Are comic strips art? Of course they are (somebody sat down and drew them, didn’t they?). Now, are they high art? That’s a trickier question. I think the distinction between high and low art is fairly pointless and quite often discriminatory, but I can acknowledge that every piece of art is made for different reasons.
When it comes to syndicated newspaper comics, every single one is, first and foremost, commercial. Newspapers run them in hopes of bringing in readers, and cartoonists create them in return for a paycheck. Yet, every cartoonist brings a different perspective and purpose to their strip. In Peanuts, Charles Schulz seemed interested in profound truths about human nature first and foremost, and Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson had such high standards that he chose to retire his strip rather than eventually compromise them. Jim Davis, though, proudly admits that he started Garfield solely to become rich*, and a number of strips now drag on as “zombie strips,” repeating the same handful of jokes week after week, often reusing old art and almost none of them drawn by their original creators.**
*Garfield gets a mostly-deserved bum rap, but despite Davis’ above-stated goal, the early years of the strip that he drew and wrote personally were often actually rather funny (at least in comparison to newer strips), and had a more anarchic, whimsical tone and more interesting art. Since Davis pawned cartoonist duties off to uncredited PAWS inc. artists, it’s become far more soulless. Compare an early Davis strip:
to a more recent installment:
Huge difference, right?
**Most zombie strips are ones that have been in papers for 50-70 years — think The Family Circus, Blondie, Hagar the Horrible, Hi and Lois, Beetle Bailey, etc. Their original creators are all long-dead, with cartoonist duties sometimes taken on by family, but usually by, again, uncredited artists publishing under the original creator’s name and not allowed to really bring their own artistic perspective to their work. Thankfully, there are exceptions to this, as in recent years, new cartoonists have taken the likes of Sally Forth, Nancy, and Heathcliff in wildly different, more interesting directions.
I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with that second category of strips (other than them taking up space that could be better filled by new creative voices), and most of them even manage to make me laugh occasionally, but I guess my point is that comic strips can’t be summed up easily. Like any other medium, there’s huge differences in target audiences, genre, purpose, and quality. Most people can easily identify the medium’s “classics” — your Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, Far Sides, the likes of Krazy Kat and the 1940s adventure strips if you want to go back further — and can also usually agree on which modern strips have outstayed their welcome, but there’s another category here, a “middle” category, which I don’t see brought up very often.
These strips are all more relatively recent (probably started in the 80s or 90s) and still drawn by their original creators. They usually aren’t trying to push the envelope in terms of theme or format the way the classics did, but still have their own unique styles and perspectives. While many have running gags they like to return to like the zombie strips, they usually have more variety in how they deploy them, and their characters tend to be more specific and well-defined than your typical zombie strip character. Characters are often allowed to (slowly) grow, change, and undergo major shifts in the status-quo without it being a big deal. They don’t feel like they’re trying to be “high art” in the way that the classics did, but they have far more soul than the zombie strips do. In this middle category is where you’ll find the likes of Pearls Before Swine, Foxtrot, Baby Blues, Zits, Pickles, and many more that are worth checking out.
Today, though, the strip in that middle category I want to talk about is Jump Start. Jump Start, by Robb Armstrong, has been in syndication since 1989 and stars Joe and Marcy Cobb, their four children, and their extended friends and family (The Cobb family — as well as probably 75% of the strip’s cast and Armstrong himself — is African American, which is notable in real life, but very rarely comes up in the strip itself). The strip is only two years younger than me and has been in my paper all my life, so in a way I’ve grown up with it, which feels appropriate because I’ve watched the strip, as well as most of its cast, change and grow and expand just as I have.
I say that because, as the years pass, I’ve easily been able to see Armstrong’s interests change. When I was a kid Joe and Marcy had a baby daughter, Sunny, and much of the strip focused on Sunny being visited by visions of her future selves and her obsession with Aladdin — now those elements have been abandoned and she’s an incredibly intelligent, socially conscious pre-teen. When she entered school the strip focused quite a bit of energy on her slacker best friend, Dexter, and another classmate, “Doctor” Appleby (his parents named him Doctor because they want him to grow up to be a doctor). Those characters later receded into the background after Sunny’s younger brother, Jojo, entered school and his abrasive, entrepreneurial attitude developed, and he and his classmates took the spotlight instead. A few years later Joe and Marcy had twins, Tommi and Teddy, and their infant perspective became the strip’s focus. When Armstrong seemed to tire of that, he spent more time expanding the supporting cast, often through weddings. Marcy’s widowed mother married the father of Joe’s best friend, Clarence. Clarence’s eleven brothers, especially pro-football player Marcus, were explored more. Armstrong dove into the life of Joe’s police partner, Crunchy, giving him a precocious dog Snoog-A-Boo and eventually marrying him off to their chief, the quick-tempered Yolanda Ruiz. One long storyline dug into a patient of Marcy’s who turned out to be rich, leading to a new job for Marcy and the introduction of the patient’s daughter, Dana, who married ex-con Ray Ramsey (more on him in a bit) and, after her mother died, became Marcy’s boss. Crunchy’s brother later marries Ray’s mother.
