Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Presentation and perception

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Mike Peterson Published: January 23, 2014 1 minute 4 comments

I'm going to start with an apology to Brian McFadden. Sort of.

Until he signed on with Matt Bors' site, the Nib, I only saw him at Daily Kos. Now I see his work twice, a few days apart, which is not uncommon with independent cartoons.

But check this out:

Here's his current piece, from Daily Kos:

Now here's the way  the same cartoon was presented over at the Nib:

Here's the "sort of apology," which is certainly a sincere apology but only "sort of" because it really depends on how he feels about (A) what you've just seen and (B) what I have to say about it.

To start with, I don't know who determined that there should be two formats, and I can't assume that McFadden either embraced or fumed over the difference. Nor is the discussion simply about his work: He just happened to provide the example.

However, here's my point: In seeing McFadden's work previously, I liked where he was coming from, but put him in the TLDNR category.

I didn't disagree with him. I just felt like his cartoons were homework, that he was throwing too much mud at the wall and I didn't feel like it was my job to sort it out.

But seeing it laid out as it was on the Nib yesterday — regardless of whose choice that was — completely upended my perception. I happily scrolled down and followed along, just as I would with Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal or the Oatmeal or any number of other long, lean cartoons.

Then, when it popped up this morning at Daily Kos, I recognized how much impact the presentation has on my perception, because I looked at it and, even though I recognized it, I still said, "Homework. Not doin' homework, no."

Maybe it's just me. 

I'm a newspaper man by trade and experience, and one of the oddities in our world is that paragraphs are generally formed with a hard return after every sentence, rather than in response to topic shifts.

Your English teacher would object, but those breaks make it easier for the reader.

Ink-stained wretches live by the advice laid down by a legendary Wall Street Journal editor, Barney Kilgore: "The easiest thing for a reader to do is to stop reading."

This is the main reason for the inverted pyramid, wherein all the important stuff is at the top of the story. (Granted, the other reason is so that editors in the hard-copy days could chop from the bottom to make stories fit the page.)

It's also one reason why the McPaper generation of button-down, focus-group-driven management insists that stories be short enough that jumps — those "continued on A8" page breaks — can be eliminated.

That word-count/inch-count dictum was part of the dumbing-down of news, but the theory is valid, and we of the inverted-pyramid era always knew, even as we added background and detail, that a lot of readers weren't going to turn to Page A8.

Anything that makes the reader pause works against your ability to inform and delight. Bad fonts, grammatical errors, bad art, implausible connections, logorrhea, confusing layouts.

I feel like I'm flogging McFadden, and that's not my intent. I learned all this myself by making every one of those mistakes, some of them several times.

And I'm not convinced he's made any mistakes at all. To start with, the cartoon itself is freaking brilliant.

But, beyond that, he is a highly successful cartoonist with a wide following. Obviously, if I've got a problem with how his work is laid out on Daily Kos and how it was also laid out in the NYTimes, it's mostly my problem.

Mostly.

Because another stage in my development as a writer was taking courses in fiction writing in college. We would write our short stories, then type them on Ditto masters, with only our student ID numbers to let the professor know who wrote what.

The class would take two or three stories home to read and then, at the next class, we'd critique them, while the anonymous author sat and alternately beamed or cringed, as covertly as possible.

Our professor would, at the close of the criticism, offer the writer a chance to disclose his identity and respond, but the bottom line was this: If one person didn't get it, maybe that was his problem. If nobody got it, well, sorry, mate. 

But the middle ground became like Lot's bargaining with Jehovah: What if only four misunderstood? Do I have to rewrite it for the benefit four readers who didn't get it? And what if it were only three? Must I rewrite if only three were confused?

And that's a question only the author can answer. James Joyce is alleged to have said that it took him 10 years to write "Finnegan's Wake" and he expected it would take a reader that long to understand it.

But, then, it was Mark Twain who allegedly defined a classic as a book that everybody praises but nobody reads.

I'll let you have the royalties for "Finnegan's Wake" if you'll let me take home the royalties for "Tom Sawyer."

Again, this isn't about Brian McFadden at all, except to the extent that he furnished an opportunity for me to say this: Reader engagement is critical. Presentation is a primary factor in how you engage the reader.

And, in this particular case, of the two formats above, I prefer the second.

Bearing in mind that, while I can see on the counter the number of people who clicked on this page, I have no idea how many of them bothered to read this far.

*shrug*