Cartoons and the Common Culture

Bizarro cartoon from a year ago today

Those of you who are my Facebook friends know that I occasionally post cartoons from the daily newspaper--generally, cartoons that have some sort of cultural reference. These are some of the common cultural allusions I see in cartoons:

• Rapunzel and her long hair
• Frankenstein's creature
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Noah's ark
• Adam and Eve
• Dorian Gray (less common--but still ...)
• Edgar Allan Poe (with, especially, his raven)
• Washington Irving (especially the Headless Horseman and Rip Van Winkle)
• Shakespeare (Romeo beneath Juliet's balcony and Hamlet with the skull of Yorick are especially popular)
• various Greek and Roman gods and historical figures
• Zeus, Poseidon, Odysseus, the Trojan Horse, etc.

There are others--many others--but you get the idea. Newspaper cartoonists can still assume that we (well, most of us?) will recognize these characters and situations and will smile/laugh at the twist the cartoonist imagines.

But for how much longer? As reading-as-a-leisure-activity declines, as streaming video floods over the world, as the public school curriculum continues to fixate narrowly on tests and test scores, I wonder: Is the day coming (and soon?) when a reference to Hamlet or the Trojan Horse or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde will leave most comic readers puzzled?

And another factor: How many comic readers are there? As print newspapers continue to decline (and disappear), as we become more and more divided by the news media we watch (or check on our smart phones when we hear a ping!), will common cultural allusions continue to become more and more contemporary? Will we see more and more cartoons about Spider-Man and Wonder Woman and Ant Man and fewer and fewer featuring the allusions that once were widely understood?

I smiled this morning when I saw the cartoon perched above this post--and not just because I've read Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde but because I wondered: How many people now remember who Mr. T was? (He's now 67, by the way!)

Between 1983-87 he was in a very popular TV series, The A-Team. There were 97 episodes. (If you're clueless about who he was--he's the guy glaring at you from the far right.)

He was in a bunch of other stuff, too--including Rocky III (1982). Older folks (like me!) of course remember him--he was everywhere for a while. But what about the Younger Crowd?

It's a cliche, I know, to say that "things change"; after all, they always have. But not at this swift pace. Do young readers today know Harry Potter? (Our younger grandson, 10, has just finished reading/loving all the books--but are they still popular? I don't know.)

As I look over this post, I can tell it's sort of an Old-Guy's Lament ... you know, Back when I was young ... A tad pathetic, I know.

But I can't help grieving for the loss of the days when most everyone knew about the Trojan War, had read "Rip Van Winkle," who knew what-on-earth Hamlet was doing with a skull!