CSotD: A feel for her character
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Rina Piccolo, who draws "Tina's Groove" and is one of the "Six Chix," has for the past year also been drawing "Velia, Dear" and, on what I believe if the strip's first birthday, enters comics history by depicting the main character being groped. Or maybe not.
Not that Velia isn't being groped. She certainly is. The issue, rather, is how much of a breakthrough this is. After all, Fritz the Cat was, despite his name, a notorious horndog who went from innocent libido to violent perversion over the course of the strip, and Little Annie Fanny was mauled on a regular basis.
But Fritz was a feature in a comic book, not a strip, and Little Annie Fanny was a feature in "Playboy," where the comics regularly featured sex, and was more of an occasional multi-panel cartoon than a real, regularly-appearing comic strip. And why am I parsing things so sharply?
Because, well, what the hell is this, after all?
On most levels, it's a comic strip. It's formatted like a comic strip, it features the same characters in a continuing story and it's updated regularly. But it's not a syndicated comic strip that appears in newspapers and it doesn't aspire to be. And it's more than simply a PG-13 rating. There are plenty of webstrips that have depicted sex, drugs, drunkenness and other things that wouldn't play on the comics page of the Daily Bugle.
What "Velia Dear" represents, I think, is a mainstreaming of webcomics that reveals an interesting side of a conversation that never quite ends up making a point — the "rivalry" of syndicated versus web cartoonists. This continuing argument, which disrupts cartoon websites constantly, includes a false premise, which is that a syndicated cartoonist could move over to the web and, by mimicking the moves of the successful web cartoonists, also achieve commercial success with their existing strips.
This is similar, I think, to the notion in the 1920s that all a stage actor had to do to become a movie star was to step in front of a camera instead of out onto a stage. There were many well-established, successful stage actors who disproved that notion, not because they couldn't act but because, well, they just didn't have the right chops. And then, when talkies came in, there were film stars from the Silent Era who couldn't make that transition.
The Broadway folks were right in saying that a lot of movie stars couldn't have made it in their world, but they were wrong in not acknowledging that the opposite was also true. And there's a lot of that going around in the web/print comics debates, which aren't debates at all but simply what the Brits call "slanging matches."
Into which steps "Velia Dear," a strip that is not about intergalactic space or three college buddies with a talking pet, but still manages to be off the main road enough that you wouldn't mistake it for "Tina's Groove."
Now, I remain convinced that Velia and Tina are sisters, one of whom is a little more centered and conventional than the other, but it's not as simple as Rina thinking up a gag and deciding it's too raunchy for Tina, so assigning it to Velia.
Tina lives in a far less complex world, more of a sitcom setting, where the jokes, while humorous, are more universal and comfortable, and story arcs still yield stand-alone strips and then, once resolved, fade into the archives. This is the dimension in which syndicated comic strips exist.
Velia is not only a more neurotic personality, but her world is more nuanced and her storylines contain more continuity. It's not simply that she cusses like a sailor and that her boyfriend reaches for a tittie now and then. That earthiness is only one aspect of a depiction that goes beyond the PG world of the syndicated cartoon. For example, Velia's mother is not the archetypal Italian sitcom mother we recognize harping over George Costanza on "Seinfeld." Like her daughter, she also is more neurotic, more nuanced and more toxic for it, and her influence on her family is more like that of Tony Soprano's mother. And, as in that atypical TV series, the things that happen here do not end when a story arc wraps up, but continue to have impact on the characters.
After a year of working on it, I think Rina has established a pacing, a sense of atmosphere and a familiarity with her characters that are lifting Velia from an experiment to the level of an ongoing project.
Which is to say that I no longer read it to see how Rina is doing so much as to see how Velia is doing.
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