One of my great pleasures when I was younger was reading newspapers.
Each morning in my teens and 20s, I read the Washington Post, I don’t remember when I first started reading daily comic strips. but I know Charles Schulz started writing Peanuts when I was less than a year old and wrote his last one when I was 50.
There weren’t a whole lot of times I would say Peanuts was my favorite strip, but there weren’t too many times it wasn’t in the top three. Most of the ones I really loved didn’t last. Bill Watterson stopped doing Calvin & Hobbes, Berke Breathed got tired of Bloom County and Gary Larson gave up on the Far Side.
The one strip that I would probably call my all-time favorite has been Doonesbury, which Garry Trudeau started drawing at Yale in the late ’60s. Eight years or so ago, he cut back to just Sundays, and I miss the daily strips.
In fact, most of the time I read comic strips anymore is in collections. I’ve got a half dozen or so sets of all the ones that have been released, from Little Orphan Annie to Pogo to For Better of For Worse. One of the saddest things that comes to my mind is that all these books I have been collecting for decades, when I die no one I know will want them.
There is only one current strip that I make the effort to see, and it’s certainly a worthy successor to the best of them.
Pearls Before Swine is a wonderful strip by Stephan Pastis which looks at modern-day life through the eyes of animals — a rat, a pig, a goat, a zebra, a crocodile and some additional minor characters like a cat, a duck, a goldfish and the cartoonist himself.
Rat is mean, Pig is wonderfully naive, Goat an intellectual, and even though the crocodiles are goofy, Larry the Croc might be the most poignant character in the strip.
The one issue that seems to bother Pastis the most is school shootings. Larry the Croc loves his son very much, and one strip in the last few years is almost guaranteed to bring a lump to your throat.
He has walked his son to school and is saying goodbye.
My two children graduated from high school in 1998 and 2003, after school shootings had begun but before they had reached epidemic proportions. My grandchildren have been lucky enough to spend most of their school years to date overseas in American schools while their parents serve in the Foreign Service.
Pearls Before Swine makes me laugh six days out of seven, but once a week or so, it brings tears to my eyes.
That’s why I’ll keep reading it as long as Pastis wants to draw it.