A laugh a minute

When I was very young, my parents introduced me to the wonderful world of comics. They kept me amused for hours, until I actually learned how to read and figured out what was going to happen long before it did happen. Which kind of spoiled the fun a bit, except that by then I was too busy discovering more new and exciting comic strips that brought back that amusement and giggles.

Perhaps I began with the age-old standards, comics than truly set the standards (ha, ha!) for me. I was introduced to characters like Little Dot, Lotta, Richie Rich and Caspar the Friendly Ghost, and decided that they were ‘people’ I needed to have in my own life. For years I looked everywhere for friends like this, and occasionally found someone who was close, at least in character. And they are still with me, even though I rarely read the comics these days.

Then I was shown the racks where Charlie Brown ruled. Living in a small town in Germany then, which had just one bookshop that stocked anything in English, I managed to accumulate as many Peanuts compilations as were available there. So I read through the entire roster of Charlie Brown’s adventures, identified closely with the fussbudget Lucy and danced my way into a world that was populated by the madness of Snoopy and the Red Baron, Shroeder and his passion for Beethoven, Linus, Woodstock and everyone else who made life so much fun for me and my generation.

Then came the advent of a new set of characters – all from the Asterix and Obelix series. I had the whole set, some bought in stores, others ordered for me from the publishers by my parents. The comic books were all in German, and astoundingly funny – and, in some ways, as hilarious in English, especially since I knew where the original puns came from – and while the newer plots published more recently have been more political and less regional, they have not lost their original quality. Perhaps the best part of the stories was that some of my schoolfriends of the time were also fans, so we could all talk about it and giggle happily in school. I was even given a set of brilliant orange plastic figures of the main cast by a friend who, if we were all much older and more worldly wise, may have had serious designs on my virtue.

When I was in college in the United States, my friend Karen had me meet her favourites – Opus the Penguin and his friends from Bloom County. I was already tuned into the world of animals with Garfield, and had been reading Calvin and Hobbes and trying to understand the American political commentary of Doonesbury. But my favourites remained: Beau Peep, Hagar the Horrible and, of course and always, Peanuts. Many of the creators of the strips are now gone to that funny-house in the sky, though their work still endures in reruns and memories. Today, I still read the comics in preference to going through all the hard news and deeply meaningful editorials that are necessary for me to deal with a day at work, but now it all happens at top speed. I still turn to the comics page in whatever one of the four newspapers we get at home and log into my favourite comics site online as soon as I can. My preference now leans towards things catly, and I check in on Mutts, 9 Chickweed Lane, Kit ’n’ Carlyle and Rose is Rose – the last for its charming vignettes of a young family – regularly.

But somewhere along the way I miss my old favourites. And some day I will catch up with them once again and find out just what Charlie Brown, Little Dot, Asterix and Opus are up to. Then, my funnybone may just wake up to do its familiar little wiggle of joyful excitement.