As part of my personal financial austerity program, I regretfully canceled my weekend subscription to The Columbus Dispatch. I might be tempted to use the trendy excuse that I get my news and opinion digitally these days (is WCBE digital?) but that has been true for a long time. The fact is the newspaper never served to keep me abreast of current events or provide much in the way of in-depth coverage or intellectual enlightenment. I primarily used it to satisfy a more basic hunger for the plebeian entertainment found in the sports section and the funnies. Reading the softly lit online version of their Buckeye coverage feeds my appetite for spiritual intimacy with the team but I miss the comforting sensory experience of the traditional weekend morning spent settling in on the couch and maneuvering large sheets of crinkling newsprint that waft through the air like wings when the pages turn and end up falling like leaves collecting in piles on the floor and the furniture, scattering the den with headlines and photos echoing the exploits of my champions.
There was also a very practical secondary use that was part of my recycling efforts. One of my cats, Muffy, aka Muffah, is a surly old girl who does things her way and using a litter box is just not her style. She does show me the courtesy of consistently using the same general area of the floor enabling me to keep it covered in recyclable material. While Muffy’s lavatory literary selections usually consisted of the mundane black and white sections of the paper, I kept the colorful pages in my bathroom where I rationed consumption of the strips, like hoarded Halloween candy, to be savored throughout the week.
Not that the Dispatch offers a great selection of periodical humor. If Bloom County was still in there, I would never have canceled my subscription. Doonesbury has always been well-written, masterfully illustrated and precociously liberal for such a conservative rag. Foxtrot was my favorite new strip with powerful, simple lines, bold blocks of color and a topical narrative about a commonplace American family that was wickedly smart. 9 Chickweed Lane had a whimsical weirdness factor but I was more attracted to its very soft-core porn whose proximity to the Family Circus always amazed me. As for the rest, I enjoyed the art and humor in some while others just provided mindless reading material to pass time as I occupied the throne.
I’ve been reading the comics in the Dispatch for fifty years probably. Some great ones have come and gone like Li’l Abner and Calvin and Hobbes. Fortunately, editors were smart enough to reprint classic Peanuts. Some of the strips grudgingly keep going, impervious to the passage of time like Blondie, Beetle Bailey and, one I just started reading a few years ago, Prince Valiant. I’m not sure what kept me from spending time with Prince Valiant earlier. Maybe its realistic style seemed sloppy to me, maybe the subject matter seemed too uncomical. Once I started reading it, however, I got hooked on the momentum of its never-ending story, an epic that began 3,700 weekends ago, according to Wikipedia. In the early days, apparently, the Prince did some aging but the passage of time seems to have slowed to a crawl. Valiant is as much of a bad ass as ever and Queen Aleta stays youthfully beautiful without the help of plastic surgery. Over and over Prince Valiant bravely meets the most dire challenges and barely emerges victorious to fight another Sunday. There is no quitting, no changing, no defeat. As the colorful life of the funnies rolls on, now without me, I find myself wondering what Prince Valiant has been up to lately.
