Sunday Funnies Memories
If you’ve been paying close attention you’ll remember that our fall 2011 Zits collection will be a hardcover gathering of our favorite Sunday strips called Zits Sunday Brunch, a title which, if taken literally, makes some people throw up in their mouths. Well, that ship has sailed, friends, and we’ve moved on to amping up what you’ll find between the covers.
Jerry wrote an essay for the book called What Makes a Sunday a Sunday? and I wrote a piece on title panels which appears elsewhere on this blog. We collaborated on a longer piece about our process of creating a Zits Sunday strip, and then each wrote about our earliest memories of reading the Sunday funnies when we were kids.
Those pieces prompted us to ask some cartoonist friends about their own memories of reading the Sunday funnies and, as the snowball grew, we suddenly found ourselves with a generous pile of priceless vivid memories from the top people in our profession. With the addition of these memories, the book has become a lovesong to the tradition of reading the Sunday funnies “on real newspaper, as God intended,” in Richard Thompson’s words. Here’s one memory. Can’t wait to share them all.
“Bloom County opened up the world to me. At a
time when my most pressing concern was whether
Gilligan would ever get off that island, suddenly I had to
know who Caspar Weinberger and Nancy Reagan were.
Calvin & Hobbes taught me to appreciate truth in art,
even if there was no traditional punchline. Dillon,
which starred the children of a divorced single mom,
showed me that every type of family was worth talking
about on the comics page.
My dad wasn’t around and my mom seemed to always
be out working. I was a latchkey kid. I read the comics
page of the LA Herald Examiner, and later the LA Daily
News, because when I read them, I felt like I wasn’t
alone. I would race to pick up the paper on our front
lawn, fold up the comics section, put it in my pocket, and
head straight to the room I shared with my big brother.
I’d climb under the covers with a flashlight and explore
what seemed like endless pages of four-panel worlds. All
the strips seemed like windows into alternate
realities populated by people who I knew so
intimately that I could literally read their minds.”
– Darrin Bell, Creator of Candorville