CSotD: A narrow escape from the shark
Skip to comments
Our story so far: Trapped in the house by a blizzard, Poncho is forced to coexist with his master's cat-loving, flu-stricken wife. Worse yet, he has been caught relieving himself in the litterbox. Can this be the end of their ongoing rivalry? Will these implacable foes at long last learn to respect and even love each other? Or, to put it another way, could this be the end of one of Pooch Cafe's most compelling and humorous ongoing conflicts?
Don't be silly. Paul Gilligan is a much better storyteller than that.
Back in the brief but creative heyday of JumpTheShark.com, one of the categories for shark-jumping was "They did it," with the iconic example being Sam and Diane from "Cheers."
I would posit a related event, when Hawkeye and Hot Lips were stuck out on the front lines in an episode of M*A*S*H and, through their shared risk and peril, came to understand that, despite their differences, they were each selflessly dedicated to saving lives and doing their very best to provide good medical care, and that, from this day forward, nobody would ever again watch this increasingly preachy and tiresomely uplifting TV show expecting to encounter actual comedy.
Ain't none of that gonna happen at Pooch Cafe.
Narrowest escape since Mary Richards and Lou Grant went on a date!
The thing is, there is a major difference between a TV show and a movie, and between a comic strip and a novel.
Movies and novels are, at least theoretically, finite.
I say "theoretically" because we do, indeed, have movie series that are, in essence, long-form TV shows, like "The Bourne Bunch Goes to Hawaii," in which Jason finds a tiki in a cave, or …
Hmm. It's actually kind of hard to make a joke any more ridiculously depressing than the truth. I'll let Norm handle this, in an insightful, sadly prescient classic from just before The Grand Disillusionment:
And, before anyone points it out, I am aware that the Bourne series is based on a series of novels, not just one.
And not just a good one, either. Leave us not conflate "The Bourne Identity" and "The Bourne Supremacy" with "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and "Ulysses."
Joyce may have, in retrospect, considered the story of Stephan Dedalus to remain untold, but he wasn't playing to a franchise. He was starting fresh and doing something absolutely new with the character.
By contrast, the Bourne books are so plug-and-play that, after Ludlum died, they brought in a reliever from the bullpen to crank out half a dozen more.
This isn't a new phenomenon. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series were ghost-written by any number of nameless hacks, as were the bulk of turn-of-the-century kids books. And it's not entirely over: This week, I edited a review by one of our young writers of the latest in a collection of books written by four different authors under one name.
And, of course, we have Miss Marple, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan and any number of other fictional characters who appear in their own series of stories.
But the difference between a potboiler and a literary novel is that the potboiler is a story about a happening, while a novel is a story about change.
And I don't mean the kind of change where Holmes and Moriarty plunge into Reichenbach Falls and remain dead until eight years of fan pressure magically re-animates the corpse.
I mean the kind of change where the lead character as seen in the first chapter is not the same person as seen in the last chapter and neither is the reader.
Y'know: Literature. Art. That kind of stuff.
Now, obviously, someone who writes a daily blog about comic strips cannot insist that frivolous entertainment is a bad thing.
Nor would I suggest that it must be, or even can be, done in a purely cynical manner.
While there is an element of "we've established what you are; we're just dickering over the price," and one ought not to take oneself too seriously, the fact is, you can't do it right unless you take the form itself seriously.
Whether you are writing a sitcom, penning a strip or authoring a series of detective stories, you have to know and, moreover, to respect the rules.
One of those rules is "We'll be back tomorrow!"
Break that rule by changing the set-up and you've broken a covenant with the reader.
Or you are Lynn Johnston, the exception that proves the rule.
Good cartoonists respect literature, even when they are gently poking it with bemused appreciation.
Jen Sorensen was asked by NPR to do something for the 200th anniversary of "Pride and Prejudice," which is a very funny novel in which most everybody changes, though, as Jen's one-page Cliff Note version points out, one character does indeed persevere in her priorities to the very end.
Go read Jen's take. Then go read the equally funny original.
And if you've already done that, you should instead visit "Everybody Loves Their Jane Austen," otherwise known as an "anti-pedantry page."
Not only will you find an antidote with which to repel grammar nazis, but, if they dig deep enough on this rich site, young men can even find a collection of pick-up lines that didn't work then and won't work now.
And we'll be back here tomorrow, as always, unchanged.
Comments
Comments are closed.