CSotD: Gall is divided into four panels
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And so, we go from yesterday's loveable loser to this unloveable loser.
When life hands you the milk of human kindness, the Piranha Club will make it into healthy, delicious yoghurt. I have to say that I am really burning out on mean-spirited sarcasm as a punchline, particularly the fad in comics of creating a misanthropic animal as a main character whose only function is to spit out sarcasm in a strip whose only gag is to set up that punchline.
However, Bo Grace has managed to create a strip full of misanthropes, mopes and slugs in which, even when you see it coming, there is real humor in the unfolding.
A few weeks back, a strip in which the occasionally-seen brother appeared in Non Sequitur was featured here, and, in the comments section, Wiley Miller said he had based the character not on Richard Nixon (whom he somewhat resembles and who commentators often suggest was the model) but on Dabney Coleman, whom he also resembles and who starred in the short-lived sitcom "Buffalo Bill," playing an ascerbic talkshow host.
I've been pondering that since, because I loved "Buffalo Bill" for several episodes, and then I started not loving it and then I stopped watching it. The problem was that you can't set up an unpleasant character as the central character of a TV show and just leave him there. As the character gained a daughter and went through a normal life, his one-note misanthropy became unconvincing and discordant, and yet it was the point of the show.
Norman Lear has pulled that off, but mostly because his characters were there to make political points, not to throw pies and have fun, and I always thought Lear's shows had better ratings than writing anyway. I think Alex Keaton was a more convincing, well-realized character than either Archie Bunker or Maude Findlay, and I didn't watch his show either.
The problem is, I think, that TV sitcom characters and comic strip characters are both two-dimensional at best, but that comic strips are a two-dimensional medium while TV begs for added depth.
In a comic strip, you can take a character from one place to another, from one day to another, from one year to another, with no need for segues or even an explanation. A panel can contain one, two or more lines of dialogue, or it can be nothing but a silent reaction. Action doesn't have to blocked out or even depicted in a comic strip. The action, the segues, the passage of time all take place in the reader's head, and in a matter of seconds.
By contrast, a 30-minute sitcom forces you to create extended dialogue both to reveal character and to explain action. There is also an element of continuity and development in television, even when there are no continuing plotlines from one episode to another, that simply doesn't exist in most comic strips. A character in a gag-a-day comic strip is rebooted fresh each morning. But once a TV character has explained a motivation, that explanation becomes part of the character moving forward.
It's inevitable in that format that, while a fool like Gilligan can remain a fool forever, and the villains on that show could be one-episode cardboard characters who fulfilled their role and then disappeared forever, a confrontational character like Hot-Lips Houlihan will eventually have to display some element of humanity if she's going to be in the show week after week. M*A*S*H dealt with that by recasting the character as sympathetic, though by then the show had become a weekly lecture the earnestness of which made "All in the Family" look like a Three Stooges short.
Which brings us back to Bo Grace and the Piranha Club. Grace can use his two-dimensional characters to successfully pull off variations on the same set of gags day after day, in a two-dimensional world that has allowed artists to do that since the days of Maggie and Jiggs, Mutt and Jeff, and the Katzenjammer Kids.
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