Why Are Comic Pictures Necessary in Sunday Newspapers?
Share:
you the answer to this inquiry via an original article, as it ran in the King
Features publication, Circulation, in July 1921. The Arthur
Brisbane-penned piece speaks to the timeliness and relevance of early newspaper
Sunday strips:
Why Are Comic Pictures Necessary in Sunday
Newspapers?
Because Youth Needs Laughter, Old Age Needs Rest–and
for Other Reasons
By ARTHUR BRISBANE
G.H. Denby, one of the
able men who run the Cleveland News-Leader for Mr. Dan Hanna, asks for “a
short statement as to the psychology of Sunday comics; why people like them.
What is their function in a paper?”
It is a question that many have
asked, and many answered, foolishly, thoughtlessly and without information.
When you smile or laugh, your brain for a moment is freed from the load
that it ordinarily carries. The belt slips off the wheel. Men thinking are
something like dogs walking on their hind legs. They CAN do it. But they like to
stop every little while.
Humor is good for children because it stimulates
their minds, accustoms them to sudden surprises.
Humor is rest for the
adult, it is good for him, because it stops the thinking in the tired part of
the mind, transfers it to another part, relieves the nerves.
Humor
consists usually in SURPRISE. If you see two actors on the stage pulling with
all their might and main on a heavy rope, struggling, straining, and gradually
pulling out the rope, with a large iron safe on the end, that would NOT be
funny.
But if they struggle and strain and finally there appears at the
end of the rope a tiny white dog weighing a pound and a half, that IS funny.
SURPRISE explains it.
They say laughter distinguishes men from animals.
It is certain that earnest THOUGHT distinguishes men from animals, that such
thinking tires men, and that the best, instantaneous relief from tiring though
is found in laughter.
There is probably more good health for the human
race in a million copies of a Sunday newspaper with a good comic section than in
any million medical prescriptions.
To the publisher who must make his
newspaper circulate and succeed the comic section in his newspapers is most
important.
First of all, it interests children, impresses them and causes
them to ask for the particular newspaper that has amused and entranced
them.
What the children ask for they get, and the newspaper that they
like is the newspaper, usually, that their mothers will read. And ONE mother
reading a newspaper is better for the publisher than any TWO men-first because
SHE IS BETTER; second, because the mothers spend the money, read advertising
carefully, because they are economical, thus making the advertising pay and
making the newspaper pay.
There is some just, and more foolish, criticism
of comic newspaper pictures. Some criticize newspaper comics because they do not
teach some high moral lesson. That is not the PURPOSE of the comic artist. He
should strive, of course, to make vice hideous and virtue beautiful; everybody
should try to do that. But his actual job is to make men, women and children
laugh, and if he does THAT, without offending good taste, he is a good comic
artist.
“Laugh and be fat” is an old saying. One more
important to the tired nerves of the high-strung American is laugh, and let your
mind rest….
There is no doubt as to the surpassing circulation value of
a good humorous newspaper department. Humor interests humanity every Sunday,
every day, and every hour. It is as welcome as a fresh breeze in hot
Summer.
A good “comic series” has the great advantage of
REPETITION, of building up readers like a snowball. Such men as Opper, Tad, and
others in the United States, men of similar power and knowledge of human nature
in Europe, build up from themselves a following ten times greater than that of
any writer, preacher or “serious” artist.
Just exactly what
causes the New York Sunday Sunday American, for instance, to sell more than
eleven hundred thousand copies every Sunday at TEN cents, while its competitors
selling for FIVE cents sell on HALF as many, it would be impossible to say. A
newspaper, like a human being, is a complete organism; you cannot say that any
ONE thing MAKES it.
But this you can say of the comic section of a
well-balanced Sunday newspaper. To leave it out would be like leaving the
laughter out of life, the flowers out of the field, or the rainbow out of the
storm’s ending.
The wise publisher, regularly, without stinting space or
quality, will give his readers the very best Sunday comic section and the very
best daily comics that he can find. No matter what they cost they are the best
investment he can make.
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<div>He Begged Me to Elope!!!! Romance on a Classic scale. Slight crease in
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