CSotD: No joke today

Mike Peterson Published: April 20, 2010 1 minute 2 comments

Doonesbury

Comics don't have to make you laugh. I've been impressed with the turnaround in "Doonesbury," from a funny but kind of snide wise-cracking strip to one that has really turned out some fine storytelling. I think Garry Trudeau has grown up with the rest of his age cohort and has gained some perspective on the world, just as we have.

Which is not to say that I don't like snide, wise-cracking strips in general, or that I don't look back at old Doonesbury collections and laugh. But the 20-somethings have all sorts of strips in which talking animals make snide wise cracks. It will be interesting to see if any of those characters are able to go through the transformations that the Walden crowd has been through.

Meanwhile, I think Trudeau is doing something to report on the war that I don't see from anyone else, at least not in the mainstream. This character, Mel, is nobody you'd have met in the comic strips a generation ago.

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JayFish

I love Richard Thompson’s cartooning but I do not see anything funny or amusing or clever about this dialog. I’m a wannabe comic-strip writer myself and I know it is extremely difficult if not impossible to be amusing on a daily basis (except maybe for “Zits”),
so I find it interesting that something like this becomes a cartoon-of-the-day.

Mike

Well, all I can say is that comics don’t have to make you laugh. Trudeau has become a terrific storyteller over the years, and this is an important story. And there is a “joke” in that she comes up with a very lame excuse about why talking about her situation is making her start to cry.
Rex Morgan isn’t funny, either, and I’m enjoying the current story. Comics serve many functions.

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CSotD: No joke today

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JayFish

Mike

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