Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: For the kid who has everything, poor kid …

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Mike Peterson Published: October 4, 2010 1 minute 0 comments

Edison Lee with a better-than-average gag about overscheduled kids.

One thing that makes this strip appealing is that you never know on Monday whether it's headed into a completely fantastic, surrealistic arc that will involve the space shuttle or some such, or a simple kid-based story about a brighter-than-average little boy. What in some strips would be a failure to develop a consistent voice is part and parcel of this strip and it works.

The idea that kids no longer have time for play isn't particularly far out. I saw a PSA on television yesterday encouraging kids to go play in the woods. Now, on the one hand, not every kid who needs to play in the woods has ready access to woods in which to play. They don't even all have playgrounds in their neighborhoods anymore, which brings us back a little over 100 years to when Jacob Riis was trying to make playgrounds a central part of urban planning and the destruction of the slums. He was successful then, but things are slipping away again.

On the other hand, it's a reminder of the movement which began at more or less the same time to form groups like the Boy Scouts and to establish summer camps so that city kids would get some sense of how nature and reality work. Some of this still exists, but many of these once-nature-based groups have started to focus on "real life," which is to say, they no longer expose kids to a different world so much as they try to put the kids' existing world into a more constructive context.

That's an okay goal, but it isn't the same one, and there's a danger of those activities simply being one more thing to put on an already over-filled calendar.

There is grace in doing nothing in your own bedroom, between the music lessons and the youth sports and the tutoring and all the other necessary activities of the modern kid. And I love how Edison's "improvement" of Lincoln Logs makes them more compatible with modern life and thus completely misses the point.