Comic strips’ plight isn’t funny

IN an upcoming “Opus” Sunday comic strip, Berkeley Breathed’s affable waterfowl Opus comes across an iPod-toting twentysomething who has no clue what a newspaper is. In the strip’s eight little boxes, Breathed succinctly sums up the plight of not only newspapers but also the comic strips contained therein: They “are trying to reach kids who literally have never picked up a newspaper before,” says Breathed, who burst on the national comics scene in 1980 with the cult-classic “Bloom County.”

“What can we offer them as 25-year-old new workers that might interest them enough to pick up sheets of paper and examine them for several minutes a day?”

That, Breathed says, is the million-dollar -- or million-reader -- question facing comic strip creators. It’s also one of the questions that will come up this Sunday at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, where Breathed, along with Cathy Guisewite (“Cathy”), Jerry Scott (“Baby Blues” and “Zits”) and Lalo Alcaraz (“La Cucaracha”) will appear on a panel titled “The Los Angeles Times 125th Anniversary Presents: The Sunday Funnies” that’s moderated by comedian Elayne Boosler, who serves on The Times’ cartoon advisory panel.

“People in my generation grew up reading comics, and a lot of us in my age group still do,” says Scott, 50. “The current generation didn’t grow up with it -- many of them are too busy in the morning to pick up the newspaper and read it -- and consequently newspaper circulation is falling. As a result, we’re fighting for our survival, to find a new audience and to retain our old audience.”

While strips such as “Boondocks” and “Over the Hedge” are making forays onto the small and large screen, respectively, the comics page is struggling to find its place in a post-”Calvin & Hobbes” world as its readership grows older and as its piece of newspaper real estate shrinks.

“I don’t think you’ll ever see another ‘Calvin & Hobbes,’ ‘Bloom County’ or ‘Doonesbury’ again,” says Breathed, 48, who received the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987. “The popularity of those strips was built on a young audience -- great comic strips are not built on the backs of aging readers.”

Part of the problem, Breathed and other cartoonists say, is that newspapers, when choosing their comic strip lineup, put too much emphasis on the opinions of aging readers. As a result, stalwart strips such as “Peanuts,” which continues to run as a reprint since the death of Charles M. Schulz in 2000, and “Blondie,” which was created in 1930 by Chic Young, tend to remain entrenched on comics pages.

As middle-of-the-road as “Blondie” is, it’s surprising to learn that it has come to represent a divisive topic in the comic strip community. Young passed away in 1973, and since then “Blondie” has been carried on by his son, Dean, and is known as an example of a “legacy” strip.

“As an art form, comics are threatened by legacy strips,” Breathed says. “The fact that papers are running [legacy strips] throughout the country is a sign that they’re desperate to cling to the readers they think they need, and they’re afraid to take risks and find the new talent.”

Wiley Miller, who writes and draws “Non Sequitur,” refers to legacy strips as “dead cartoonist” strips. “The only reason this is done is money, not creativity,” says Miller, 55. “This was not a big deal years back when you had a vibrant and competitive newspaper industry, but now newspaper real estate is precious -- most towns are one-newspaper towns -- and continuing a strip past the death of a creator is keeping new blood from getting a chance to get in.”

On the other side of the debate are cartoonists such as Guisewite, 55, who remembers reading the comics on Sundays as a family ritual.

“To me a strip should run forever because it’s a classic,” says Guisewite, whose “Cathy” is marking its 30th anniversary this year. “They have meaning to me, and no new newspaper strip is going to earn that place in my heart.

“I love the old strips, I love the old characters, and I know as I say that, that’s what’s preventing new strips from coming in because there’s only so much space and newspapers have to drop a beloved strip to make room for a new one. [My solution] to that would be to devote more space to comic strips.”

But the trend in newspapers has been to cut the amount of space allocated to comic strips.

According to comic strip historian Brian Walker, son of cartoon legend Mort Walker, the Sunday comics section used to average 16 pages (strips such as “Prince Valiant,” “Tarzan” and “Krazy Kat” filled an entire broadsheet), but during World War II, a newsprint shortage caused papers to cut the Sunday comics section in half, and they haven’t looked back since.

