Eek! Sob! It's the death of comics!

'LEAPING LIZARDS!" sounds too cheerful. "Good grief!" might be more appropriate. Look what's happened to the funnies. We should look seriously because this is a serious matter, touching on the state of the nation.

There are three peculiarly American art forms: the Western, the musical, and the comic strip; all of which, having come to full flower not so long ago, when they seemed to represent much that lay close to the American heart and much that the rest of the world admired in America, have manifestly degenerated. Of these three, comics have been the least studied but are by no means the least significant, if only because they came into, still do come into, almost every American home.

Solemn books have been written about them ("Underlying the action is a deeprooted sense of determinism and naturalistic despair, not unlike the world view of the more extreme Dadaists"), but such solemnity is a bad sign. Intellectuals theorizing about popular culture tend to be like opera singers rendering show tunes: they miss the point.

Comic-strip artists never aspired to compete with Rembrandt or Gillray. Their social importance lies not in aesthetic achievement but in their historic unifying role. They created a common culture that, for a while, brought old and young, immigrants and native-born, together across the breakfast table, providing not only thrills and laughs but values identifiable with what would then have been a generally accepted concept of Americanism.

A hint of their power can be gleaned from the words and phrases they coined or popularized, anyhow slipped into everyone's vocabulary: "piker," "jeep," "fall guy," "horsefeathers," "dumbbell" (meaning "stupid"), "ball and chain" (for "wife"), the "heebiejeebies," "time's a-wastin'," "you said it," "the cat's pajamas," "hard-boiled," "drugstore cowboy," "google-eyed," "baloney," "Dragon Lady," and "security blanket," not to mention wow!, pow!, bam!, socko, arf, and aargh! Some everyday commodities--Popeye's spinach, Wimpy's hamburgers, Dagwood's sandwiches--reflect gleams of comic-strip glory still.

But clouds have drifted across the sun. We are looking at what has been described as "a once great but now dying and misused field."

The ancestry of the comic strip can be traced back as far as you wish--to ancient Egyptian wall paintings or to the Bayeux Tapestry, each of which narrated successive events in a row of pictures. Eighteenth-century political cartoonists used speech balloons. However, the American comic strip grew, toward the end of the nineteenth century, out of two more or less simultaneous developments--photoengraving, which made possible relatively cheap newspaper illustrations, and the great flood of European immigrants, many of whom had only a tenuous grasp of the English language.

Rival newspaper groups, notably those headed by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, battled for readership. Hearst raided from Pulitzer an artist called Richard Felton Outcault, whose already popular strip, Hogan's Alley, featured a jug-eared urchin, soon to be known as "the Yellow Kid," reputedly because the color printer wanted a clear space on which to test his yellow tint and the boy's nightgown-type clothes were convenient. The Yellow Kid became the star of Hearst's new comic supplement, launched in 1896, "eight pages of polychromatic effulgence that make the rainbow look like a lead pipe." In response Pulitzer hired another artist to create an alternative Yellow Kid.

Even more tangled and much longer lasting was the tale of The Katzenjammer Kids, by any standard a classic of the genre. Based on a German pictorial series, Max und Moritz, it was adapted--truth to tell, plagiarized--into an American comic strip for Hearst's New York Morning Journal by Rudolph Dirks, himself a German immigrant, who added speech balloons and a narrative that advanced from panel to panel. When Pulitzer hired Dirks away, Hearst successfully claimed a legal right to The Katzenjammer Kids, which was thereafter drawn by another artist, Harold Knerr. But Dirks continued his own version, first as Hans and Fritz, and then, after the outbreak of war with Germany, as The Captain and the Kids. He went on drawing it until his death, in 1968.

In whichever form (and the two versions were practically indistinguishable), this was a charming strip. On a tropical island, otherwise inhabited by cigar-smoking cannibals and an occasional dusky maiden, der Captain, der Inspector, formidable Mama, and mischievous Hans and Fritz squabble in fantasticated German accents ("Mit bummers giffs no supper!" Mama warns). The overall effect was lovable and unforgettable in a way that no modern strip seems to be.

Popeye, created by Elzie Segar in 1929, was the first superhero, capable of amazing feats, though he used his great powers infrequently. His early adventures were far more complex and adult-oriented than the strip and film versions that followed; they told elaborate stories that went on from day to day and week to week. And Popeye himself was a richly conceived character, with a face (as his sweet-patootie, Olive Oyl, once put it) "like a shipwreck," wrestling to express himself in words, irresponsible, stubborn, naturally aggressive but gentle with a baby, inflexible in pursuit of what he considered justice, epitomized by the slogan Segar evolved for him, "I yam what I yam an' tha's all I yam." Popeye became the most widely published strip before Peanuts.

