CSotD: Domestic Comedy
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It's not considered hip to like the Lockhorns, but, while it is tragically bereft of misanthropic talking animals, it's a consistently funny strip and John Reiner's art is, to play with the phrase, "simply" superb.
Not being an artist, I don't know if it's harder to create intricate detail or to work smoothly in a plain style, but what I do know as a reader is that I'd rather enjoy Reiner's line and Bunny Hoest's gagwriting than look at something that combines the intricate draftsmanship of the 1897 Sears & Roebuck catalog with a similar level of action and character development.
This ties in with my comments the other day about the herd mentality of snark, in that, while it's hip to hate the Lockhorns, it's very hip to reference the Honeymooners and their bastard child, the Flintstones, and uberhip to even know who the Bickersons were.
To which I say, "Fap!"
Upper right is kind of weak, but lower left and lower right more than make up for it, while the other two are solid 3's on a scale of 5. Your mileage may vary, but it shouldn't show up as different unless we raise the scale to 10.
I will admit that the Lockhorns are so omnipresent on comics pages that I had glazed over them and dismissed them as a strip for the bluehair crowd, until I did a reader survey in which we divided our strips up into categories of seven each and asked readers to pick one (only) in each group to keep and one (only) to dump.
I expected the strip to be picked as the keeper by a fair number of 55+ readers, and as the one to dump by a raft of 18-34's, but it was singled out as the favorite in its category by a whole lot of readers of all ages and both sexes.
It made me start paying more attention to the strip, and I began to see why such a diverse number of people liked it. Then, a few months later, when I interviewed Bunny, I was able to really get beyond the surface-simplicity and gain an appreciation for her craft.
There are several single-panel dailies that, on Sunday, offer multiple gags, and it's hard, when you do that, not to have, not "a stinker or two," but a layout where a couple of the gags just aren't up to the level of the others, so that you end up topping yourself.
Didn't happen to Hoest and Reiner today. This was a very solid outing.
Bears With Furniture
Meanwhile, speaking of domestic comedy, Mike Baldwin hit me at just the right moment with this "Cornered" gag.
I had, just 12 hours earlier, ended an email exchange with this:
Besides, I have one of my back-up laptops over the sink and, if you do dishes too often, you can't stream anything longer than Jon Stewart because the dishes run out before the show is over. That makes no sense now, does it?
Yes, I know guys who carry a lot of Felix Unger in their DNA.
But 99 percent of the humor of The Odd Couple was based on the assumption that Felix was annoying and that Oscar was the default, the guy who got the babes and who you would want to play poker and have a beer with.
And that Felix just said, "with whom."
Or, as it was expressed in a Rita Rudner quote that became our household mantra when the definition of "household" came down to me and my teenaged sons, "Men don't live like people. They live like bears with furniture."
The good thing was that, through most of those years, I was in a long-distance relationship, which meant that every four-to-six weeks, my girlfriend would come to visit, in anticipation of which I'd go into a flurry of making the place once more inhabitable by humans.
Today? Well, read the caption again.
Of course, one of the things I learned in my second bachelorhood — which, by the way, is a time of delightful, eye-opening frankness — is that a lot of guys won't even take a shower before a date, much less clean up their caves.
For the record: I still bathe regularly.
Just in case anyone out there was thinking of offering an incentive for me to clean up the place.
OHGODPLEASEMAKETHEMSTOP
I know a lot of cartoonists make a practice of not looking at other people's work for fear of being influenced by it.
I also realize that sometimes more than one cartoonist will come up with the same idea at the same time, and, while it's kind of a sign that you didn't come up with anything that wasn't a little obvious, it's inevitable that it happens every so often, even with reasonably good ideas.
That said, come on. Next person who draws this damn thing should lose cartooning privileges for a month.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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