One of the advantages of a DailyInk subscription is the ability to add classic strips to your daily diet, and I've really been enjoying this 1952 Rip Kirby storyline.
Not only is the art terrific, but the pacing is equally painstaking. Alex Raymond has been setting up this storyline for over a month and we have not seen hide nor hair of Rip Kirby, though, in the first strip in the arc on October 7, we learned that he knows the singer, Pagan Lee (ouch!), and is coming to see her perform in this thinly disguised version of Las Vegas.
What we know so far is that the Mangler, the angry fellow in the pin stripe suit, has moved in on the casino across the street -- yes, much as the Corleones took over Moe Green's place -- and is determined to get Pagan to cancel her current engagement and come work at his joint. When she refused, he sent Moray to literally bump her off, but the car wreck didn't kill her or her assistant.
The Mangler is not happy, and Moray's part in our little play may be coming to a finish.
Now, over at Dick Tracy, the new proprietors have decided to cut back the story arcs into more bite-sized pieces. I think it's a wise decision, and not because people don't necessarily read the newspaper every day. They still need to read the paper regularly to know what's going on in a continuity strip.
The problem, rather, is the competition for attention. When this storyline ran in 1952, TV was still something of a curiosity. Not only was it not in all homes, but the programming was limited, with the few channels there were still trying to figure out what people wanted to watch. And, of course, radio had been a strong factor for several decades by then, but it wasn't a constant presence either. There were shows you stopped and listened to, but there was also a lot of background music.
The newspaper was no longer the sole piece of fresh entertainment coming into the home, as it was back at the turn of the century when people like Arthur Conan Doyle were publishing whole chapters of novels in the papers, but it remained a centerpiece of the day.
You could run a strip like Rip Kirby then and expect people to know what had happened the day before and to care about what was going to happen the day after -- you didn't need to devote the first panel to a recap and the last panel to a cliffhanger. Every panel mattered, and you could actually tell a fairly complex story with fairly three-dimensional characters, knowing that the readers cared and were willing to pay attention, that they weren't just glancing amid a cacaphony of distractions.
Those days are gone ... in the newspaper.
But if you look at the web comics that are succeeding, they do so in very, very large part by creating a community of readers who care about them, who do pay attention, who don't mind if they have to work a little at remembering what happened the day before.
And besides, if you forget to read it for a day or two, if you're tied up or out of town or your computer goes down, you can click a button and catch up on whatever you missed.
The web is a great medium for serious storytelling.
There are barriers on the creator side these days. A few strips are genuinely self-sustaining for the artists, but the majority are not. The labor involved, and the need to have a paying gig to cover the rent, means that you often don't have daily updates, and it takes particular dedication to keep up with something that isn't a daily habit.
And yet readers do.
For my part, I follow and enjoy some of these MWF strips, but, not being a science fiction/fantasy buff, the overwhelming majority simply aren't my cup of tea. That's not a better-or-worse judgment, but I do find that the cartoonists working these continuity strips were raised on Star Wars and Marvel rather than Casablanca and the Untouchables.
So being able to settle in each morning with Rip Kirby and The Heart of Juliet Jones is a privilege and well worth the twenty bucks a year it costs to be part of DailyInk, even if my actual reason for subscribing is to see a lot of my favorite contemporary strips on one page.
By the way, I suspect Stan Drake was slipping some real kid into Juliet Jones, back in 1954.
And a bit of synchronicity -- if you read the Toonopedia article on Rip Kirby linked above, you saw that the actual originator of the strip worked on "Lady and the Tramp."
And so did the original "Pagan Lee."
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