CSotD: Resisting a rest
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When I saw Norm Feuti at the One Fine Sunday exhibit in Boston this spring, we talked a little bit about Marla's ongoing plan to open her own store and he told me he was going to do something with Retail that might be risky.
So I've been watching the strip since then, trying to figure it out. Cooper, the stockboy, has been dating Val. It's an interracial relationship, but not the only one in the comics, though she was fairly out front the other day about intending to sleep with him. It didn't seem like a bombshell, though.
Marla being pregnant is more of a bombshell, in part because it introduces a new element to a strip in which things like this don't just happen and then fall away. Marla's kid is not going to be one of those fictional kids who only surfaces every six weeks or so for a quick gag, because the strip keeps all the strings taut. Marla the Exploited Assistant Manager is going to also be Marla the Mom.
It also defers the dream. Now, over at Arlo & Janis, Arlo has always dreamt of buying a boat and just sailing off into the sunset, but it is a dream on a different level, because he likes his life and he's actually had a couple of chances to buy the boat over the years. Whether he ever makes the move or not is immaterial; he's not going to sit on the porch at the Home one day going, "Dammit, I should have bought that boat!"
By contrast, Marla's dream of her own shop is an actual plan, and a matter of escaping from the frustrations of her current position. That's not the kind of dream that defers gracefully, and I don't think that working for Stuart and trying to be a mother — or just trying to get through a pregnancy — is going to make that dream any less compelling.
But I'm not going to continue to look for one element anymore, because I think that, whatever Norm might have been referring to that day, what he is doing with the strip is more holistic than simply adding a plot twist or a new character or a specific element. What he's doing is keeping the strip in play, and that is not how syndicated strips work very often.
It should be, but, then, TV shows should have limited runs. The reason British TV shows like Fawlty Towers and Blackadder become such cult favorites is because they set up their situations and then run long enough to tape all the good stuff they had in mind, and then they stop. The only similar examples in American TV are shows like Car 54 Where Are You? or My So-Called Life that were cancelled before they ran out of good material.
For the most part, TV shows stay on the air as long as they draw an audience, even if that audience is simply chuckling over predictable, repetitious jokes based on well-established tropes within the show's universe. Something that begins with the surreal, creative inspiration of Arnold the Pig becomes a recurring gag of a pig in various outfits. It's no longer artistically interesting, but the laugh track laughs and the people at home look up from their knitting and chuckle along like Guy Montag's vapid, TV-watching wife in Fahrenheit 451.
When Gary Larson pulled the plug on The Far Side and when Bill Watterson ended Calvin and Hobbes, it sent shock waves through the comic strip universe because you just don't do that. You don't end a comic because it's not creative or interesting anymore. You only end it when its client list falls to the point where it isn't making any money. If it's profitable, even the death of the artist won't end the strip.
I'm not putting Retail on a level with those two ground-breaking strips, and I think Norm would be more embarrassed than flattered if I did.
What I am saying is that there are any number of strips out there that, when they debut, are wonderful, inventive, fresh strips, and I get excited to see someone doing such creative work in the medium, but then they kind of hit their stride, and they get into a groove, and then the groove deepens and becomes a comfortable rut, and I read the strip each morning and see the familiar gag and chuckle like Montag's wife.
There are only a handful of strips that manage to stay in a state of constant re-invention, and in which you can feel the artist's active engagement, day after day, story arc after story arc, year after year. It's not necessary to rise to the level of Calvin and Hobbes or The Far Side to do this. Some of them aren't even terribly good strips. But they remain interesting because the artist hasn't become comfortable and isn't just relying on familiar formulae. There is no sense of rest; they remain in constant motion.
And you need to remain in constant motion in order to remain interesting.
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