Are you reading enough comic strips?

Danny Tyree on Mar 1, 2023

A good comics page balances heartwarming “legacy” comic strips with “edgy” new entries. (Ever get the idea that newspaper syndicate salesmen are trapped in Bill Murray’s “Groundhog Day”? Every morning they find the same word on their Word of the Day calendar!)

Forgive me if I’ve locked myself into a pattern of quantity over quality. Some of the legacy strips are three generations removed from their creator and stopped being funny in the Harry S Truman administration. (“The punchline stops here.”)

And some of the hipster strips take such a long-winded, meandering, navel-gazing route that you can well imagine the cartoonist begging, “Please, I need to intrude upon the Sudoku puzzle and maybe take just a smidge of the sports page…”

I hope I’m reaching kindred spirits here. We could all use an extra smile or two each day. And while serialized adventure strips are way past their heyday, we can still use heroes to inspire us.

Granted, we can never quite live up to the heroic standards of the stalwart comic strip doctors, judges and super-heroes. Take for instance, The Phantom. “The Ghost Who Walks” has only inspired me to be the Ghostly Pale Guy Who Sits On His Butt Reading 138 Comic Strips and Panels.

Danny Tyree welcomes email responses at tyreetyrades@aol.com and visits to his Facebook fan page “Tyree’s Tyrades.”