See you in the funny papers

Back when I was growing up during the 1960s and 1970s, the Chicago Tribune published the dullest, most out-of-sync comics in the world. I took everything that I read, saw on television or heard on the radio very literally as a child, and wondered why I never came across any raucous boarding houses or little girls with no eyeballs living by their wits in the street.

I read the funnies religiously every Sunday in the Trib. Aside from Dennis the Menace and Peanuts, the other strips were throwbacks to World War I. None of them really made sense in a modern world- context, and they make even less sense today.

For example, Dagwood and Blondie are still wearing the same style of clothing they wore 75 years ago, when rich, young playboy Dagwood first met flapper Blondie in some seedy New York nightclub, and was disinherited by his millionaire father after marrying the trashy, slutty Blondie.

Dagwood and Blondie are still trying to make ends meet in their tacky house on Dagwood's weekly salary of $48, and getting hassled by the Man, Mr. Dithers. Yet today, a contemporary boom-box or computer will appear out of nowhere in the strip. Do we really need to see this? Any attempt to bring Blondie and Dagwood into the 21st century still can't compensate for their same tired shtick from the Great Depression. These two should have been retired 30 years ago, when Chic Young attempted to modernize the strip by having Blondie appear in tight pants, only to have her go back to her 1930s fashions after a public outcry. They sucked during the 1970s and they still suck today.

For a long time I thought Little Orphan Annie was blind because she didn't have any eyeballs. I thought her dog, Sandy, was a seeing-eye dog, guiding his young mistress through all sorts of harrowing perils. And why the hell didn't Daddy Warbucks keep better track of Annie if he was supposed to be her guardian? Somebody call DCFS!

Another comic that I read regularly was Rick O'Shay. Rick O'Shay was the blond, freckle-faced U.S. marshal of Conniption, Montana. The strip was beautifully drawn, set against breathtaking vistas of the Montana Rockies. Each strip was set exactly 100 years before the date it actually appeared. I used to get horny over Rick O'Shay's friend Hipshot Percussion, the sociopath gunslinger. There was always an element of danger about Hipshot, like he was going to snap any minute. Some dude was always riding into Conniption to call Hipshot out for a gun duel. Stan Lynde, the comic's creator, always managed to avoid any overt violence in the strip, which was a disappointment to me, because I wanted to see Hipshot kill Rick O'Shay.

Dick Tracy also made me horny as a child. He was the first male that I was ever attracted to. I was totally ga-ga over the square-jawed, inscrutable detective in the yellow raincoat and fedora. In 1960, WGN aired a series of five-minute, poorly produced, animated shorts of Dick Tracy, on a program hosted by Ray "Sgt Pettibone" Rayner and his sidekick, talking-canine puppet Tracer, who did double duty as Beauregard Burnside III on "Garfield Goose." Dick Tracy never did any actual police work in these animated shorts, but instead assigned cases to a staff of ethically questionable detectives that pushed the envelope of racial stereotypes, such as Joe Jitsu and Go-Go Gomez. The animated cartoons followed the same violent course set by the comic strip, as the junior detectives pursued actual villains from past strips who had either been killed by Tracy or were otherwise serving sentences on Death Row. Dick Tracy motivated me to learn how to read, and his 2-way wrist radio fascinated the hell out of me, which has since been replaced by a wrist computer. I eventually grew out of my Dick Tracy fixation, especially after Junior, the 9-year-old street urchin whom Tracy adopted and saved from a life of poverty, grew up and married Sparkle Plenty, daughter of B.O. Plenty and Gravel Gertie.

Moon Mullins was also outdated by the time I discovered him in the Sunday comics. Supposedly, Emmy Schmaltz's boarding house was set in Chicago, where Moon, a ne'r do well prizefighter rented a room. Moon, short for "Moonshine," was first introduced in 1923 at the height of the Prohibition Era, to attract new readers who made their own illegal bathtub gin, I presume. Moon was usually shown laying around Emmy's boarding house drinking and betting on the ponies. Moon's little brother, Kayo, was introduced a few years later, who was Moon's "mini me" wearing the same bowler hat. Kayo slept in one of Moon's dresser drawers, which I found very interesting. Besides, Emmy, the ugliest woman in the comics, there was Lord Plushbottom, or "Plushie" as Moon called him. Plushie introduced whole a new level of "fish out of water" humor to the strip's low-class ruffians, as well as plenty of big bottom jokes. Emmy eventually married Plushie, becoming Lady Plushbottom, and the strip often included gags about their married life, which was hideous. Other characters included Lady Plushbottom's black cook, Mamie, and Mamie's incredibly lazy husband, Willie. Both of these characters were quietly dropped from the strip during the 1950s, as even then their racial stereotypes pushed the boundaries of good taste. If Willie were around today, I'm sure he and Moon would be smoking crack behind Lady Plushbottom's backyard outhouse.

