CSotD: A celebration and an apology
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By the time "Harold and the Purple Crayon" arrived on the scene, I was a semi-literate young man of five, and one who already knew the main character from poring through my parents' collection of Barnaby.
Different name, but it hardly mattered, because I hadn't been able to read the words anyway. I knew he was a little boy who looked like me and to whom strange and wonderful things happened.
Looking back, I think the best part of Barnaby/Harold was that he was only marginally in control of what happened to him, and yet he remained blandly unflappable.
His fairy godfather would blunder the pair of them into some situation, or he'd draw something with his crayon that didn't turn out quite as he had expected, but the moon went with him. It was all cool.
Pretty good metaphor for a kid who would grow up to be a newspaper reporter: Follow the fairy godfather, go where the crayon leads, keep your eyes open.
To put it in the archetypes of the next generation, I was more Oblio than Max.
And I suppose that put me in a better place for the other cartoons I would find in my parents' collections, because I didn't feel threatened, only fascinated, by an octopus emerging from a city sewer.
Or by this, however the hell it could happen.
Or by this, whatever the hell it meant.
And I think I liked cartoons because you could ponder them. Which is pretty much what I do, starting at 4:45 every morning. I tried staying up to do the blog at midnight, but cartoonists whose sites update at midnight often live in exotic places like Chicago or San Francisco, so that didn't work out.
Oh well, early to bed and early to rise. Still working on the middle segment, not too sure about the first, I leave the last to you.
As for the "every morning" part, that's a hangover from my days at the paper. I didn't come in from vacation to follow fire trucks around, but I had a weekly column for about 10 years and I only did a rerun once, when I had my appendix out. The rest of the time, I wrote an extra column before I clocked out for vacation.
I figured unless the paper was going to be free, readers deserved fresh copy, not some lame "here's one of my favorites" retread.
That has carried over to the blog: You can tell when I'm off the job, because I'll write a fresh take on a "classic" cartoon, but, though the cartoon isn't new, the text is.
Four years without failure, as of today. I'm quite proud of that.
What I'm not at all proud of is what prompted me to start in the first place, so here's an apology to dampen the celebratory mood.
I've said before that my mission is to draw positive attention to cartoons, as an antidote to the snark of people who tear down the work of their betters for the amusement of the jeering yokels who flock to the stoning.
And I quickly lost interest in the weekly snark column that once appeared in a Baltimore alternative paper, in which they would oh-so-cleverly rip apart the work of the cartoonists whose work appeared in the Sun.
I might have forgiven the fact that their tie to the local comics page meant they repeatedly attacked the same half-dozen targets, if they had shown any knowledge of how the art form works. But how often can you read the same nasty, off-target remarks about the same strips before you wander away to freshen your drink?
That column is gone, but it spawned imitators, some more clever than others, but all in the herd-mentality of savaging the same-old, same-old mob-sourced victims.
Yes, we get it: You are too hip for Garfield, too insightful for Family Circus, too great a storyteller for Mark Trail, and eager to make homophobic jokes about Rex Morgan because some other hipster made them first.
And that makes it hip, you see.
(What? You thought "innovation" and "non-conformity" were supposed to be part of hipness? How charmingly naive!)
All of which was very annoying, but could be dismissed as a bunch of showoffs and bullies who probably didn't have the cojones to act like that in front of anyone in person, and a bit, too, like the gnat who apologized for being such a burden, sitting on the bull's horn, to which the bull replied that, had the bug not spoken up, he wouldn't have even noticed him.
But snark is infectious, and the bull would certainly notice a swarm of gnats.
Granted, Samuel Johnson said, "A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but, one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still."
However, the bite does still sting.
And then this happened: A swarm of gnats began to gather around Lynn Johnston, as she wound down "For Better or For Worse," and, forgive me, Lynn, I joined in the snark.
I'm not apologizing for disagreeing with her artistic decisions, as she gathered in the Pattersons, bringing Liz back from her exciting life teaching on the Rez, reconciling Michael with the wife who had made him quit his freelancing job by "accidentally on purpose" getting pregnant.
I liked that the kids had been given "wings and roots" and I still disagree with her choices.
But, let me explain this in plain terms: I didn't have to be such a goddam asshole about it.
Moreover, after I dropped out of the snarkfest, I realized that, even if you don't join in, standing by and watching is pretty much the same thing. Silence implies consent, and you are still part of the mob, even if you aren't waving a pitchfork.
So here we are, on the fourth birthday of this blog, AKA, the fourth year of my apology, and I'm glad so many people like it, and I'm sorry that the snarky blogs get so much larger numbers.
That's the way the world works, I guess.
But you don't have to like it, you certainly don't have to go along with it, and, if I can provide an alternative, I'll feel better about the whole thing.
Meanwhile, here's my favorite FBOFW of all time. Great strip, Lynn.
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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