POWER PLAY: SPACEMAN SPIFF, BILL THE CAT SORELY MISSED

A couple days back one of my favorite "Bloom County" strips came up on the day-by-day cartoon calendar which sits on my desk.

It was one from the early 1980s in which Milo Bloom, ace reporter for The Bloom Beacon, is perched on the city desk fielding a call from a pleasant elderly woman who claims the paper mistakenly printed she has died.

"Impossible," Milo replies. "We don't make mistakes on the obituary page, Mrs. Billsby." After she politely insists, he tells her to find some good light and read it to him slowly.

"BILLSBY SLASHES FOUR, DIES IN COCAINE BRAWL," she reads.

"Oh, that's the FRONT page, Mrs. Billsby," says Milo.

More than a decade after I first read that strip, it still cracks me up, particularly since I'm now in the newspaper business and have witnessed first-hand occasional plunges off the journalistic deep end.

Berkeley Breathed, the creator of "Bloom County," stopped writing the strip several years ago, the first in a wave of defections from the comics page.

Although Breathed continued to write the Sundays-only strip "Outland," which started out with mostly different characters but ended up as a once-a-week "Bloom County," the move still created a void.

Then just over a year ago, brilliantly twisted Gary Larson discontinued "The Far Side." Breathed made his retirement full-time months later with the final "Outland." The knockout blow was delivered at the beginning of this year when Bill Watterson ended the ultra-popular "Calvin and Hobbes."

Losing one would have been bad enough, but the departure of all three has left the funny pages a dreary place. The effect on cartooning is what would have happened to rock music if when the Beatles broke up, the Rolling Stones and the Who decided to call it quits as well.

In my personal opinion, the comics section of this paper is barely worth turning to. The only decent strips we run are "For Better or For Worse" and "In the Bleachers," which was banished to the sports section a couple months back.

There are a few other strips -- among them "Dilbert," "Doonsbury," "Non Sequiter," and "Mother Goose and Grimm" -- that I enjoy in other papers, but overall few panels of any quality are to be found anywhere.

In the forward to his last book of previously printed "Outland" and "Bloom County" strips, Breathed said he decided to retire because he wasn't hungry anymore. Too many cartoonists become "lifers," he said, once hugely successful but now stale though impossible to fire.

There is plenty of evidence to support that position. Many stalwarts such as "Peanuts" and "Beetle Bailey" haven't been funny in decades.

Just how many more times is Charles Schultz going have Lucy pull away the football at the last minute, making Charlie Brown crash onto his tuckus? Does Mort Walker still believe that Sarge pounding Beetle into a bloody pulp still elicits a laugh after it's been done 164,843 times?

And other strips such "Hi and Lois" and "Hagar Horrible," which have been turned over to the sons of the original creators, only generate the occasional giggle.

Someone needs to give these guys a good pounding up side the head with a Calvinball. (Just be sure to touch the red wicket and sing the "I'm So Sorry Song" first.)

Hopefully, this is just a temporary condition and new and creative young cartoonists will develop and step in to fill the void. And the sooner the better -- "The Born Loser" and "Nancy" just don't cut it.

~Marc Powers is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.