Comics a U.S. art form and daily ritual for millions

The Oscars had an estimated worldwide audience of 1 billion people.

But the Academy Awards happens just one night a year. Before Charles M. Schulz died in 2000, the cartoonist reached 355 million people every single day in 21 languages and three times as many countries, with his beloved "Peanuts."

And that's only a single strip, one of more than 250 now in syndication.

Such is the power of the newspaper comic strip.

It seems a humble thing, really, the comic strip: 5 5/8 inches wide, 1 1/2 inches high in the daily paper (bigger and in color on Sundays). Over a few panels a joke is told, a prank executed, a story line slightly advanced by recurring characters, then it's over.

Much of each day's comics section, admittedly, is pretty uninspired stuff — worth a smile at most. The cumulative effect of regular morning encounters, however, can be powerful.

The noted communications scholar Marshall McLuhan observed that comics, with characters that are both friends of and stand-ins for readers, "provide a sort of magically recurrent daily ritual."

Besides, "It's fun to look at pictures, particularly if the pictures are funny," says comics historian Robert C. Harvey, author of "The Art of the Funnies."

And readers feel passionately about their comics.

When The Washington Post dumped "Mark Trail" in 1991, 15,000 readers called to complain. The Post reinstated the strip. A similar uproar, albeit on a smaller scale, prompted the Albany Times Union in early 1998 to bring back "Mark Trail" after trying to replace it with something fresher.

Like jazz and the banjo, comic strips are an American art form, one born and perfected in halls far from the academies of high art. In the comics' case, those hallways were newspapers'.

The battling giants of 1890s New York City newspapering, William Randolph Hearst (founder of The Hearst Corp., which owns the Times Union) and Joseph Pulitzer, used comics in their fierce circulation wars.

Bold, graphic, colorful and generically simple in their language, the funnies were used to make readers out of the massive immigrant population, for whom the more elevated English of the news columns was difficult.