Mandrake the Magician

Sometimes I consider myself to have a foot in two worlds of entertainment. Modern day and the past. This offers a unique perspective, and sometimes an appreciation, of what I'm reading.

Reading Aquaman comics of today is a world of difference than how the character was presented in the 1950's. That's just one small example. Almost every character I can think of has changed drastically with each decade. Superman and Batman being the best examples.

Except the Peanuts strips. The Peanuts strips of the 1950's have very minor differences with later decades. Except for some reason they come off as more charming.



One of the more terribly painful examples of this concept is Mandrake the Magician.
Mandrake the Magician is a newspaper comic strip started in 1934 by Lee Falk, who also created the Phantom. Like the Phantom, Mandrake turned out to be enormously popular in the 1930's and 1940's and was even featured in movie serials. The character was a common household name in the days when an adventure strip could run successfully in the newspapers. Unlike today.

Unfortunately, Mandrake is still being published today. You might be surprised to find out how negative I am about that. The problem being how far the strip, and indeed the very medium of adventure strips in the newspapers, have fallen.

I subscribe to a website called DailyInk. The website is crappy and mismanaged and doesn't work consistently at all. The strips themselves won't pull up from my work computer, so I load them on my iPad for my morning reading before going to work. However, I don't belong to the website for how well it runs. It's the content I crave. They offer several modern day strips from popular cartoon syndicates. But, more importantly to me, they offer several vintage comic strips from days gone by.
Tragically, they offer both vintage Mandrake and modern day Mandrake. Enabling the reader to compare how far the medium and the magician have fallen since their heydays.


All the modern day adventure strips move at a frustrating snails pace and have very poor art. The Spider-Man strip in particular is extremely ridiculous. Mandrake is the worst of them all, though. With overly-simplistic story lines sometimes lasting for months on end, and even single confrontations stretching out over weeks. The art is messy, muddy, and a direct slap in the face to the clean, crisp lines of the Mandrake strips of the past. It's a rare case where I would rather see the strip fade away than be dragged through the mud as it is today.








But what makes this so painful is seeing what the strip used to be! Every day to be treated to the beautiful artwork, thrilling stories, and interesting characters that used to make the strip so popular. Storytelling was quick and exciting. And it's through this comparison that I know what the format of daily, three panel comic strips are capable of doing!


The only way in that the modern strip is better than the former strip is the treatment of Mandrake's right-hand man, Lothar. His depiction in older strips is a painful stereotype, but a record of our cultural thinking from those decades.


Ironically, one of the recent adventure strips that DID move along and tell a good story was Little Orphan Annie. My buddy Scott and I used to rave about how good the modern day strip was. Little Orphan Annie was finally cancelled in 2010. After running for 86 years. When it was cancelled, it was running in less than 20 newspapers. The New York Daily News carried the strip for it's entire run.

Two strips that are doing fairly are Flash Gordon and Prince Valiant. They are still a far cry from there 1930's heyday, but both strips still run on Sunday's, both are action packed and fast paced, both have good artwork, and both are offered through DailyInk. However, I don't consider either character to be a household name like they used to be.

One strip that bounced back from this degradation of the decades is Dick Tracy. Dick Tracy is another strip of immense popularity in it's first several decades. However the strip had fallen on hard times, terrible art, and achingly slow stories in recent years. I bailed on it, unable to continue reading it. However, in 2011 the strip was taken over by a new writer and by former DC Comics artist Joe Staton. Story and art improved by light years almost immediately. It's a must-read for me today.

It feels like I'm announcing the death of the daily comic strip format in this blog entry. However, I just don't feel that way. The truth is, the newspaper syndicates did their best to ignore the internet, changing trends, and the future for quite a long time. They are the ones responsible for the deaths of these strips. The habit of reading a daily comic strip is still very much alive, only now it's webcomics. Artists who were treated terribly or turned down by giant monolithic dinosaur comic newspaper syndicates turned to the web and found bigger audiences than they ever could in the freaking newspaper. So much so, that websites like DailyInk and GoComics that provide syndicated strips online were proved to have a place in the world. It's the webcomic creators that saved this particular medium.

That won't help poor Mandrake the Magician, though.


Thanks,
DCD