A number of cartoonists and comic strip fans have mailed me (via paper mail, which amazingly still exists), a page that shows the actual size of newspaper comic strips over the years…how they've gotten smaller and smaller. There's no effective way for me to reproduce it here but it's quite amazing, seeing how they've diminished in size and therefore stature. If there's a person out there today who could do what Winsor McCay did in Little Nemo or what Walt Kelly did in Pogo, it almost wouldn't matter. The canvas is just too tiny to hold much of a painting.
Obviously, most newspapers are in trouble and they're condensing everything, not just the funnies. Obviously too, more and more will be folding up or trying to morph into some sort of web-only presence…and some of those that endure will dump comics in order to become leaner and meaner. I'm not even sure what kind of argument could be made as to why they shouldn't do this. I feel it's wrong but I can't explain why.
To some extent, the contraction of newspaper comics snowballed out of anyone's control. Over the years, economy drives and paper shortages occasionally caused papers to print their strips a notch smaller. This led to cartoonists simplifying their work, using fewer and bolder lines and making their lettering larger. And this, in turn, led to more newspapers deciding they could print the strips even smaller. Right now, if you put me in charge of a comic strip page and I took the bold step of taking strips back to their old size…well, some of those strips wouldn't look that wonderful. They aren't being drawn for that format.
I have no answer for this. I don't think anyone does. Garry Trudeau, who for contractual reasons has been less affected than some, made a good comment this week in Doonesbury. But the downsizing continues. It's made me not want to read any strips in the newspaper. If I read them on a website, I can at least enlarge the image to a more dignified, readable size.