Not surprisingly, reader participation has reached extraordinary heights; readers truly laugh and suffer with their favourite characters. Young received 400,000 suggestions for a name for Blondie's new baby.
Perhaps in no other form of art has the creator become to such an extent prisoner of his creation, to which he may be locked for his lifetime and which becomes in a real sense independent of his own existence, for the successful strip will almost always be continued by other artists if the original creator should die or lose interest in it. Traditionally, the newspaper strip is also in fief to the syndicates, publishers, and editors who regard it primarily as a circulation booster. The conventional view has been that it must not offend any conceivable readership or commercial-interest group and therefore must observe strict, conservative codes of morality and decorum. This explains the extent to which the newspaper strip generally has avoided controversial issues of the day. It was against such restrictions that the American underground comic and the European bande dessinée pour adultes ("adult strip") struck out, and in their wake some innovative newspaper strips, notably G.B. Trudeau's "Doonesbury," began to break new ground. ( D.M.Ke.)
