobbes at http://www.calvinandhobbes.com
Also, “Peanuts” ran for 50 years, which means there’s a lot more of them to re-run than “C&H” or “The Far Side.”
Cartoon re-runs? Doesn’t seem right, does it? Won’t the oldest ones looks pretty strange to us?
Some would, but the best would be timeless.
In the early 70s, Newsday ran reruns of Krazy Kat for about a year and a half. It was a revelation (it’s once thing to read them collected, but much different to see them day to day).
You could probably rerun a variety of strips and they’d still be as good as ever. Some include:
Krazy Kat
Pogo
Barnaby (though there’s not a lot)
If you want to go back to continuity strips, you could have:
Mickey Mouse (a first-class adventure strip for awhile)
Terry and the Pirates (while Caniff was working on it)
Thimble Theater Starring Popeye
“What we have here is failure to communicate.” – Strother Martin, anticipating the Internet.
The problem with “dated” strips would be roughly comparable to the problem with certain cartoons.
For example, there’s a Bugs Bunny cartoon which has Bugs in an airplane. At the end of the cartoon the plane is spiraling down out of control, only to suddenly stop a few feet above the ground. Bugs points at the window and says something like “You know how it is with those A coupons”.
However, that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it; it’s possible to guess from context what Bugs is talking about, and though the joke falls a little flat it’s not totally ruined.
From my recollection of the Peanuts strips, Schultz mostly avoided making jokes utterly dependent on pop culture references, so they should hold up fairly well.
The Far Side isn’t too dated. Peanuts is dated terribly. Snoopy is alway engaging in the lastest fad, from Roller Disco to Breakdancing.
Besides it is unfair to all those new comic authors that won’t get space. You can easily buy books. I get them on eBay for as little as 50¢
I’d rather see them replaced with new strips. If I want to read old ones, I’ll buy them in book form.
That line escaped me for some 15 years!
I for one welcome our new insect overlords… - K. Brockman
I haven’t routinely read Peanuts for at least ten years, so I don’t really know what was going on then. However, I don’t recall Snoopy doing “faddish” things in the earlier strips. Most of Snoopy’s weird behavior is either more or less timeless, OR it was already dated at the time the strips were written (his fantasy life as a World War I flying ace).
Contrast this with, say, Bloom County, in which at least every other strip clearly references current events.