CSotD: Those oldies but goodies remind me of me
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For a week or two, I've been watching "Big Top" at GoComics, seeing that it was coming to an end and thinking I should provide a heads-up when it restarted.
"Big Top" reruns have re-started.
Rob Harrell did Big Top for five years and I was poking around to see if I could find out why he stopped, which I didn't. I remember he had a serious health issue involving his eyes at one point, but he's clearly back in the saddle as far as that goes, doing "Adam @ Home" with Brian Bassett and fine art on his own.
I did find this 2010 interview by Scott Nickel that is worth a read.
I'm going to be really interested to read the strip again from the beginning because, when it started, I wasn't impressed. Then I ran into Universal publicist Kathie Kerr at a convention and she raved about it, so I took a second look and became a huge fan.
Now I want to see if it took Rob some time to find his legs or whether I was just not tuned in when I first saw it. If the former appears to be the case, stick with this strip. It's definitely worth it. (His line gets considerably better over time, by the way.)
Big Top is a strip that belongs on the "Golden List of Strips That Ended Before They Began To Really Suck."
And, boy, I could name a couple of once-innovative strips that are no longer eligible to join that exalted company.
Here's the deal: I don't want to see zombie strips in the paper. I especially don't want to see reruns in the paper. The real estate is too limited and too precious.
(Speaking of which, the New Orleans Times-Picayune has just announced that it is going from daily to thrice-weekly publication. They imply that they'll still run the full week's comics. We'll see how long that decision holds up, but Nawlins comics fans had better be vocal with their thanks, because I know what silence yields you.)
The web, however, is pretty infinite and is a wonderful place for reruns and golden oldies and suchlike.
I read Rip Kirby, the Heart of Juliet Jones, Radio Patrol and Little Iodine over at King Features, and follow Big Top, Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, the Norm, Shirley & Son and Geech at GoComics, and it hasn't stopped me from keeping up with the new stuff.
And today was not only a chance to alert readers to the re-start of Big Top, but a good day for nostalgia over at C&H:
In the eighth grade, my friend Chris and I used to compete to see who could come up with the most outrageous takes on the dippy writing prompts we were given. Our teacher would clip cute, small-poster-sized pictures from somewhere or other, post a half a dozen on her bulletin board and tell us to choose one and write an essay.
Chris eventually won the Lifetime Achievement Award for an essay based on a picture of a darling little puppy in a gift-wrapped box under a Christmas tree, in which little Johnny opened the present on Christmas day to find that his gift from Santa was a suffocated dog.
Chris, by the way, was the son of the Episcopal priest and he and his older brother embodied the old joke about the barber's son being well-groomed for nothing, the tailor's son being well-dressed for nothing and the minister's son being good for nothing. They were great fun.
They moved away, however, before sophomore year, when I was permanently expelled from English class for responding to the prompt "A 4-H Activity" with a detailed, step-by-step process essay on how to muck out a horse stall. It caught the teacher in a bad mood because, in the class just before ours, Terry Smith had read a book report on "Catcher in the Rye" that didn't contain sufficient euphemisms and so he had been kicked out before I got up and sent the class into convulsions.
Somehow, we reached adulthood despite our expulsion from English class: I became a professional writer and Terry ran a bookstore.
On the other hand, being a writer isn't exactly like being an investment banker or a professional athlete. There were times in later life that my life resembled today's Geech rerun:
It's okay to enjoy some reruns this weekend. The people who make the new comics are all out in Vegas cavorting anyway. They'll never catch us.
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