Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: A Mannix of the heart

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Mike Peterson Published: December 9, 2010 1 minute 1 comment

Darrin Bell treads some interesting lines with his strip, "Candorville." From what little I know of his personal life from Facebook and suchlike, it does, in some ways, reflect what he's going through, but not in a journalistic sense.  Rather than recounting real-life events in the strip, he seems to use them to inform the fictional life of his doppelganger, Lemont, as a novelist would. But, unlike a novel, Candorville doesn't lead to a conclusion; it simply continues to unfold.

There are traps in this style of storytelling, and one of the most threatening traps yawning open in Candorville is Lemont's relationship with his buddy, Susan. She is gorgeous and brilliant and they are obviously in love with each other but are each too insecure to chance destroying their friendship by making a move. This emotional tension hangs over the strip in two senses, one internal and the other external: The first is that it means you hope every relationship they enter will fail, because they genuinely deserve each other, and the other is the realization that, if they ever DO try dating, the strip will have jumped the shark and won't be worth reading anymore. 

In this current situation (I hesitate to say "story arc" because Bell weaves these more sweeping situations through multiple short-term story arcs), Lemont has been contacted on Facebook by a girl he had a mad, but, of course, undeclared, crush on in college. This could wrap up quickly, but it could also continue for a year or more, and the only certainty is that he is doomed, doomed, doomed.

And, again, the evidence for that is both internal and external: We know it can't work out because, first of all, we're talking about Lemont, and, second of all, Bell writes for an audience that is old enough to know that these things never work out, and he will tease the hell out of us, but, so far, he's never messed up and stepped off that narrow balance beam of his.

When I was a kid, I used to get really creeped out by TV shows like "Mannix," where a detective would enter a dark room and start poking around, because I knew that some unseen hand was going to come out of nowhere and pistol-whip him.

Now that I'm older, I get the same feeling by watching Lemont reconnect with a girl he had a crush on in college. The big difference is, I've never actually been slugged in the back of the head with a pistol.