The Lost World of Comic Strips

Sitting alone in our cars, our cubicles and in front of our screens, it’s almost impossible for us in the modern world to imagine how communal and intimate virtually all human life used to be until historically yesterday. For twenty years I talked to elderly people in rural Ireland – who often grew up in intense poverty, without electricity or cars – and over and over they described how everyone looked out for each other. What they describe is simply how most humans lived – in tribes, villages and neighbourhoods – for thousands of generations until historically yesterday.

Living uprooted as most of us do, spending our lives adrift on a sea of strangers and rarely seeing loved ones, was in most cultures the worst punishment. Ancient Greeks chose death over exile, and the Israelites grieved to be strangers in a strange land. International law today condemns solitary confinement as literal torture, but that is how many of us spend our lives, alone even in a crowd. 

While the social network dissolved earlier in my USA than in Ireland, even here older people can remember a time when it was utterly normal to know all the neighbours and “borrow a cup of sugar,” as the phrase goes. There’s a world of meaning in such old phrases; it implied that people could walk around neighbourhoods unafraid, knew their neighbours well enough to walk in and ask for something, and could expect to be told yes. It also meant that most people cooked their own meals, rather than buying them pre-cooked and frozen from the store, so that people could plausibly need a cup of sugar for something. 

In his excellent book Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam used dozens of polls, surveys, diaries and other statistics to back up their depiction of what American life used to be, a culture rich with neighbourhood gatherings, card games, fraternal lodges, dinner parties, bowling leagues, PTA meetings, political caucuses, town ban

Sitting alone in our cars, our cubicles and in front of our screens, it’s almost impossible for us in the modern world to imagine how communal and intimate virtually all human life used to be until historically yesterday. For twenty years I talked to elderly people in rural Ireland – who often grew up in intense poverty, without electricity or cars – and over and over they described how everyone looked out for each other. What they describe is simply how most humans lived – in tribes, villages and neighbourhoods – for thousands of generations until historically yesterday.

Living uprooted as most of us do, spending our lives adrift on a sea of strangers and rarely seeing loved ones, was in most cultures the worst punishment. Ancient Greeks chose death over exile, and the Israelites grieved to be strangers in a strange land. International law today condemns solitary confinement as literal torture, but that is how many of us spend our lives, alone even in a crowd.

While the social network dissolved earlier in my USA than in Ireland, even here older people can remember a time when it was utterly normal to know all the neighbours and “borrow a cup of sugar,” as the phrase goes. There’s a world of meaning in such old phrases; it implied that people could walk around neighbourhoods unafraid, knew their neighbours well enough to walk in and ask for something, and could expect to be told yes. It also meant that most people cooked their own meals, rather than buying them pre-cooked and frozen from the store, so that people could plausibly need a cup of sugar for something.

In his excellent book Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam used dozens of polls, surveys, diaries and other statistics to back up their depiction of what American life used to be, a culture rich with neighbourhood gatherings, card games, fraternal lodges, dinner parties, bowling leagues, PTA meetings, political caucuses, town bands, Boy Scouts and many other groups. This, by the way, was true for both genders and all races. He also shows how all these things – in fact, all forms of human interaction – have plummeted in recent decades, as screens and politics have conspired to divide us against each other.

One surprisingly useful resource to see this transformation – in the USA, at least– is through the  newspaper “funny pages,” comic strips like Blondie or Family Circus. Many of then have been running for more than a century and have changed little, as they were written by only one creator for decades, and the increasingly elderly readers liked them just fine the way they were. Thus they provide a valuable time capsule of the habits and values of Americans three or four generations ago.

For example, in Family Circus, a running gag shows the mother sending a child out to the neighbours to borrow a cup of sugar and telling him to “come right home.” The rest of the comic is a map of their town, showing the child taking a winding route through the woods, the creek, the playground, his friends’ houses and finally home to an exasperated mother. When the strip was created in 1960 this immediately earned a chuckle, as adults saw children do this every day, and remembered being that child.

Today, the scene looks too incomprehensible to be funny; not only would few people in a village even know their neighbours, much less borrow from them, but few parents would allow their child to wander the neighbourhood unsupervised, or play in the woods, or wander in and out of other houses.

Blondie also has once-common scenes, like the husband sitting at a bench at his favourite diner and chatting to the cook as a neighbour – normal when the strip appeared a century ago, but try doing it in the local kebab shop or fast food joint. Another common joke is that he is always late for his carpool in the morning; he and all his neighbours carpool to work, an act that was taken for granted several decades ago but is rare today.

Also in Blondie, many of the jokes centre around the husband and wife chatting amiably with local children who just wander up to them and talk, or Dennis the Menace – no relation to the UK comic of the same name – pestering his adult neighbours. Today, if a local man were to spend a lot of time with a child, parents would be likely to call the police.