Another pre-World War I comic was Gasoline Alley. Gasoline Alley was the first strip where the characters aged progressively. Much of the action took place around a local gas station owned by Walt Wallet, a confirmed bachelor, who found an abandoned baby on his doorstep that he named Skeezix, cowboy parlance for "motherless calf." Walt adopted Skeezix and eventually married, producing more children. The strip is still running today, though in what papers I couldn't tell you, probably Crawford, Texas. There is a Gasoline Alley website where you can still read the daily strip. A lot of the main characters have died, and Walt, who is now in his second-century and not long for this world, is being cared for by a politically-correct, African-American caregiver. During the 1990s, Walt's wife, Phyllis, passed away which was covered in weeks of gut-wrenching daily strips about her funeral and Walt's lonely, physical decline. Skeezix has since retired from the gas station business, which is now being run by his daughter Clovia's fat-ass husband, Slim. Much of the humor in today's strip revovles around Slim polishing off two or three Quiznos subs on his way home from work. The gas station has also been transformed into a min-mart, that sells beef jerky and corn nuts, and has a Cappiccino machine offering three different kinds of artificially flavored coffee. The Gasoline Alley mini-mart is the perfect setting for a mass murder shooting rampage.

By far the worse comic strip ever that I can remember growing up is Dondi. Dondi was an Italian war orphan who happened upon an Italian farmhouse occupied by U.S. soldiers at the lingering end of World War II. No one could figure out who Dondi's parents were, so he just stayed with the "Joes," shining their boots, and handwashing their dirty socks and underwear. Dondi never aged but still managed to remember details of World War II with amazing clarity, even in 1969. Dondi debuted in 1955, and much of the early strip focused on Dondi's acclimation to American society. Eventually, his origins as an adopted World War II war orphan were de-emphasized, and Dondi became just another small-town kid having adventures with the Explorers Club, comprised of his three idiot friends Eddy, the stupid one; Baldy, the scrappy one whose bangs covered his eyes; and bespectacled, bookish Web. Dondi also had a small dog named Queenie, which gives you some idea of the kind of fag Dondi really was. I could also never figure out the pronounciation of Dondi's mother's name, Katje. Was the "j" silent or did it have a soft "g" sound?

Dondi was dark and depressing, especially during his annual summer adventure with his adopted grandmother, "Grandma McGowan," a rich, society lady who took a shining to the dark-eyed lad, and would lose him places like Rio de Janeiro, forcing Dondi to sleep in rat-infested alleys. Hasbro created a Dondi board game, and a film version of Dondi starring David Janssen and six-year-old David Kory in the title role, is often credited as "the worst movie ever made." During the 1970s, almost 30 years after World War II ended, a serviceman named Jim Dante showed up claiming to be Dondi's biological father, and for several weeks, a bitter custody battle ensued. Finally, Dondi was put out of his misery in the early 1980s, after Katje returned to work and was sexually harassed by her boss, causing Dondi and Ted to come and save Katje from being raped by her lecherous boss during a business trip.

I don't read the comics anymore, with the exception of "The Family Circus." Somehow, I can't start my day without coming up with a incredibly dirty punchline to replace the cute, Christian Family-values gag, like "Billy's fisting Dolly again," or Jeffy asking his grandmother, "Are you wet yet, Grandma?" I still can't get over the uproar caused when Mommy changed her hairstyle to a short, Dorothy Hamill coif in the early 1990s. I can think of a million more bad comic strips, like "Nancy," whose spiky burrhead is still featured today, "The Wizard of Id," and "Li'l Abner," which I never understood.

The comics today are as bad as the ones I grew up with. Remembering their plot lines compared to what I know now about pedophiles, sociopaths and addiction, they're just too depressing, reopening old fears of childhood abandonment, which is probably why I read them.