View From the Phlipside - Comic History

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, Radio, the Movies and more. I love them and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View From the Phlipside.

I love the comics in the newspaper. In fact I love them so much I generally read the paper backwards. Funnies first, headlines last. One of the primary reasons why I will mourn the passing of the classic newspaper is reading the funny pages.

So the past week included an important series of landmarks for those of us who love the comics in all forms.

Let’s start with the senior most member of the clan. October 2marked the 60th anniversary of the characters in Charles Schulz’s comic “Peanuts”. Charlie Brown and Snoopy and Lucy and Linus are such standard part of our world today it’s hard to imagine a world where they didn’t exist. What’s also hard to imagine is a single artist telling a story for 50 years in over 17 thousand strips distributed to 26 hundred newspapers in 75 countries and 21 languages. What is most amazing is the depth of the intellectual content that Schulz managed to insert over that lifetime. Peanuts is arguably the greatest comic strip ever created.

Last week also marked the 50th anniversary of the Flintstones. Different from Peanuts in that it is an animated cartoon Fred, Barney, Wilma and Betty have staked their own place in our popular culture. Again it’s easy to brush off the Flintstones’ place in media history but quite simply without the Flintstones there isn’t The Simpsons. This was a prime time cartoon and one that did social commentary albeit without the edge of Homer, Bart, Lisa and Marge. Yet it was still a top show for several years and achieved its place in history with only a 6 year original run.

Finally just this past Sunday the kid in this group, with a mere 36 years under its belt, called it quits. “Cathy” created by Cathy Guisewite ended with a Sunday full color cartoon where our heroine finally moves into the next phase of her life, as a mother herself. The comic strip provided its own brand of social commentary by gently chiding women about the “Four Basic Guilt Groups” - food, love, mom and work. Guisewite is the only one in this group that got to call her own shot on when things were over. Schulz continued working right up to his death, The Flintstones got canceled. Cathy Guisewite decided it was time. She called the decision agonizing but felt it was time to spend more time with her own family.

My thanks to them all for having made my world a little bit funnier.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010