CSotD: Newman!
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Some strips are more autobiographical, or perhaps self-referential, than others. It's a dangerous game to play, because the more you base any work on personal experience, the more you risk a kind of slavish dependence on real events, and a tunnel vision about what it all means, that keep it from being universal.
Which, in turn, keeps it from being art.
It's not an either/or proposition, of course. Keith Knight's "Knight Life" is based on his real life in a very upfront and direct way, and he's both funny enough and insightful enough to be able to pull it off. Others prefer a more arm's-length approach: Jan Eliot has used her transformative experience with Habitat projects to launch a continuing storyline for the grandmother in "Stone Soup" that is apparently quite separate from her actual experience but which adds considerably to the strip.
And then there's Newman.
On her blog, Sandra Bell-Lundy has been up front that she is not a dog person and that acquiring a golden retriever was not her idea. Since her strip, "Between Friends," is a rather warm strip about feelings, I'd bet a large number of her readers are, indeed, dog people, and, judging from comments and vibes, it has seemed that some of her blog followers have been waiting for her to post "Omigod! I LUV this darling doggie!"
*Ahem*
That hasn't happened.
And yet there has been a sense that, despite her instincts and his very dog-like behavior, Newman has, over the past three years, been working his way into her world and even, to a limited but genuine extent, into her heart, and last month, she admitted it on her blog.
Today, she admits it in her strip. And I think she does it rather well.
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