by Andrew Auclair ’29 on January 29, 2026
A&E - Film & TV
The concept of a printed newspaper has been popular since the 15th century, when the invention of the printing press in Europe made information on weather, economics, politics, and social issues a routine morning necessity. A newspaper must follow four major criteria: public accessibility; periodicity, where the newspaper must be published in either daily or weekly intervals; currency, where the published information is as up to date as possible; and universality. American newspapers gained frequency and popularity throughout the 19th and 20th centuries; the papers published historical events ranging from the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 to the Watergate Scandal in the early 1970s. Newspapers continue to inform the public of breaking news to this day, with major publications such as The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal becoming American institutions, subject to public praise and dismay, depending on political affiliation. The speed at which news has been reported, covered, and critiqued has only increased with momentous fervor, much to the detriment of honesty and integrity. This rapidity can be highlighted by the major technological advancements of the last 100 years. News has been broadcast from the advent of the radio in the 1920s to social media apps in the 2010s. However, throughout these changes, one extra category that should be added to the criteria of a successful paper rose in popularity, achieved great social acceptance, and diminished when the news went online; the hand-drawn comic strips, otherwise known as the “funnies.”
It would be Paul Simon’s commentary on a fear of becoming inauthentic and caricature-like in his 1986 hit, “You Can Call Me Al,” that has taken on literal meaning in the 21st century: “don’t wanna end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard.” With the demise of weekly comic strips in major papers, there are hundreds of websites that reissue and rerun old comics for those who are desperate. In effect, the internet has become scattered with nostalgic “cartoon graveyards.”
The early decades of the 20th century had comics such as Little Orphan Annie or Popeye the Sailor Man that sprawled the entire width of the page, but with the commercial competition of the 1930s, mass paper shortages after World War II, the decline of news readership, and higher printing costs during the 1950s and 1960s, comic strips began to shrink and became consolidated in the modern three to four boxes typical to a modern newspaper. This adversity, however, created diverse and wonderful new forms of artistic expression through such a limited medium. Humor moved away from slapstick, physical comedy, to more cerebral and educated satires on American life. From Charlie Brown and Snoopy’s philosophical ponderings in Peanuts to the amusingly daring and Pulitzer Prize-winning commentary on the Watergate Scandal in Doonesbury, the fears, anxieties, hopes, and dreams that remained in the consciousness of the American public were played out in four small boxes. But what about humor that expresses and tries to search for the bigger point of the human collective deep in the 21st century? Strips like Garfield, The Family Circus, Dilbert, Pearls Before Swine, and Non Sequitur continue to produce, albeit at a slow rate, strips that focus on the digital age, partisan polarization, human connection, and family ties.
The struggle that modern cartoons face is the decline not only in numbers in readership, but also in originality. Due to the extreme popularity of certain comic strips in the mid to late 20th century, after the original author has passed away publishing syndicates continue to produce new strips with the use of “second authors.” These are typically close relatives of the original authors, hired authors, or even large teams of authors who draw strips for weeks, months, and even years in advance to replicate the artistic vision and humor of the deceased author. These “zombie strips,” lacking original authorship and creativity, have been severely criticized by cartoonists such as Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes, who retired the strip on his own grounds in 1995, and Charles Schulz of Peanuts, who requested the strip to be retired after he died in 2000 and compared the hiring of a second author to “a golfer hiring a man to make his putts.”
Humor played out in its sharpest, quickest, and rarest form: four small boxes. It was with these four boxes that much of the United States’ taste of humor formed, cultured, and advanced as the years progressed. What has been lost with not only the decline of cartoons, but newspapers as a whole, is the collective human interest and humor. The rise of social media has created algorithms and tunnels that trap its viewers into forming tastes that are widely different from those of the people sitting next to them. Gone is the collective laugh from the audience; now we just hear chuckles at scattered intervals. Maybe the aforementioned Paul Simon lyric can both be literal and figurative; we have lost that sense of authenticity and originality that comes with the analogue form, and all we have left are the billions of “cartoon graveyards” that live on in our day to day media consumption, leaving us just not knowing what to laugh at.