It’s a lot, but my point is that Jump Start has had many different phases. Armstrong isn’t content to write the same jokes over and over; instead, he finds characters and concepts he’s interested in, explores them for a few years, then moves on to new ones. Yet, through it all, Jump Start has always been Jump Start. The characters have grown, but are still recognizable. The cast has expanded and focus has shifted, but older characters still appear often and aren’t forgotten, and the Cobbs are always at its center. Some running gags — such as Joe’s father’s love of comic strip Klondike Ike or Joe’s mother’s deadly driving — have survived the entire life of the strip. Truthfully, Jump Start long ago became a bit of a soap opera strip, but without losing the ability to tell funny jokes or becoming so wrapped up in itself that it’s lost perspective, and I appreciate that. I consider myself a big fan of Jump Start, and have always admired Armstrong’s aspirations.
So, with all of that said…let’s circle back to the Jump Start installment I opened up this article with.
As I mentioned, Frank Cobb’s obsession with Klondike Ike is one of Jump Start’s longest-running gags. It’s Frank’s favorite strip, which is why he’s constantly sending overly-familiar fan-mail to its cartoonist, or is constantly up-in-arms over changes or perceived dips in quality. It only just occurred to me, though, that Klondike Ike gags must be Armstrong’s commentary on being a cartoonist and his relationship with his fans — and, often, a way to vent about it. He’s probably dealt with plenty of Frank Cobbs throughout his career.
The above strip, though, is almost certainly a reference to Jump Start’s new character, Ray Ramsey, so let’s talk about him for a bit. Ray was introduced a few years ago as a petty criminal that Joe and Crunchy have put away dozens of times. The Cobbs end up adopting Ray’s dog, Mortimer, during his most recent stint in prison, and their kindness helps him decide to reform.
Those early Ray stories focused as much on Joe as they did on Ray, giving readers Ray’s journey towards redemption but also Joe’s journey to overcome his biases and the judgmental parts of his personality (Armstrong released a pretty interesting interview about this storyline and the work that went into it that’s worth checking out). The biggest problem with this story, and with Ray as a whole early on, is that we never saw him as a “deranged sociopath” (to quote Joe) — he was a pretty nice guy from our very first glimpse of him, which took a lot of the tension out of the conflict. Readers needed to know that Joe’s doubts about Ray were a flaw, so Ray always seems like a moral paragon even when he’s still in the earliest phases of his redemption. The problems Ray faces are interesting, but Ray himself, while not totally without personality, is a fairly bland character.
From here, I’d say that Ray ends up becoming a part of the Cobb family, but what really happens is that Ray sucks the Cobbs, their friends and family, and really the entire strip into his orbit. In short: He works with Frank at a Costco-ripoff before getting his dream job in the NFL. He becomes rich. He tracks down his homeless mother. Ray discovers his true family history, and that Crunchy’s wife, Yolanda is his long-lost sister (and their other sister a secret agent who only appears in the strip in disguise). He begins going by his original name, Delray. His mother marries Crunchy's brother, George, but later loses the ability to walk in an accident Delray feels responsible for. Delray marries Marcy’s rich boss, Dana. Sunny makes a new friend at school, Kenny Sharcane, who has to move away because his father gets put in prison; it turns out Delray was friends with Kenny’s father, and he and Dana adopt Kenny, but they find out that his birth mother is still alive and apparently the owner of for-profit prisons which she is now burning down, for some reason?
