CSotD: Grooviness
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So the answer to last week's question is, as I suspected, that Tina has left the restaurant in order to expand her universe, and congrats to Rina Piccolo for recognizing the difference between Tina's Groove and Tina's Rut.
Comic strips need to establish a groove. They do not need to dig themselves into a rut.
But I guess that's easier said than done.
To begin with, let's update the old saw that comics sell papers. Sure, they do, and publishers are fools for cutting down their comics section, but only to the extent that they're also fools if they cut back local sports coverage, drop the advice column or reduce their print product from a newspaper to a pamphlet without a similar reduction in price.
But let's focus on comics for the moment.
In the waning days of the 19th Century, comics like the Yellow Kid, the Katzenjammer Kids and so forth did, indeed, spell the difference between buying one paper vs. another for a significant number of readers. But note that this was a question of which paper they bought, not whether they bought a paper at all.
There are very few cities with more than one newspaper today, while a couple of other choices have opened up, including radio, television and motion pictures, options that didn't exist in the days of Hearst and Pulitzer.
So the question is no longer "Which paper shall I buy?" but "Shall I buy a paper?"
It's a very different question, and comics can only be a part of the answer.
I have, in the past, compared the newspaper to a diner, as compared to a fine restaurant.
A restaurant is a book — it's relatively expensive, you don't go there all that often, and you expect something very special when you do.
A diner is a quick, affordable meal. You don't expect a gourmet experience but you expect good food at a reasonable price: A burger, some fries, maybe some cole slaw. You're apt to be there several times a week, and the "some place where everybody knows your name" atmosphere is a major reason why.
Each part of that affordable meal needs to be good, nothing needs to be special, but it all needs to fit: News, sports, comics, advice columns, whatever.
It all has to be familiar and comfortable and welcoming.
In those early, initial days of cartoons in papers, they were individual hit-or-miss pieces, but it wasn't long before it became clear that readers liked strips with established, consistent characters and moods, at which point giants began to emerge: Not just the Yellow Kid but Mutt and Jeff and the Katzenjammer Kids and a whole roster of familiar names.
There's nothing astonishing about this. TV shows are the same thing: People want to settle back with a familiar cast doing familiar jokes in a familiar setting and mood.
The challenge, then, is whether, within that necessary format, you are trying to keep it fresh or simply filling out the form, and both comic strips and TV shows, even ones that start out with a creative burst, can fall into a mindless pattern of same-old same-old.
The last few years of Johnny Carson's stint on the Tonight Show consisted of him throwing familiar, shopworn taglines to an audience that was a whole lot more excited to be there than he was.
Too many comic strips do the same thing, which is why they can be passed along from creator to re-creator to hack.
This classic commercial brags about the variety of donuts they make, but leave us not kid one another: Changing the frosting doesn't change what's underneath and the overwhelming, unintentional message attached to that familar line is one of total burnout, which is why the phrase has outlived the commercial.
Stay fresh, my friends.
Don't ask the question if you don't want the answer
At what point does America get demeaned?
At what point do they start laughing at us as a country?
— Donald J. Trump
(Dr. Jack & Curtis, South Africa)
And, finally …
Bill Whitehead hits a pet peeve with today's Free Range: Movies in which the triumphant conclusion comes halfway through the logical action.
This not only includes mountain climbing movies in which they reach the summit and then, in the next shot, are sitting around the hotel toasting their success, but jungle movies that do the same thing and never explain how they got back to Nairobi, having cut down all the bridges and thoroughly pissed off all the natives en route to whatever treasure they've found.
In real life, people make a greater hero of Robert Scott, who made it to the South Pole second and didn't make it back at all, than of Roald Amundsen, who made it there and back.
Part of the reason is pure public relations and imperialistic pride because Scott was British.
But a lot of it was that Amundsen succeeded by taking advantage of the fact that, the less food you had left in the sleds, the fewer dogs you needed to pull them, which paradoxically meant that you had more food available after all.
And it was gluten-free, but nobody seems to have praised him for that.
Scott got all the glory …
(oops. wrong film. well, you get the idea, anyway)
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