Of course comic strips were works of fiction that exaggerate reality for broad comedy, yet the comedy only worked because everyone who read the strips recognised the situations from real life. Today, they are read mostly by an increasingly elderly audience who remember the lost civilisation they depict, and can appreciate the jokes. For the rest of us, society has changed so much that they are merely bizarre. Their humour now consists of what we might as well call “banana-peel jokes,” something we register as a standard joke material even though no one can remember the reason it was once supposed to be funny.

The Potential of Libraries

Most of us take libraries for granted, without appreciating what amazing things they are. Imagine having to buy even a fraction of the books, CDs and movies we can borrow freely from even the most meager local branch, whose total inventory might be worth millions.

They also serve you and your neighbours in other, less appreciated ways. Many offer free internet access to everyone, including the millions who are not online. They often act as a community centre, hosting meetings and events of everything from the Boy Scouts to the PTA to the local Tidy Town volunteers.

Your branch might offer weekly storytelling for children or night courses for adults. I knew one library that featured the art of local painters, perhaps their only recognition, and another that published short-run collections of local students’ fiction, giving aspiring teen writers like myself a start. A library might offer bound volumes of now-extinct local newspapers, records and other information forgotten in an age of Google.

Even more useful than the books or activities, though, is the principle behind libraries, that we and our neighbours can pool our resources and hold things in common that all of us occasionally need. Most of the Western World, however, adopted this principle for books and then stopped, never extending it to other obvious areas of life.

In fact, the trend of the last few decades has been the opposite – people bought more and more of their own private stocks of anything, no matter how expensive or little-used: a row of ten family homes might have ten rakes, ten chainsaws, ten barbecue pits and ten Dora the Explorer videos, each of which is used for only a few hours a year.

Those same neighbours could save a lot of money, though, if they pitch in and buy a shed full of tools together – a rake, shovels, saws, hammers and so on. Most of the tools would be there when needed, but each contributor would spend only a tenth of the price on them. There might be more wear on the tools, but there might also be more people taking care of them and making them last longer.

Any small community could also keep a library of seeds. Many garden megacenters carry only a few varieties of anything, often shipped from around the world, sometimes genetically engineered to yield only a single year’s crop. A seed library would be inexpensive insurance against unforeseen events – drought, fuel shortage, worsening economy -- that might make seeds might be harder to come by and more urgently needed.

Everyone needs medical care sooner or later, and while prescription medicines should not be casually traded or used past their sell-by dates, many other first aid items could be kept together in a neighbourhood or apartment building – bandages and plasters of various sizes, surgical spirits (rubbing alcohol to Americans), hydrogen peroxide and painkillers, as well as thermometers, blood pressure wraps, swabs and other basics.

Food doesn’t exactly lend itself to re-use, but cooking supplies do, and many people have things like steamers, pressure cookers, woks, fryers and other expensive equipment that they use rarely and that could be kept in a common stock.

Any parent knows that children love new toys but are quickly bored with them, and they gradually accumulate in a child’s room until digging through them becomes an archaeological project. If each family were to frequently clean out the toys their children don’t use, however, they could create a toy library for the community, whose toys could be used and re-used.

Finally, to come full circle, you could keep books that might be useful in times to come – gardening, home health care, water filtration. You can recommend such publications to public libraries, and perhaps consider joining your local library board – I used to cover the library board as a reporter, and they are usually a small group of elderly people whose hard work and subtle power goes unappreciated.

One easy way to start would be for you and your colleagues to engage in a spring cleaning together – books you finally admit you aren’t going to read, clothes that might come back in style in ten years and rarely-used tools from the garage. People have more than they realise, and find less clutter a relief – and since many might fear abuse of the system, it’s often best to start with things people won’t miss anyway.

Such abuse – members not giving back what they borrow – can happen, but it happens in public book libraries too, and it is rarely fatal. Things like power tools, of course, are more expensive than books, so members might have to keep them secure and enforce membership fees, security deposits or late charges to make sure everyone plays by the rules.

The details will depend on your group, of course, and “group” here could be almost anything. It could be you and a few neighbours sharing a shed, your congregation storing some common goods at the church, the Girl Scouts asking to store a cabinet of seeds at City Hall, or the town’s 4-H Club keeping a shed of equipment for members to check out. It could be poker buddies going in on a chainsaw, or people in a college dormitory time-sharing their textbooks. The principle is the same – most of us have more than we need, and not enough.

Whatever the circumstance, though, try to gradually open it up to more and more people, even at a greater risk. A few scattered libraries create tiny pockets of assistance in a troubled culture, but an overlapping network of such collaborations would help restore something the culture has lost.