CSotD: Terms of Engagement (x) accept ( ) don’t accept
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Sherman's Lagoon is a successful strip, but, for some reason, Jim Toomey's masterful cartooning seems to fly under the radar. There is occasionally some buzz when he takes on an ecological issue, like the brutal and wasteful massacre of sharks for shark fin soup. But, on a daily basis, he produces a strip that combines smooth, funny art with impeccable comic timing, and yet I rarely hear the strip discussed, except when someone decides to kvetch over something impossible.
I interviewed Toomey a few years back and asked him about the impossibilities, and he acknowledged how people seemed to want to impose logic on such an illogical world:
Some people will never quite understand how the candles remain lit underwater.
"But, still, they accept that you can have two sharks sitting there at a table, eating chicken and talking," Jim Toomey chuckles.
In today's cartoon, Meghan (which I already think is a screamingly funny name for a shark) is upset over being eliminated in the first round of competition. But watch her facial expression change as her anger ebbs and she accepts the fact that, indeed, Sherman did warn her that he was a lousy dancer. In the space of four panels, she morphs from angry to curious to conversational, and it's not just a matter of frowning or how she holds her mouth — it's body language as well.
Moreover, observe that, in the fourth panel, Sherman isn't just saying he's bad at computers but has pulled up the notation which apparently appears a little farther down the list than the warning about his dancing prowess. But, as thick as this list of shortcomings is, he can find each of them without an extended search process.
A clean, simple style, but Toomey packs a lot into it every morning.
Meanwhile, in Florida, the "Dancing with the Sharks" competition continues. Those people standing hip-deep in the water must be the judges. Or the prizes.
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