Comics

WASHINGTON -- U.S. soldiers in the Persian Gulf are finding themselves in a real jam -- strawberry and blueberry, that is, thanks to a Jessup gourmet food distributor.And when they polish off the nearly 2 tons of jams, jellies, corn chips and Danish butter cookies shipped by Castle Food Product Corp., the troops can curl up in their bunks with 10,000 comic books, courtesy of Diamond Comics of Baltimore.Well, not quite yet. "They haven't gone over yet," said William Neuhaus, account representative for the Woodlawn distributor, explaining that some of the comics would not pass Saudi Arabia's strict Islamic code.

If a good impresario is always updating his act, Eric Peterkofsky must have a pretty decent idea what he's doing. Take what happened about a year ago, when the veteran Hollywood TV writer, a closet political conservative, was listening to a favorite talk-radio show one afternoon. The host, syndicated pundit Larry Elder, invited his listeners to come to a Los Angeles nightclub that evening, where a passel of comedians would spend several hours lambasting ultra-liberal filmmaker and conservative bane Michael Moore.

It's been a funny century, thanks in no small part to the cartoonists and comic strips that have for years started our day or ended our evening with a laugh, an insight or a little bit of both.Some are old friends, some are institutions; some come and go quickly but leave an indelible mark. Some don't make us laugh like they used to but, like Linus' blanket, we don't know how we'd live without them.This special edition of The Sunday Sun offers an opportunity to look back, and to look forward to more giggles in the century to come.

Colin Quinn wasn't into Bob Hope when he was a kid. "He looked a little square to me," Quinn says. "By the time I saw him, I was a teen-ager, and you weren't going to be into Bob Hope then." No, for Quinn, a 44-year-old comic who seems barely able to contain a Hulk-like hostility, his role models were a generation or two younger than Hope, comic heavyweights like George Carlin and Richard Pryor, whose humor was far more biting than Hope's, not to mention brimming with the profane. It's hard to imagine the relentlessly wholesome Hope even knowing Carlin's "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" let alone uttering one of them.

Last month, when the teenage daughter on NBC's The Book of Daniel turned out to be a talented manga artist selling drugs to pay for her software, adults may have said, "Huh?" But their teenage daughters probably knew exactly what manga was. These black-and-white comics, translated from Japanese best-sellers and meant to be read back to front and right to left, are a huge hit with American teens and 'tweens. They can find manga (pronounced mahn-ga, with a hard G as in "girl") in the popular teen magazine Cosmo Girl or they wait impatiently for the next book in a series to be translated and brought to the shelves of a nearby Barnes & Noble or Waldenbooks.

Have you looked at today's comics yet?Maybe you should. Just turn the page, read over your favorites, and then come back. We'll wait for you. Go on.Back? Good. And we'll bet that little thought balloon over your head right now reads, "What the !! have they done to my funnies?!?"This isn't the usual comics page funny business, but an April Fool's prank. Specifically, it's The Great April Fool's Day Comics Switcheroonie of 1997, a cunning stunt in which 46 cartoonists switch strips for a day."

Robb Armstrong and his wife were in Baltimore earlier this year, just visiting, staying at the Marriott Inner Harbor, doing the crab thing. Then Armstrong, the 37-year-old cartoonist and creator of the strip "Jump Start," picked up The Sun. He wasn't in it."It broke my heart," says Armstrong, who has depicted its characters Joe and Marcy Cobb for more than a decade. The Cobbs, one of the first middle-class black couples to be featured in a nationally syndicated comic strip, now appear in 375 newspapers across the country.

Despite the popularity of his series "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," Jeff Kinney does not fit in. His illustrated journals of curmudgeonly middle-schooler Greg Heffley are neither comics nor novels, but in the past two years, Kinney, a University of Maryland alumnus, has been nominated for 14 Harvey Awards, which recognize excellence in comics. Since he "got skunked" last year, he says, he's "going for the record for the most Harvey nominations without a win." The fourth installment of the series, "Dog Days," goes on sale Monday, and the live-action movie "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" is scheduled for release in 2010.

Beginning this week, our comic lineup has changed. Zippy, Apartment 3G, Rex Morgan, M.D. and The Phantom will no longer appear in The Sun. This decision was based on a survey in which more than 1,000 readers told us their preferences. You'll still find 24 comics exclusively in The Sun. This change was made to conserve space and consolidate our comics on one page. If you would like to comment on this change, please e-mail customersatisfaction@baltsun .com and put "Comics changes" in the subject field, or you can speak to us directly at 888-539-1280.