You know that I churn out essays almost daily.  Since you don’t read them, you haven’t figured out that sometimes some never get published fork, even though it is rare, my writing doesn’t always turn out to be sensible or the idea doesn’t go anyplace. Nevertheless, sometimes they are cockeyed and go nowhere.  Creativity may be there but sometimes it hides and needs to be coaxed and coddled and reworked before it bears a resemblance to a real essay.

The first thing this morning I looked at the Herald’s comics.  I have to say that I saw nothing new or fresh.  The same old situations were rehashing old situations.  I know some were intended to be funny but I could not see jokes anywhere in them.  In others, I could not see the humor although they clearly were drawn to get us to laugh.  This morning there was nothing to laugh at.  Not one! Most of the cartoons were carefully drawn as always.  Most of them had either three or four panels while the single panel or two panel efforts were feeble.

The best cartoons or “comics” are those without the text bubble over the head of the people or the improbable cats and dogs that provide the action.  Not one today was able to accomplish this feat – it really is hard to get it right all the time and is almost to deliver day after day.

The same thing happens to me as an essayist. Perhaps I should restrict MY text bubbles. But, thank you anyway for not mentioning it.

I think that the little things like the endurance of such things as “Dick Tracy” and “Peanuts” is such a comfort.  We open the papers and go straight for the comics.  They are not all humorous and some days I despair that their creators ran not only out of inspiration, but steam - as I sometimes do.  So they draw something and it is terribly lame.

The new crop of comics is disquieting.  What is funny about the selections made by what must be the new editorial generation that has assumed control of our local paper?  I cannot fathom what is funny about the additions of new strips and deletions of perfectly good ones that we enjoyed for some time.  Perhaps it is all due to the new alphabet generations and their gaining control over the newspaper.

This essay is an example of what this essay is all about.