CSotD: Sons at Christmas: Different as Knight and Day
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Keith Knight has been chronicling his life in "the K Chronicles" for getting onto a couple of decades now, and it is consistently fresh because he rarely reaches into the Bag of Accepted Memes for his observational gags. He just tells you what he's been thinking and doing lately, with more wit than jokes to enliven it.
In recent years, that has meant reflections on parenthood, both here and in "the Knight Life," a more traditional strip he does, but that is also pegged to his own experiences.
I don't know how much lag time he builds into his stories; Lynn Johnston used to put a couple of years between her family's events and the versions she depicted in "For Better or For Worse," but I don't think Knight is using anywhere near that length of time to reflect on the meaning of it all or to build a little wall of plausible deniability.
In any case, his little guy in the strip is about the actual age of my youngest grandson, of whom my son posted on Facebook the other day that he and his older sister had participated in the wrapping of a gift for their mother, and that he was then "able to keep the secret for the whole time it took Sarah to walk through the doorway but not how long it took to take off her jacket."
Keith's observations are great nostalgia for those of us well through that stage, and I'm sure great "ain't it the truth" fodder for those currently along for the ride. Today's certainly made me smile, and that's better than getting a laff — it takes more.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the parenting timeline, today's Arlo & Janis took me a minute:
Arlo and Janis Day's son, Gene, is on the verge of marriage to a very nice girl who has a young daughter, and they're spending the holiday at their own place, which happens to also be her father's restaurant and Gulfside complex.
At first, the vision of Gene standing on the dock put me in mind of my eldest son calling from overseas when he was in the Navy, but I quickly realized that we'd been separated at Christmas many times by then, and, the times we were together through those years, he and his brother had been apart from their mother.
This doesn't reduce my appreciation of the strip, because Jimmy Johnson's characters are consistent and three-dimensional. Arlo and Janis dwell in a place between the traditional "Comic Strip Couple" and the non-fiction observational humor of Knight's work and so reading the strip is like reading a novel. You don't have to be in the same exact place as the characters to experience what they're going through.
There are only a handful of cartoonists who work on that level. Frankly, I don't get a lot of cheer from the traditional Christmas strips, in large part because I've seen the same gags now every December for a whole lot of years and also because, as suggested above, it doesn't take much to get a laff, but it takes a lot to get a smile.
Arlo and Janis gets consistent smiles from me, as well as frequent laffs.
But they aren't depicting me, now that Gene is beyond being a little kid. The only place I've found myself on the comics page in that respect was in "Shirley & Son," the late Jerry Bittle's strip about a divorced family.
I miss Jerry, who was one of my first friends among cartoonists and a very funny, insightful guy in email as well as in his work, but I particularly miss "Shirley & Son," which was still unfolding and establishing itself when he died.
Here's my life at the holidays, depicted in comic strip form back in 2000:
… and also …
By then, I was 16 years into being divorced, so the strip was more nostalgia than current events for me. The funny thing is that Jerry was in a stable, longterm marriage and got his information on divorce from friends.
The important thing is, he got it right. There aren't a lot of creators, in the comics or certainly in television, who have the talent or who care enough to get it right. Jerry stood out.
If you happen to be still in the same dark period of transition as Shirley and her disrupted family, you might take some holiday comfort from something I wrote as a newspaper column in 1994 but then reprinted on my personal blog a decade later. As I wrote there, "Others have been through this, and, while there is no fast-forward button you can push, it will eventually end."
And then you get to a point where all three of these strips will make you smile. And maybe laff.
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