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One consequence of having older parents is that my kids may be the last of their kind to live in a house that gets a daily newspaper. Yes, it's kind of last century, but there's one undeniable advantage: every morning over our cereal, we get to share two full broadsheets of comics.
Comics aren't just funny. They're also a form of living history. Want to see how people dressed, talked and lived in the first half of the twentieth century? Just check out Blondie or Hi and Lois. The sad fact is, many, if not most, of the strips running in newspapers today are at least a generation older than I am. The good news is, they're easy to make fun of. I never followed Mark Trail until the kids introduced me to the Comics Curmudgeon. Now I enjoy Mark's stilted adventures on a whole new level.
That's not all. Comics can entice kids to read. It was his desperate need to find out what Calvin and Hobbes were saying that finally made my younger son literate at age seven. Even today, in their late teens, my kids probably spend most of their money on comic strip collections: Pearls Before Swine, Get Fuzzy, and especially FoxTrot. Thanks to these strips and their creators, you can't sit down in my living room or the back of my minivan without first having to push aside a mountain of softcover books to clear a spot.
For me, FoxTrot is a particular favorite. The strip features a family of three kids -- two typical teens and their geeky younger brother Jason. The kids act and interact like modern kids -- at one point, my husband had to sit the younger son down and explain that what's funny in the newspaper is not-so-much in our house -- and the parents act like parents do today, and not a family out of a fifties sitcom. The strip is funny, smart, and most importantly, I get pretty much all the jokes.
Last weekend the kids and I got to hear FoxTrot creator Bill Amend speak at PAX East. Amend showed off some of the kind of strips that make him a favorite of gamers and other Geek Parents like me. And he talked about starting to make the transition from ink to pixels -- something I, who started off writing for newspapers until I realized I'd better figure out what these "blog" things were, and fast -- can certainly relate to. I also like to follow Amend's tweets about his daily family life, which made meeting him on the line for autographs a little like peering into a stranger's living room window and suddenly have them step out the front door and see you there. But he was gracious and friendly and signed both a book (we bought a fresh copy, no one having thought to check that one of our 40,000 * * books were in the car) and a print I could hang on the wall, where I knew it wouldn't get tattered and torn from constant use, like the rest of our FoxTrot collections.
You can read FoxTrot, which after 20 years of daily strips now comes out only on Sundays, on Amend's website. But if you're a dinosaur family like ours, you only have to wait for Sunday to read the color comics right on your breakfast table.
