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On the Upswing. The impact of Schulz's introspective, sophisticated humor is magnified, perhaps, by its novelty in an entertainment medium that has traditionally gone in for improbable adventure and is now up to its ears in the cold war world. Detective Dick Tracy, who once stalked gangsters on the streets, now marries Junior off to a moon maiden. Terry, who once snared pirates on the China coast, is now in the wilder blue yonder with an Air Force fighter squadron against the Viet Cong. Tired of designing fashions, Winnie Winkle has joined the Peace Corps, and is headed for underdeveloped Pornacopia. But Peanuts and pals are far removed from melodramatic plots and realistic art. They employ instead a deceptively casual style of drawing (the "toothpick school," says one cartoonist) and a whimsical, often biting humor.
"The funnies are becoming funny again," says Comics Researcher David Manning White of Boston University. "It is a verbal humor and it sticks. It hurts a little bit." Adds Al Capp, who has produced some pungent humor of his own—and added Lower Slobbovia to popular geography—in the hillbilly world of Li'I Abner: "The new comics are the real Black Humorists." In Walt Kelly's Pogo, a group of peculiarly human denizens of Okefinokee Swamp —a cigar-chewing alligator, a bespectacled owl, a turtle sporting a derby—play with words, con one another, and offer the only trenchant political satire to be found in the comics today. In Johnny Hart's B.C., indolent cavemen, sharpshooting anteaters and terrified ants make droll comments on the modern world. In Mell Lazarus' Miss Peach, megacephalic, supersophisticated school tots show up their elders' ignorance. In Mort Walker's Beetle Bailey, a gawky, hapless buck private makes a hash of military life.
Thanks largely to these new strips, the whole comics industry—300 syndicated strips and panels in 1,700 newspapers—is pulling itself out of the doldrums. In the 1950s the comics lost both readers and advertisers to television. Now that TV's appeal has begun to tarnish, the comics are on the upswing. Advertising revenue for the Sunday comics supplements reached an estimated 6,000,000 in 1964, double what it was the year before. While adventure strips may be hard-put to compete with TV shoot-'em-ups, there is nothing on television that packs quite the same punch as a comic strip that succeeds in being funny. From time to time, when editors have made the mistake of trying to drop one of these newer strips, the reader reaction has usually been so vehement that the strip reappeared.