CSotD: You’re forgetting something, Miles: You have no choice!
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On some days, my interest in one strip stems from it being closely related to another. That could be from two strips riffing on the same topic, as with Arlo & Janis:
I'm kind of worried about smartphones, because I see them as an extension of the electronic leash, and I used to feel that way about cell phones in general. I'd see people taking calls in various places and be grateful not to be at everyone's beck-and-call when I was out of the house.
Those days ended in 2005, when I dropped my landline. Today, my checklist as I go out the door is "wallet, keys, cell phone."
Now I see people perpetually hunched over their smartphones, looking up stuff that certainly could have waited until later, if not until never, and I wonder why they bothered to leave the house at all.
But smartphone penetration is getting to, if not past, the tipping point. The days when Crackberries were the sign of a Wall Street Yuppie are long past and we are into some serious Pod People territory.
Now, I look at my cell phone usage and realize that (A) I'm rarely on the phone at all, (B) I don't text except when texted, which happens nearly never, and (C) as a freelancer, it's good to be reachable. As a freelancer whose meat-and-potatoes client is two time zones away, it's excellent to be able to take a call at the dog park.
And if they ever figure out all the G4 stuff and make that nearly universal, without wiping out the capacity to dock your phone on your laptop, there may be another kind of landline being snipped. I can feel myself being sucked in, and it doesn't feel bad at all …
Still, I think of Siri as Tom Cruise's baby, and that's appropriate, since I don't want to be pulled into a cult.
Which makes me laugh even harder at this week's "New Adventures of Queen Victoria," since her smartphone is staffed by a much earlier artificial intelligence babe:
Meanwhile, on a topic mostly connected only by the interlocking strip conceit (a "conceit" being a "meme" for people who remember books):
I've been burned out on comic crossovers for some time now. Self-referential humor has its limits, and there is a real danger, when strips constantly go off visiting each other and talking about each other, of becoming too clubby, particularly when the strip being referenced isn't carried in your reader's paper.
Yes, some people still read their strips in newspapers. These folks provide a logical connection to the first part of today's post because they are related to those Luddites who refuse to stand in the middle of a sunny meadow checking their email.
But, so far, they are also the people who actually pay the bills for syndicated cartoonists. Unless and until on-line revenues come close to the money generated from print, I'm not sure the risk of making them feel excluded is worth the dig-in-the-ribs chuckle of riffing on the work of a fellow club member.
However, Lio has been wandering the comics page looking for his lost cephalopod this week, and I got a laugh out of today's very non-pandering crossover strip:
Charles Schulz was a talent who not only brought significant innovations to the comic strip but served as a mentor to many young talents. And his widow continues to support and foster talent in the industry.
He also said he never wanted other people to draw his strip and I guess he should have added a number of footnotes and codicils explaining exactly what he meant by that.
My on-line menu contains a number of strips that are no longer in production: Rip Kirby, The Heart of Juliet Jones, Calvin and Hobbes, daily Foxtrot, Sunday Little Iodine, Big Top, The Big Picture, Bloom County, Shirley & Son, Geech, the Elderberries and, yes, Peanuts.
But on-line is infinitely expandable, or nearly so. I really hate the idea of repeat strips taking up valuable and increasingly limited real estate on a print page.
For one thing, I find it very hard to believe that Sparky would have fostered all those young careers if his intention was to shut them out from the chance of making a living at their art.
For another, the current run of classic Peanuts is from a period of his career that was quite lame. Not as lame as the "Joe Cool" period, in which I am convinced he would doodle a funny picture of Snoopy and then struggle to come up with some caption to hang on it — there was rarely an actual punchline to the Joe Cool cartoons, just a declaration by the MetLife mascot about what he was calling himself at the moment. But lame enough to question running it.
At its best, Peanuts offered droll philosophy and thoughtful reflections on the human condition. An entire week of Linus's blanket coming to life is neither of those things, and Tatulli could not have asked for a better example of the pointless squatter element inherent in the strip's continued syndication:
When Schulz died, I was in a position to have some influence on the comics page at the paper where I was working, and we replaced the strip as soon as it ended. I was appalled when the numbers emerged a few weeks later and it turned out we were among only five or ten percent of newspapers that apparently understood the concept "new."
I've said before that I think the last two years of the strip were the best work Schulz had done in decades. He had chosen Rerun as an important voice and elevated him from repetitive jokes about riding on the back of a bicycle to some insights that were important and moving.
Schulz announced his retirement on December 14, 1999. He died February 12, 2000.
This strip ran January 30, 2000.
It's profoundly ironic that so many of the Reruns whose love of cartooning inspired them to skip the damn flowers and follow their hearts would then find their career paths blocked by … reruns.
The Pod People are everywhere.
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