CSotD: He’s ready for his close-up, Mr. Toomey
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It's Shark Week, and, in one of comicdom's great annual unilateral crossovers, Sherman has a starring role.
Sherman's Lagoon is one of my favorite sources for the Bob Newhart-style humor I enjoy, but Jim Toomey (whom I interviewed some years ago) is also a genuine aficianado of ocean life and manages to use his strip from time to time to promote marine ecology without becoming preachy.
For instance, he speaks out against finning and shark fin soup in general, but, as seen here, he's not above a joke about eating baby seals, and he did name one of his collections "Poodle: The Other White Meat."
Sharks eat things. Get over it. And not just "get over it" but let's have some fun with it.
I like the honesty of a strip that stars a shark and then actually lets him be a shark. I mean, aside from the candles (see that interview).
Disney was always willing to feature lions in his True Life Adventures, but you'd have thought they lived on road kill, because, while he sometimes showed them eating, they never seemed to actually catch anything and certainly never killed other animals.
At the risk of bursting Walt's bubble, "Circle of Life" is more than a song to real lions who are rather fond of warthogs, and not as buddies, a fact I never learned at Disneyland.
I'm a bit suspicious of self-styled nature lovers who don't acknowledge the nature of nature. When I was a wee lad, I read the tales of Ernest Thompson Seton, but later became a bit skeptical of some of his purported nature facts and so was somewhat relieved when I recently learned that he was one of the sentimental authors condemned by John Burroughs as "nature fakers," a charge that drew additional power when it was picked up by Burroughs' friend and admirer, Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote of the true naturalist's "half-indignant and half-amused contempt both for the men who invented preposterous fiction about wild animals and for the credulous stay-at-home people who accepted such fiction as fact."
And we're not talking innocent error. In fact, when George Bird Grinnell wrote a review of Roosevelt's "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman" and proclaimed it charming and entertaining but full of errors, since the author obviously wasn't much of a hunter, Roosevelt furiously stormed into the offices of "Forest and Stream" to confront him.
But Grinnell sat him down and went through the book pointing out the aforementioned errors and the two struck up a friendship that included founding the "Boone and Crockett Club," one of the first great sportsman-headed conservation groups. (Roosevelt also supported Grinnell in founding the Audubon Society and in transplanting bison from the Bronx Zoo to the Great Plains to re-establish the nearly extinct herds.)
It is not necessary to wear Birkenstocks to be concerned about the environment. I was back home in the Adirondacks this past weekend for a reunion and, at one point, braced myself as a friend started to rant about "tree-huggers," only to find that he was furious with the "bare roads" mandate that had come out of Albany during the Olympics 30 years ago, which involves using salt or (more recently) calcium chloride on the highways so the city folk wouldn't have to drive on packed, sanded snow in winter.
"Any wonder you can't catch a trout downstream of those roads?" he groused. "You can cross right over the road and catch fish upstream!"
It's a protective, pragmatic attitude towards the environment that Roosevelt (a frequent visitor to and protector of the Adirondacks) would have appreciated, given what else he wrote about realistic nature writers:
"We owe a real debt to the men who truthfully portray for us, with pen or pencil, any one of the many sides of outdoor life; whether they act as artists or as writers, whether they care for big beasts or small birds, for the homely farmland or the vast, lonely wilderness, whether they are scientists proper, or hunters of game, or lovers of all nature, which, indeed, scientists and hunters ought also to be."
I think TR would have guffawed over the joyous nature fakery of Sherman's Lagoon and seen through it to the real affection for marine life that Toomey has brought to his work for the past 21 years (as documented in this archivist's note from King Features.)
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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