That last plot is still ongoing, but clearly, this is all a lot. Delray’s gone from a supporting character to the one driving much of the strip’s forward momentum in a few short years. For me, the most ridiculous development was when it’s revealed that Delray was the homeless man who, a decade ago, gave Joe the medal that saved his life during a shooting; Armstrong has literally revised, or retconned, the history of his strip in order to more solidly place Delray in its center. If you made Venn Diagram of every Jump Start character, the character in the center of that circle would be Delray Ramsey. For lack of a better term, Delray has become Jump Start’s Poochie. Poochie, of course, hails from the classic Simpsons episode “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochy Show,” where new character Poochie hijacks Itchy & Scratchy by making it all about him — his presence completely alters the tone of the show, and at one point an executive declares “Whenever Poochie's not on screen, all the other characters should be asking ‘Where's Poochie?’” That’s an exaggeration when it comes to Delray at this point, yes, but not by much.
The thing is, about half the time Jump Start is still Jump Start. There were some cute strips this week where Jojo’s friend Benny scared away some bullies by being relentlessly, obliviously nice. There was a fun story last year where the Cobbs’ dog Mortimer was sneaking out at night to rescue people, and a lengthy story about Frank’s African Safari. It creates a real clash in tone between the more classic-flavor Jump Start strips and the ones that go into melodramatic Delray Ramsey storylines, almost like Jump Start is two different strips at once.
While there’s always been more continuity to Jump Start than the average comic strip, the Delray strips veer straight into Soap Opera territory. Soap Operas actually have a rich history in the comic strip medium, though I would argue that the majority of them aren’t actually good. The biggest downside to the typical modern soap strip (think Mary Worth, Apartment 3-G, or even the newspaper Spider-Man) is that they move at a snail’s pace. The thinking is that most people don’t read the comics every single day, so the first panel of every strip is dedicated to recapping the previous day’s strip, and Sunday strips recap the whole week, so nothing ever actually happens. Jump Start, though, has the opposite problem. It moves at a gloriously appropriate pace and probably reads wonderfully collected, but a few times I have missed a day and felt extremely confused. It’s less of a problem in the digital age, but still one that effects and changes the experience of reading the strip.
So, all that said, let’s go back one last time to that strip I opened this article on. Delray is clearly a character Armstrong feels strongly about, but also one that’s been divisive within the fanbase. Armstrong has the right to complain, but something about how he did so in that Klondike Ike strip rubbed me the wrong way, and the next day’s installation helped solidify why.
There’s way too much of Armstrong tooting his own horn in these strips. You can believe that your ideas are relevant and elevating your artistry without outright putting those words in your characters’ mouths. It comes across as arrogant, and also slightly missing the point of some fans’ complaints.
For what it’s worth, I don’t hate Delray or want him killed off the way some of the fans Armstrong mentions in his interview do. In fact, I still think Jump Start is one of the better strips in the papers these days; I read it every day, and enjoy it more often than not. It’s doing things no other comic strips are doing, and I appreciate that kind of ambition. But just because an idea is ambitious doesn’t mean the execution is perfect, and nobody should let their ambition or their fondness for their own stories blind them to legitimate criticism.
CHECK OUT
In terms of pure comic strip nerdery, I am a mere amateur in comparison to Josh Fruhlinger. For fifteen years, Fruhlinger has been reading the comics so you don’t have to over at the Comic Curmudgeon, providing a daily lampooning of the worst newspaper comics have to offer, but all coming from a place of love and encyclopedic obsession. I’ve been keeping up with the Curmudgeon for over a decade, and if you have any interest in newspaper comics at all, you should too. Fruhlinger’s Twitter is also one of my favorites, as he’s knowledgeable about many topics, curious about more, and witty about all, so it’s always a pleasure to read. I also greatly enjoyed his self-published novel, The Enthusiast, about an organization attempting to monetize people’s obsessions and hobbies — it’s fun, but believable to the point of being prescient. I actually liked it enough to start calling myself an enthusiast in my own personal bio at the end of these emails, because what am I if not someone who’s almost professionally enthusiastic about the things I love? That’s not exactly the way the book uses the title, but please take it as a ringing endorsement nonetheless.
HOORAY!
Back in my piece on “(Mis)Remembering Sitcoms,” I lamented the fact that abject failure Joey lasted five times as many episodes as the delightful, gone-too-soon Tuca and Bertie. Well, it was just announced that Adult Swim will be bringing Tuca and Bertie back for a second season! Hooray! It’s a really great show, and if you haven’t checked it out yet, the first season is still streaming on Netflix and is only ten episodes long, so get on it!
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!