CSotD: Comics and identity
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One of the major rules in creating three-dimensional characters is to know more about them than you necessarily share. Comics are, for the most part, two-dimensional in both a graphic and a conceptual sense, with the characters having limited if any back-stories, and the back-stories that do exist being mostly an archive of episodes rather than true characteristics that would flesh out and explain their actions, reactions and motivations.
But the Ardins of Edge City are as Jewish as the Pattersons of "For Better or For Worse" were Canadian. Lynn Johnston insisted on making her mailboxes red and celebrating Thanksgiving in October, and she almost always had a nice memorial strip on that holiday she called "Remembrance Day."
Perhaps that paved the way for Terry and Patty LaBan to make their characters notably, not just nominally, Jewish. Many cartoons will put their characters in a sort of non-denominational church on Sunday, and especially at Easter, but mostly for the purposes of a sort of non-denominational joke about sleeping through the sermon or having one of the kids say one of the darndest things to the preacher on the way out. But even in the case of Family Circus, where the family is not vaguely Christian but specifically Roman Catholic, there is no real identity to their religion. Church is simply a setting, like the office or the supermarket or school. As today's Yom Kippur-themed strip suggests, Edge City is not simply about a family that happens to be Jewish.
And yet the other part of this identity is that it's not the point of the strip. It's simply part of the underpinnings. A century ago, "Bringing Up Father" was a constant reflection on the Irish experience in America, with the tension being between Jiggs, happy in his workingclass roots, and his social-climbing wife Maggie, who longed to assimilate into the society of Count Uptoten and the other American Brahmins. While their website describes the strip as being "about a Jewish American family juggling relationships, careers and traditions at
the fast pace of modern life," the LaBans don't offer "How to Be a Jewish Mother" commentary and self-parody any more than Lynn Johnston had her characters obsessing over polar bears and beavers and Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
But at holy days and on other occasions, the Ardins live their lives as they would in real life, and, having seen that, you can then feel that portion of their identity as you read the strips in which it is not part of the plot. That's how characters become more than two dimensional.
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