Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: In the groove

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Mike Peterson Published: May 10, 2014 1 minute 2 comments

This is going to be a backwards posting, and you'll understand at the end. But, as long as it's going to be backwards at all, it might as well be completely backwards:

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Bizarro)

(Speed Bump)

Well, obviously it's not the same castaway. Better rescue Piraro's guy first. Coverly's guy says he's fine for now.

A Promise Kept

I promised the other day to be funny and then wasn't. So here are a couple of strips that don't particularly bring about much commentary but that cracked me up. 

(Pickles)

(Pros and Cons)

One of the founding principles around here is that a good strip, even a silly one, is thought-provoking.

Often, yes. Always? No.

There's a certain type of strip that establishes a style that allows it to be consistently playful in a familiar way, and I honestly can't tell you how to distinguish a "groove" from a "rut," except that a groove still asks for a little work from the reader.

Pickles and Pros & Cons are strips with a well-established style, though they couldn't be more different from each other. The Pickles groove is a blend of "ain't it the truth?" and "come to think of it" while the logical twists in Pros & Cons provide a mix of "come to think of it" with "got me again."

So they each make you think, but not in the same way.

Pickles began the gag yesterday, with the water bottle/hamster joke, and then caps it off today with an extension of the joke that remains within the character of the grandmother, and that's critical.

Granted, it's not as specifically "her" as it would be if she were Betty, who's a little younger and whom we would expect to regularly work out on a treadmill, but it's within her established traits enough that we continue to concentrate on the gag itself and aren't distracted by a sense that we had no idea she would even have a treadmill.

And I'm going to add another one here:

Today's "Retail" caps off an arc with Marla having caught the staff gathered around laughing over something and reflects on the fact that she's now the store manager — but regular readers will realize that she's still Marla, that part of her annoyance is because she has a management technique of "Come on, gang: Work with me here" that's really no different than when she was the assistant and acted as a buffer between them and Stuart, the boss.

As for Pros & Cons, Kieran Meehan plays "Gotcha!" as well as anyone in the business. When I read that first panel, my response was "Wait a minute, does he mean …" or, to put it another way, my response to the first panel was the second panel.

Which made me laugh harder when I got to the third, in large part because that particular attorney has a well-established personna as something of a dolt. He's really the only character for whom the gag works: Most of the others are too sharp to twist themselves into a rhetorical dead end, and the cop is not so much doltish as he is incredibly insensitive. Big difference.

A gag that can be tied to any character in the strip is either a bad gag or a sign that you need to polish and focus your characters.

All of which raises this issue: I don't find it amusing to read the same lame, repetitive "I hate my boss" and "I love to eat" and "our checking account is overdrawn" gags day after day after day.

But I just said that establishing a style and a set of consistent characters is the key to good gag work.

Which brings me dangerously close to admitting that I'm a snob, that some cartoons just aren't subtle enough for my exquisitely tuned comedy palate.

Look, I won't deny that a lot of strips are so obvious and repetitive that I find them boring, that I find their "groove" to be, rather, a "rut."

But that's why I champion a large and diverse comics page. I likened newspaper content the other day to menu items at a diner — nothing in particular standing out, all of it satisfying and enjoyable, like french fries and coleslaw. Necessary, but more for the overall experience than for any one of them individually.

And, in Michael Cavna's coverage of the NY Post's abysmal decision, Hilary Price refers to the comics page as a "buffet."

You don't have to order everything on the menu. You don't have to put some of everything on the buffet onto your plate.

But "snobbery" comes in the form of condemning other people for liking things that you don't or mocking things simply because they aren't made just for you.

And, this being the anti-snark comics blog, we try to avoid that here.

Two confessions:

1. I don't feature those repetitive, predictable strips that I think are in a rut. But they are among the 120 or so that I read every day. And I'll bet that Emeril Lagasse eats peanut butter sandwiches, too.

2. I said that the above strips were funny but wouldn't spark much commentary. I lied. Sue me.

Here's why we led with the silly stuff today:

I recently lost a brother to dementia, so I can't be objective about Tony Husband's memories of his father's slow fade to black.

But I think it's an extraordinarily loving, touching, well-done tribute and memoir.

And this time, I really, honestly have nothing more to say.