With how the newspaper comic landscape is now, it’s really hard to explain to rising generations how much more important comic strips were to people in previous decades.
One of the things you realize when you study the history of a thing is how much longer it has existed than people think. Sequential art has been with us for centuries. It has incredible staying power. How it’s published and consumed may change, but the medium will not die.
💬 Milt Caniff on the social significance of comic strips, from TCJ 108, May 1986
“…It may end being socially significant, or accepted, or whatever, but at the time, almost without exceptions, it was a way to make living. It starts that way, anyway.”
It’s interesting that cartoonists who started their careers in the 1930s, like Milt Caniff and Hal Foster, didn’t view their work as having any significance or artistic merit and was only meant to make them a living. It would take another generation before some cartoonists would see it differently.