All the main themes of American humorous and picaresque literature were represented in the comics of those days--rural naivete, backstreet cunning, small-town warmth. Maggie and Jiggs, Mutt and Jeff, and Joe Palooka were characters from the heart of American mythology. In the following golden years Prince Valiant, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, Terry and the Pirates were beautiful specimens of graphic art, and their narrative techniques grew more ambitious, with panels of different sizes, shifting points of view, close-ups and long-shots, dramatic lighting, vast landscapes, and natural backgrounds that mirrored changing moods. Heroines and villainesses carried a powerful erotic charge; heroes never failed in chivalry, courage, or patriotism.

Political themes, as distinct from simple Americanism, were generally eschewed as being more likely to divide than to attract readers, but there were three notable exceptions. Dick Tracy, drawn by Chester Gould from 1931 until 1985, was only by implication political, but it stood, without a qualm, for law and civilized society against inexcusable fiends whose hideous faces reflected the evil in their souls. Little Orphan Annie, however, was so uninhibited in its political message that Harold Gray, who drew it from 1924 to 1968, was compelled to change one sequence because of the vigor of its attack on Roosevelt and the New Deal. Annie was matched in her irrepressible self-reliance and benevolence by the self-made millionaire, Daddy Warbucks, who spelled out the strip's philosophy. "Sure," he said, "I believe in short hours of work, lots of holidays with pay, all that stuff--it would be great if we could all afford to knock off any old time--but, as I see it, a few men have to work hard and take heavy chances and battle heavy odds and worry nights, so that millions may have the 'fuller life' you mention, instead of every day off without pay."

Al Capp's Li'l Abner, which ran from 1934 to 1977, moved across the political spectrum. Having begun as mere hillbilly slapstick, with forays against social climbers and the venal rich, it worked around to attacking and satirizing liberalism, feminism, and the politics of protest. Capp himself said that it had taken him thirty years to appreciate Harold Gray's superior understanding of social realities: "My politics didn't change. I had always been for those who were despised, disgraced, and demoralized. That was what changed. Suddenly it was the poor hardworking guy who was being denounced."

Like all the great comic-strip artists, Al Capp was a fine storyteller. Reluctantly he would sacrifice a gag for the sake of suspense. This was a crucial difference, he once wrote, from the old joke-strips, at which the reader might laugh with delight, then

put his paper down with a chuckle, eat dinner with a placid mind, and sleep the sleep of the peaceful.

The same citizen, however, who read Chester Gould's magnificent Dick Tracy didn't laugh when he reached the last panel--he moaned and gasped. Who wouldn't worry at the sight of a bullet whizzing out through his favorite detective's forehead, accompanied by a fine spray of Tracy's brains and bits of his skull (Tracy had been shot from behind, of course)? You may be sure that reader didn't eat his dinner in peace. He did not spend a restful night. That harassed soul couldn't wait until dawn came and, with it, the next edition. Only then was his agony relieved. And then, while the next strip revealed that it was an unimportant section of Tracy's skull that had been shattered and that he could get along just as well without those particular bits of brain, the reader's relief was short-lived. In the last panel of the new strip, the walls of the room into which Tracy had been lured began slowly and relentlessly to close in on him, with no escape possible.... Again no peace for the reader--until he could rush out in a fresh dawn to buy the next day's paper--and the next and the next.

In his own way Capp emulated the Tracy technique. Will Li'l Abner be caught on Sadie Hawkins Day? A grave peril.

Significantly, the weak film version of the excellent stage musical Annie and the moderately amusing stage and film versions of Li'l Abner omitted any hint of anti-liberalism. There has been a symbiotic relationship between comic strips and movies, but in terms more of visual technique and pre-sold characters than of an author's vision. Television, though, has undoubtedly contributed to the decline of the comic strip by bringing into homes an alternative daily schedule of adventure and comedy.

Meanwhile, the comic strip's proper medium--the printed page of a newspaper--has dwindled. There are fewer newspapers. The lavish comic supplements have gone, leaving little opportunity for storytelling artists to spread themselves. Very few serial strips survive. Instead we get a single row of small panels, filled with minimalist drawing and culminating in a mild joke. Nobody fights over the breakfast table for a first glimpse of Calvin and Hobbes or hurries to the street corner for the latest episode of Cathy.

At the same time an ideological transformation has occurred. Gone is the cofident Americanism; in its place came Pogo's declaration: "We have met the enemy and he is us." Jules Feiffer and Garry Trudeau were in the vanguard of the new wave; Feiffer's original strip was actually titled Sick, Sick, Sick. Their drawings were spindly, their theme was the neuroses and discontents that, coming as the artists did from the modish counterculture of the time, they deemed typical of bourgeois society. Heroism they specifically eschewed. "I don't believe in heroes," said Pogo's creator, Walt Kelly. "Powerlessness is my meat," said Feiffer.

