Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Family Feud

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Mike Peterson Published: May 16, 2011 1 minute 0 comments

If you're not reading Ink Pen, you're missing out on a strip that provides a well-tempered combination of wit and nonsense, and one that appeals to me because much of that wit and nonsense is devoted to skewering comics conventions. (The traditions, that is, not the gatherings.)

In art, it is a mark of quality to know more than you depict, and, while that is also true of painting and music, it is critical in creating fictional characters.

One of the standard drama-school activities is for the actors in a play to sit around and talk about who their characters are when they're not on stage, to create an awareness of the character beyond the lines and actions in the play itself. Good actors are able to build three-dimensional characters because they can see past the hour their character actually struts and frets upon the stage.

Similarly, a cartoonist needs to look past the "cartoonish" aspects of a character in order to give depth to a two-dimensional figure. The gold standard is Doonesbury, where characters evolve over time and we can watch, for instance, a Vietnamese orphan start as a sort of stick-figure shouting Burger King slogans in baby talk and develop texture and depth as she morphs into an insightful second wife to the title character.

It is not necessary for every strip to be Doonesbury. It is, however, necessary that the cartoonist put some thought into characters if they are going to be more than pale shadows of other cartoon characters.

I don't think any of the other characters in Ink Pen have as deep a backstory as Tyr, the hard-drinking, ham-headed, violent Norse god. Several, in fact, are purposefully shallow, because they represent shallow character types in the medium — the Ted Baxters of the comics. (And that wonderful, iconic character was significantly diminished in the later years of MTM as they tried to give him "depth.")

What matters, and what works so well here, is that Phil Dunlap understands Tyr, and so depicts him in a way that makes it unnecessary for you to study up on the actual Norse god in order to gain a sense of who he is, and to find today's Ink Pen extremely funny.