CSotD: Drawing Conclusions
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I meant to put up a "new story" alert the other day when this arc launched at Pirate Cove, but it's not too late to jump on board.
That's not an off-hand remark: Story arcs at Pirate Cove tend to go on for months and to become absurd and convoluted to the point where dropping in midway is virtually pointless. At this stage, the story appears to be that Brian is trying to find a gig at which he can be successful, and he's already messed up a noodle stand, so the video piracy thing may be ending as the search goes on.
Which, if true, is kind of too bad, because piracy has become interesting lately, at least to the extent that cartoonists have begun to complain on Facebook about being ripped off on Facebook by people who post their cartoons after cropping off the attribution, under the apparent impression that things are only copyrighted to the extent they claim to be.
(BTW, it's pretty easy to report theft of intellectual property on FB: Click the "Options" button in the theater view and go from there. Given that Facebook has a hair-trigger when it comes to acting on allegations and offers virtually no appeal process, it should provide some satisfaction.)
In any case, Pirate Cove is a favorite, bearing in mind that I am a large proponent of the rule that good writing can save bad art, but good art won't save bad writing.
Especially when the creator is outfront on the topic, as Joe D'Angelo has been from the time the strip debuted more than a decade ago.
I've given up on some beautifully drawn strips that offered nothing, and there are several strips that I love which offer primitive art but are brilliantly written and which actually hide some good draftsmanship behind that minimalist style: Bug Martini, xkcd and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal being three that spring to mind first.
Meanwhile, there are some much-praised strips that leave me scratching my head because they appear, to me, to use precious, self-consciously minimalist art to illustrate break-through insights like "life is really sad," "it's hard to decide what to do today" and "I ate a pancake."
Pirate Cove is well-written, but it does not pretend to be insightful. Hilarious is a different goal, and it's a good one, when you hit it. It's pretty awful stuff when you don't.
Ditto with insight.
Perhaps my sensitivity on that comes from the fact that I have in a box in the closet hundreds of pages of text that was neither Salinger nor Joyce nor even Phillip Roth, but simply … well, simply a very good argument for how lucky we were not to have the Internet back when I was in my 20s and had nothing to say nor yet a voice in which to say it.
Creating that sort of navel-gazing stuff is good skill-building discipline and a way to codify your thoughts about lifeitsownself. But it's like tuning your instrument and running scales. You're supposed to do that before you step out on stage.
And, even if you are good at Salingeresque insights, the significance and the source of impact of "Catcher in the Rye" was that nobody had ever done that before.
And then Salinger did, and all that followed was echoes, each diminishing in turn.
The trick to capturing small moments is to make them significant, to draw conclusions, to make a statement. Stephen Dedalus walking down the beach is as insignificant and ephemeral as his ashplant's trail in the sand, unless he carries with him the canon of all Western thought.
Similarly, precious, delicately-self-conscious nihilism only works when you have secretly built a very solid skeleton under it.
That is, a secret for the reader to discover. You need to have discovered it first, before publishing.
How better to sum up this up than with an entry from one of the best-ever fictional cartoon journals:
Meanwhile, in the world where bills actually get paid
I don't like it when an artist hits the target so squarely two days in a row, but Terri Libenson is back again, for having summed up what has been on my mind, too, so here's Pajama Diaries, yes, again.
As noted the other day, I love my work, but it is all-consuming. On the other hand, it "consumes all" on my schedule, not on anyone else's. Well, except the dog's, given that his two daily trips to the dog park are my prods to get up and away from the computer for a little while each day.
I haven't made it solo for a decade yet – not even quite half that – but I've been out on my own long enough that I really can't picture doing the whole "mornin' Sam, mornin' Ralph" routine again.
Fortunately, I'm close enough to Medicare and Social Security that I think I could fake it until they kick in, should my little fantasy world fall apart.
But I would hate to have to go back to a straight job.
Though, before you envy the good life too much, you should probably pause and consider what it means to look forward to living on Social Security as the good life.
Yeah, no more of that "Friskies" stuff — We'll be having "Fancy Feast" then, baby!
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