I love the comics !

Even when I was a little kid, I LOVED the Sunday comics. I don’t remember a lot of the strips from those misty days of long ago, but I DO remember “Maggie and Jiggs”, “there oughta be a law”, “Pogo”and “Li’l Abner”. It took a while to catch on to the fact that many of the strips were designed to be thought-provoking. in addition to being entertaining, and “Li’l Abner” was a prime example of that. To my knowledge, Al Capp (the creator of “Li’l Abner” is the only cartoonist who made it on to the cover of TIME magazine, and he accomplished that feat in 1950. His comic strip was published from 1934 through 1977. “Pogo” lasted almost as long, since it was published from 1948 through 1975.

Even today, the Sunday comics are still my favorite part of the paper. Sometimes, the comics are the first section that I read.

It is no secret that comic strips have been around for a long time, but few people realize EXACTLY when they first started, so here is a surprising fact for you:

An example of an early precursor to print comics is Trajan's Column. Rome's Trajan's Column, dedicated in 110 AD, is an early surviving example of a narrative told through sequential pictures, while Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek friezes, medieval tapestries such as the Bayeux Tapestry and illustrated manuscripts also combine sequential images and words to tell a story. Versions of the Bible relying primarily on images rather than text were widely distributed in Europe in order to bring the teachings of Christianity to the illiterate. In medieval paintings, multiple sequential scenes of the same story (usually a Biblical one) appear simultaneously in the same painting. However, these works did not travel to the reader; it took the invention of modern printing techniques to bring the form to a wide audience and become a mass medium

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_comics

The invention of the printing press allowed for a much greater distribution of comics. Although the first of the “modern” comics were printed in the late 17^th century, the first “official” comic strip was the The Glasgow Lookng Glass, which was first published in 1826. After more than 100 years of publication, comic strips evolved into a new form of entertainment called “the comic book”. In 1938, Action Comics published its first book, and Superman was on the cover:

Even before The Glascow Looking Glass was published in 1826, newspapers in America started publishing political cartoons. The first known example is Benjamin Franklin’s The Pennsylvania Gazette, which started publication in 1754. The political cartoons had a tremendous effect our society, but it wasn’t until 1922 that they were considered to be worth of accolades.

https://www.varsitytutors.com/earlyamerica/firsts/first-political-cartoons

The first Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning was awarded in 1922, and has been awarded every year since that time EXCEPT FOR 1923, 1936, 1960, 1965, and 1973, when no award was given. 18 people have earned the award twice, and 5 people (Rollin Kirby, Edmund Duffy, Herbert Block, Paul Conrad, and Jeff McNelly have won three times.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_Editorial_Cartooning

Since I lived in the Chicago area for more than 25 years, I was able to enjoy Jeff McNelly’s work for many years, since he contributed to The Chicago Tribune from 1974 until at least 1986, but his comic strip “Shoe” continues to be published today, 18 years after his death.

http://www.shoecomics.com/

Now that I live in Arizona, Stephen Benson has become my favorite editorial cartoonist. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, but was a finalist in 1984, 1989, 1992, and 1994. For several years, he served as president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. His cartoons are always very timely, as exemplified by the cartoon that he published this morning about the Arizona teacher’s walkout:

https://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/b6bd6c02a3013cd1119f66a99b139a74d85db144/c=0-64-3774-2902&r=x513&c=680x510/local/-/media/2018/04/21/Phoenix/Phoenix/636599190059275254-Benson-Key-Player.jpg

Arguably, the cartoonist who has had the most profound effect on America society is Garry Trudeau, who first started publishing Doonesbury in 1970 and it is still being published today. It is syndicated by 1000 daily and Sunday newspapers worldwide, and is accessible online in Association with the Washington Post. He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1975 (the first comic strip to be so honored) and was also a finalist in 1990, 2004, and 2005. For more than 30 years, his favorite target has been Donald Trump, and yesterday’s cartoon was no exception, since it takes a healthy swipe at the evangelists who support Trump:

http://doonesbury.washingtonpost.com/strip/archive/2018/4/22 

It’s interesting to note that Trump has 25 “spiritual advisors”. If you review their bios at the link below, you’ll discover that many of them are little more than “snake oil salesmen”. By definition, that means a snake oil salesman is someone who knowingly sells fraudulent goods or who is himself or herself a fraud, quack, charlatan, and the like.

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/june-web-only/whos-who-of-trumps-tremendous-faith-advisors.html

(In case you are wondering, you can actually buy a bottle of snake oil at Walmart for $4.99):

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Pharmar-Snake-Oil-1-Oz/444302918?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=9331&adid=22222222228090904856&wmlspartner=wmtlabs&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=m&wl3=204727107112&wl4=aud-310687322322:pla-335948482732&wl5=9030250&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=115780068&wl11=online&wl12=444302918&wl13=&veh=sem

If you would like to see a snake oil salesperson at work, just watch Gloria Copeland (of Copeland Ministries) talk about flu shots:

https://youtu.be/pvoKMgHca0k

We all receive far too much news on a daily basis, so it’s refreshing to note that we will always have the comic strips to take us in a more enjoyable direction, even it is only for a few minutes a day.