CSotD: Five score and five weeks ago …
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I often get it down to two or three strips and then have to make a final decision.
Today's Ink Pen was — as is often the case — one of those two or three, but I'll admit sentiment tipped the balance, given that the first posting on this blog was two years and 10 days ago, and it occurred to me this morning that Ink Pen was my first Comic Strip of the Day and that we must be approaching some sort of milestone.
Okay, overshot it by a week and a half. Huzzah anyway!
I sure hadn't found my voice yet at that point. In fact, I was doing well just to post anything and made a major software shift about a week later, to the astonishment, I'm sure, of both my readers. Seriously, readership was so low for the first few months that, if I checked the blog, I skewed the count.
And, at that point, I didn't quite know what the blog was about, except that I was tired of reading snark.
When Matt Bors declares a comic to be a turd, first of all, he's a cartoonist of substantial talent. He knows what it takes to create a comic that isn't a turd; he's not just some Beavis-and-Butthead wiseass sitting in the backrow flicking paper clips.
Second, he doesn't do it very often. (Nine times in a year would be 'not very often' in my world. Your mileage may vary.)
The snark sites generate much better traffic than I get, in part because they're more versed in all that traffic-building stuff to begin with and in part because, well, I dunno except that "Two and a Half Men" consistently gets better ratings than anything Bill Moyers does. A lot of people enjoy adolescent wiseass humor.
But 739 days after launch, I'm doing okay in the little niche I occupy on that spectrum between Bill Moyers and Charlie Sheen, with a growing audience of people who seem to care about the medium. Thanks for coming. Grab a glass of wine and make sure you try those little crab things with the puff-pastry.
And you should spend a little time with Phil Dunlap, because his strip, Ink Pen, is one of the most consistently solid comic strips out there. It's centered on an employment agency for cartoon characters, and so, as in today's strip, there is an unguardedness in their conversations that doesn't really break the wall between reader and character so much as it breaks all the rules about characters discussing their own status.
Captain Victorious is only one of several superheroes in the strip, but he's what might have happened if Ted Baxter had been bitten by a radioactive spider.
There is also a brilliantly named character who, appropriately, is not seen here because she never gets any good gigs, which is because, well, Jenn Erica is a female cartoon character and so there aren't any good gigs for her.
And since this damned strip began, I have met two women named "Jen Erickson." I realize my don't-think-about-the-pun problem is mostly the fault of all the people who named their daughters "Jennifer" 30 years ago, but I blame Phil Dunlap.
In any case, that subtext of comic criticism runs through Ink Pen at a level which makes it the comic strip equivalent of films like "A Star is Born" and "All About Eve" that are guaranteed to wow them in Hollywood even if nobody in the stix catches all the nuances.
And he does it without being snarky, which I appreciate.
(It occurs to me that, if I'd waited 10 more days, I could have marked my 750th blog entry. It also occurs to me that people who keep such close track of these things are the equivalent of clock watchers, and that the only reason to know how long you've been doing something is if you are asking yourself, "Geez — how long have I been doing this?" And I have not. Thanks again for coming. Let me get you a bag so you can take some of that crab home with you. I'm certainly not going to eat it all.)
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