CSotD: The Heart of Holly Stone
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Today's Stone Soup stands up well enough on its own, but to absorb the full effect of the bathos, you have to have been following the saga of "Holly's boyfriend" since it began nearly a full month ago. We've not only gone through the sturm und drang alluded to here of Holly's mom insisting on meeting the lad, but we've had a sneak-out tryst at the mall on a school night and we've learned that Holly is doing better than ever in class because she's trying to impress Jordan.
Her boyfriend. Or maybe not. Apparently, it depends on whom you ask.
Thursday, it was announced that "Brenda Starr" would be ending with the calendar year, after 70 years of adventures, and such negative milestones often bring up the question of "story strips" and their viability. There are few of these ongoing adventure or soap opera comic strips left, and, with a few exceptions, most of the survivors are tottering along on the loyalty of longtime readers and little else. And a few of those — notably "Mary Worth" and "Mark Trail" — are prized chiefly for their camp value rather than followed by serious fans.
(I am a tremendous fan of Mark Trail's Sunday nature strips, from which I learned a great deal as a lad, but find the daily adventure ludicrous and have long ceased to be amazed or amused by the recurring phenomenon of dialogue balloons appearing to issue from the private parts of animals. But any editor attempting to cancel the strip risks the organized wrath of the "Trailheads." I am not making this up.)
There are any number of reasons why the long-form comic strip is dying, and bland writing is only part of the puzzle. Certainly, if people aren't reading the newspaper, and thus, the comics, every day, it's hard to be successful with a strip that requires them to do so. But television soap operas are also being cancelled after decades of successful runs, so it's not entirely tied to the failing fortunes of the industry; television remains a strong and competitive medium despite the inroads of streaming video and multiple cable channels. I would suggest that it simply has to do with people's attention span and their increasing reluctance to invest in longer formats than, say, a season of "Glee" or "Dancing with the Stars."
And, just as these TV programs that combine a compact continuing story with light entertainment succeed, what works in comic strips is a short-form story strip that includes a gag each day. The architect of the format was Lynn Johnston, whose format required just that: Every "For Better or For Worse" strip needed to advance the current storyline but stand alone, and, while this sometimes led to stupid puns in place of actual gags, the format was there and made the strip a landmark. ("Doonesbury" also follows this general track, but the audience for that strip is so unique as to make it a poor model for other cartoonists.)
Jan Eliot has a lighter touch than Johnston and does not age her characters in real time, but does allow them to develop and change. There is more gag than developing storyline in Stone Soup, but she has set a tone and pace that allows her to address some significant social concepts, like job-based health insurance or voluntary public service, without slipping into After-School-Special mode. And she has also been able to parlay her storytelling talent and sense of humor into a solid second market in book collections of the strip, the latest of which she has just released.
"Stone Soup" is certainly not the only comic strip taking up the slack as more traditional "story strips" fall by the wayside, but its deceptive simplicity is key to its ability to string along sustained story arcs like this one over what is, in the modern world, a relatively long period of time. Neophyte cartoonists, whether they aim for print or web success, could do worse than to study Eliot's approach.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will simply read and enjoy it. In this instance, at Holly's expense.
Poor Holly.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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