When you think of the way a child starts his/her day, what do you think? Their parents wake them up, they eat cocoa puffs in their pajamas while they watch cartoons, and then get ready for the rest of the day. Over many years, that scenario has stayed the same with most average households that have children. One thing, however, has sadly been changed to fit the new modern world. The TV. A child's day used to begin almost identically to the previous scenario with one difference. Instead of watching cartoons, they would go ask their parents for the comic section of the newspaper. I myself even did this not to long ago, before i was consumed with Power Rangers and Captain Planet.
Parents would try to justify this sad fact with the notion that if the child wanted to know what happened in the comic they would just have to read on the next day, and when they wanted to know what happened in their TV show, they could watch what happened next on that too. That way there could be a little bit of both. This hope was quickly crushed when comics turned into TV shows. To find out what happened next in a comic, a kid could simply turn on the television and watch the next episode of Superman of Garfield instead of reading it from the paper. Comics soon became a thing of the past, and television took over. If comics weren't so old and ignored, then collectors wouldn't need to collect them. They would just be something that everyone had and did on a daily basis instead of people paying to preserve an old comic. With the world being modernized so quickly, who knows? Maybe soon instead of TV, children will be occupied with their hovercrafts.
Comics: A thing of the past?
Sep
30
2009
Hovercraft
While I certainly assume that Wendy (my daughter) will someday fly off to college with her jetpack, I don't find that technology works in this kind of deterministic way.
Instead, it's a much more fluid interchange of elements. I don't think TV replaced comics any more than the invention of writing replaced speech. Instead, each form ends up influencing the other, so that some comics are directly adapted into TV shows, and vice versa.
Moreover, the structures of televisual narrative have been influenced by the narrative structures of comics, and vice versa.
Are you thinking of a specific example of a comic being replaced by a cartoon? I really can't think of any.
Of course, there's an argument that's been gaining traction lately about newspapers themselves dying out. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is debatable, but in either case it highlights the close relationship between media technology and perceived cultural progress.
Newspapers Dying?
Perhaps newspapers in their current form might die, that's rather debatable, but it has to be considered--can a media form really die? Through this cross-pollination, you end up with lots of elements that are left behind in surviving media forms.
And besides, the Newspaper's form might easily survive through the Internet, and other media. News websites function much like electronic versions of paper newspaper, only with a few new functionalities. While this might "kill" newspapers, in another way, it simply changes how newspapers function.
As for newspaper comics, I refer you to the Webcomic--there's lots of them that still function much like newspaper comics anyways.
For example:
http://www.sinfest.net/
Sinfest is an excellent example of this--it still sticks to the same general format (although content might be a tad bit more racy at several points), and even sticks to the newspaper convention of 6 days a week having short black and white strips, and coloured strips on Sundays.
So, I don't know if the Newspaper will entirely die...
Hope not
I hope comics do not become a thing of the past. I think nothing captures the imagination and encourages reading (and creativity) like a comic book.
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