CSotD: Better than nothing. No, wait, it IS nothing …
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I saw the sales kit when "The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee" was first launched in 2006 and it struck me as too political to be funny and too whimsical to make it as an editorial strip. Maybe it struck John Hambrock the same way, because he almost immediately (well, the strip's only four years old) toned down the "little wise guy" aspects of the strip and began playing up the whimsy.
It's still grounded in the here-and-now, but the observations seem less strident and much more in the nature of social, rather than political, commentary, than in the samples for the launch. There's also a great deal more "show me" than "tell me," which is probably a case of the cartoonist finding his voice, rounding out his characters and hitting his stride. A lot of strips never manage to do that, even in more than four years.
What I find particularly appealing about the strip is that Hambrock manages to steer a course between fantasy and reality in the sense that Edison comes up with fantastic inventions and ideas but you're never quite sure when they are based on his identity as a genius and his identity as a goofy little kid.
Today is a pretty good example of that. I'm not sure his latest invention is any more or any less useful than what the Fed, the administration, the critics or anyone else has come up with. Sometimes there is no course to steer between geniuses and goofy little kids.
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