Far from establishing shared references even for a single generation, Trudeau's Doonesbury has regularly appeared as both the "best loved" and the "most hated" of strips in reader surveys. Joe McCarthy, nuclear bombs, the Vietnam War, Ronald Reagan, ecological damage were obvious and successive targets for the new-wave cartoonists, the best--or anyhow the most successful--of whom have now been absorbed into what still exists of the mainstream comic pages.

As well, however, as those relatively mild exemplars, other, sleazier cartoonists of the new persuasion work on the doubtful border between the mainstream and the underground press. Homosexuality, incest, pedophilia--nothing is out of bounds for them. Their protagonists, traveling across America, meet, instead of the good folk whom Little Orphan Annie encountered, every sort of vileness. A parody strip, called Little Orphan Amphetamine, began with a quotation from Mao Tse-tung: "Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation as a whole."

The same border region generated the "graphic novels" which are today's equivalent of the old adventure comic books. Employing the full paraphernalia of sophisticated illustration, they tell stories that can be, at one level, very serious--about the Nazi Holocaust, for example--and, at another, gratuitously violent and obscene. What almost all of them have in common is that their vision is dark--like the new Batman--rather than bright, ugly rather than beautiful, bitter rather than optimistic, cruel rather than genial.

To this melancholy scene there is one universally acknowledged exception--Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts, which is carried by more than two hundred newspapers, in sixty different countries, with some ninety million readers. And justly so. Peanuts is kindly, perceptive, funny, and wise. Its underlying morality and occasional quotations from Scripture even prompted a best-selling book called The Gospel According to Peanuts, written by a Methodist theologian. Schulz, however, does not think that the comic strip should be a message medium; he joined out of good nature but against his better judgment in Garry Trudeau's 1985 proposal that on Thanksgiving Day, every cartoonist should deal with the problem of "world hunger."

Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, who died a few years ago at the age of 97, was the daughter, wife, mother-in-law, and mother of successive publishers of the New York Times. When she was 13, she persuaded her father to introduce a comic strip. Six months later she told him it was boring, so the strip was killed. The New York Times has never carried a picture strip since. Nor has the London Times. Nor, for that matter, has NATIONAL REVIEW. If any of these distinguished journals wanted such a thing, it could hardly do better than Peanuts, which seems to work for every height of brow.

Peanuts is as much loved in Britain as in America, but Britain has never fully shared the comic-strip culture. The London papers had no comic sections, only a few isolated strips. However, such has been the decline of American strips that Britain could now claim two--Garth and Modesty Blaise--which are stronger adventure strips than any current equivalent in the United States. Even more surprisingly, Andy Capp crossed the Atlantic westward with great success. Archetypally British working-class, Andy--drinking, gambling, wife-abusing--is politically incorrect to a degree that would scarcely be tolerated now from an American artist.

Comic strips have always attracted puritan fire. (Collectors of trivia might care to note an anachronism in The Music Man, where, supposedly around the turn of the century, one of the signs of trouble in River City is said to be the memorizing of jokes from Captain Billy's Whiz-Bang. In reality this once-famous magazine began as a mimeographed joke-and-cartoon paper for the troops in the First World War, produced by Captain Wilford H. Fawcett, who continued it professionally in peacetime.) During the 1950s the attack, led by a book called Seduction of the Innocent, reached a point of hysteria not unlike the condemnation of nasty rock videos today. The publishers responded, as Hollywood had responded to similar condemnation of the movies, with a code of self-censorship. The restrictive moralism of that code contributed both to the anemia of modern mainstream comics and to the unpleasantness of the underground comics that defied it.

'WHAT'S SO Funny about the Comics?" is the title of one essay on the subject. But comics in the golden age were not so much funny ha-ha as comedies in the sense in which one speaks of the human comedy. Sometimes crude, vulgar, and apparently semi-literate, but no less often skillfully drawn and wittily scripted, sensational (Eek!), violent (Pow!), sentimental (Sob!), the American comic strip in its heyday represented an indomitable simplicity, the spirit that turned the polyglot immigrants of Ellis Island into Americans, the spirit of Joe Palooka, Little Orphan Annie, and Li'l Abner, the spirit that overcame the Dragon Lady and Ming the Merciless.

Some intellectual commentators appear not to understand, or not to mind, what has happened. Just as their equally imperceptive colleagues prefer blood-splattered spaghetti Westerns to the decency of a genuine Western, and the depressing tunelessness of modern musicals to the lyric warmth of Rodgers and Hammerstein, so they fail to complain about the diminished and degenerate comics of today.

There was a Peanuts strip in which Linus entered, wearing a sheet and carrying a candle. "I have been told," he said, "that it is better to light one small candle than to rail against the darkness. Of course," he added, "there are always some who will disagree." And in the last panel stood Lucy, stamping and shaking her fist and shouting, "You naughty darkness!" A very shrewd character, Lucy.