Why Are the Sunday Comics So Bad?

Because I am middle aged and need to get in training for my cranky Get off my lawn years, and because I’m in a pandemic with long hours sitting at home, I did a study of the Sunday comics section in the Buffalo News

This was inspired by years of opening the Sunday comics section and rarely seeing anything that made me chuckle, impressed me with artistic skill, Prince Valiant notwithstanding, or combined humor with insight into our lives now, the magnificent exception being Doonesbury. Is there something wrong with me? Of course. Humor is in the eye of the beholder and I do not have 20/20 vision. Did I mention we’re in a global pandemic? But there’s something wrong with the Sunday comics, too.

Omitting puzzles and games, I counted 24 syndicated comic strips in the Sunday comics section. None originate here in Buffalo. Then I looked up their ages. From Blondie, founded in 1930, to the youngest, Pros & Cons, founded in 2008, the average age of a Sunday strip is 44 years old. If you aspire to be a Sunday funnies cartoonist, like I did as a child, you should have gotten started around 1978.

If you aspire to be a Sunday funnies cartoonist, like I did as a child, you should have gotten started around 1978.

Only 3 strips, 12%, were founded in this century. Seven of the 24, or 28% of the strips, are 62 or older and eligible to draw Social Security. Their characters are frozen in a long-gone mid-20th century America.

American servicemen and women have fought in multiple conflicts since Beetle Bailey was founded in 1950, but you’d never know it from cringey plot lines that steer carefully away from anything resembling military life today. Aren’t there any veterans drawing comics about their lives?

American households come in all places, sizes, configurations, and colors, but on Sunday, I see a preponderance of white-middle-class-nuclear-families-in-the-suburbs (Peanuts, Family Circus, Blondie, Zits, Dennis the Menace, Sally Forth.) As though this specific demographic and its sensibilities represent something universally relatable.

One strip, Jump Start, focuses on a Black family in Philadelphia. Other than Jump Start, why is city life absent from the comics page? What about farm life? College life? Factory life? Aren’t there any strips by and about immigrants? Humor can be found everywhere.

We are living in a golden age of visual storytelling, starting with the zine movement, which took off in the 1970s, thanks to the advent of inexpensive photocopy technology. Graphic novels came of age in 1982, when Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer prize for Maus. Manga, or Japanese comics, have had a devoted American audience for decades. This creative explosion is reflected nowhere in the Sunday comics, which are dominated by senescent strips from before I was born.

This creative explosion is reflected nowhere in the Sunday comics, which are dominated by senescent strips from before I was born.

No doubt there is much to the syndication process that is invisible to the ordinary Sunday subscriber, but apparently certain comics now own valuable Sunday newspaper real estate in perpetuity, such as Peanuts, Blondie and Dennis the Menace, the last two of which are drawn by the founder’s descendants or others. 

This does not occur on the editorial page. When editorial columnists die, their children are not entitled to continue Mom or Dad’s column. Emerging columnists and new viewpoints get an opportunity to shine. This natural cycle of talent has been stifled for decades in the Sunday comics. For the sake of the new audiences that the News needs and deserves, it is time to end Sunday comic strip monopolies from the last century. Please make me laugh again.

My calculations:

StripFoundedAge in 2022Eligible for SS
Pros & Cons200814
Dog Eat Doug200418
Pearls Before Swine200121
Get Fuzzy199923
Zits199725
Mutts199428
Pickles199032
Jump Start198933
Dilbert198933
Sally Forth198240
For Better For Worse197943
Garfield197844
Hagar the Horrible197349
Funky Winkerbean197250
Doonesbury197052
Animal Crackers196854
Wizard of Id196458
Family Circus196062Y
Marmaduke195468Y
Dennis the Menace195171Y
Peanuts195072Y
Beetle Bailey195072Y
Prince Valiant193785Y
Blondie193092Y
Total11397
Average age45.56

I submitted this as a My View column to the Buffalo News on January 24, 2022. Having gotten no response, I am posting it here. Lead image by author.

Top Ten Tiresome Tropes

My essays are usually about research and history. Today, I felt like listing some pop culture plot devices from movies, TV, and novels that are long overdue for retirement.


  • The amateur woman sleuth has a cop boyfriend who violates the confidentiality of investigations and conveniently feeds her clues, a cozy mystery cliche.
Book covers of some cozy mysteries
Pee Wee Herman’s Big Adventure
  • Supernatural events are revealed to be fakery, only to have the final scene imply that the ghost is real after all. Midsomer Murders resorts to this repeatedly.
  • The good guy/male love interest is identified in novels by his crooked grin/lopsided smile. The overuse of this trope is provable:
Google Ngram showing incidence of crooked grin and lopsided smile in books it has digitized
  • The hero who needs to admit he is gay has a girlfriend/fiance who is overbearing and controlling, which defies any understanding of why he could have feelings for her in spite of his basic orientation.
  • The only attorneys who defend rapists and abusers on TV are women
  • Model-perfect women under 30 somehow have senior jobs that require decades of experience
From AutoStraddle.com.
  • Single heterosexual women on TV who have unplanned pregnancies give stirring pro-choice speeches, then keep the baby 100% of the time, AKA the Murphy Brown maneuver
Scene from Murphy Brown sitcom, 1992