“It breaks my heart to see some papers on Sundays when sometimes you have six comics on a page,” Scott says. “When you see a strip in a newspaper on Sunday, and it’s this big [he holds his hands about 8 inches apart], it doesn’t allow the characters to move, and so consequently what you get from a lot of strips is talking heads and wisecracks.”

Given that comic strips are being squeezed from seemingly every direction, it might be hard to believe that they originally gained popularity as a newspaper marketing tool during the turn-of-the-century newspaper war between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, who was known for actively recruiting cartoonists.

“Newspapers are killing the goose that laid the golden egg for them,” Miller says. “Editors today have no idea why they carry comic strips, and as a result they keep squeezing them down and not paying attention to trying to keep it as a vital, vibrant force to attract and hold readership.”

In response, Denise Joyce, president of the American Assn. of Sunday and Feature Editors, says that while comics are not the huge player they used to be 20 or 30 years ago, they are definitely on the minds of features editors.

“A good comic can drive circulation, though recently it’s been less so compared to the days of Gary Larson and ‘The Far Side,’ ” says Joyce, who is also the Chicago Tribune’s Q section editor.

Regarding legacy strips, Joyce admits it’s difficult to replace them without making their fans angry. As a compromise, Joyce says her paper is running some comics online and Web-linking to others.

“We’re also much more willing to experiment -- it used to be when we put in a comic it was there for years, and that’s not the case anymore,” she says. “Also, when a cartoonist goes on vacation, instead of rerunning strips, we might cycle in three or four new strips.”

(The Los Angeles Times has dropped some longtime strips such as “Garfield” to add newer comics but has kept others including “Peanuts,” that, according to The Times’ research, are still popular with all age groups.)

For his part, Breathed says there’s little reason for optimism unless newspapers start rethinking how they present visual entertainment to potential readers.

“The idea of one page of smudgy little cartoons as the entertainment in a newspaper is so outdated, so circa 1925,” he says. “Newspapers should have pages of dynamic visual drawing along with serial novels or extended graphic storytelling.

“With just a little bit of imagination, who knows what we could reinvent the comics page to be?”

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Weekend not just for wordsmiths

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA this weekend has an eclectic lineup, not all of it strictly literary. Among the offerings:

Saturday

Ray Harryhausen: 10 a.m. Film critic Richard Schickel interviews the animation pioneer. Moore Hall

Frank McCourt: 11 a.m. The novelist speaks with Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom. Royce Hall

Michael Connelly and Robert Crais: 1 p.m. The two crime writers discuss their work. Schoenberg Hall

Joan Didion: 1 p.m. David Ulin, The Times’ book editor, interviews the writer of novels and nonfiction. Royce Hall

Taylor Branch: 2:30 p.m. Commentator Tavis Smiley interviews the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who has focused on civil rights. Moore Hall

Gore Vidal: 3 p.m. Blogger and commentator Arianna Huffington interviews the novelist and essayist. Royce Hall

Joyce Carol Oates: 4 p.m. The author reads and speaks with radio host Michael Silverblatt. Ackerman Ballroom

The Rock Bottom Remainders: 2:30 p.m. Saturday. A rock band featuring authors Dave Barry, Mitch Albom, Matt Groening, Amy Tan, Scott Turow and others. Etc. Stage, free. (Also 8 p.m., in a benefit for the nonprofit writing and tutoring center 826LA. Royce Hall, $25, $50 and $200. (310) 825-2101, www.826la.org)

Sunday

Teri Garr: 10 a.m. The actress speaks with film critic Leonard Maltin. Schoenberg Hall

The Sunday Funnies: 11:30 a.m. Sunday. A panel composed of Lalo Alcaraz, Berkeley Breathed, Cathy Guisewite and Jerry Scott, moderated by Elayne Boosler. Schoenberg Hall

Larry Flynt: 12:30 p.m. Syndicated columnist Robert Scheer interviews the magazine publisher. Ackerman Ballroom

Carl Reiner: 1 p.m. Times columnist Patt Morrison interviews the filmmaker. Royce Hall

Mike Mignola: 2:30 p.m. The creator of the “Hellboy” comic books speaks with Times Deputy Book Editor Nick Owchar. Young Hall

T.C. Boyle: 2:30 p.m. Commentator Sandra Tsing Loh introduces the novelist. Schoenberg Hall

Admission is free, but tickets are required to attend panels and lectures. For full schedule information, go to latimes.com/festivalofbooks