CSotD: Leave the overthinking to textperts
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I've been enjoying the current time-travel arc in Edison Lee, and, when he turned to Carl Sagan for help in trying to get back to 2014, it coincided neatly with this Fresh Air interview with Neil Degrasse Tyson, who is about to launch a sequel to Cosmos.
And who is a pretty cool guy anyway, but that's not my point. However, you should go listen to that interview, because he is.
But that bit of unintentional happenstance (as in the best it is) does fit in with my topic, because, while the entire arc has reminded me of how intelligent good silliness can be, this morning's strip provoked a different stream of thought, based on how John Hambrock drew Edison today, and particularly in the final panel.
It's not that he drew him any differently than other times we've seen Edison from that angle, but it was the rightness of it. Edison is a brilliant kid, but he's a kid, and, for all that I've been rolling on the floor over this arc, he's a kid in a lot of trouble.
It's hard to create a kid who embodies the cynical, old-head-on-young-shoulders stalwart of the comics page and still make him a kid, but there is his outsized head, his back not hugging the booth, his chin at table height, his feet dangling in space.
It's not that it's a view we haven't seen before. The effectiveness is that it's the right view. Seen from another angle, it wouldn't work nearly as well.
It reminds me of a moment in one of my fiction-writing classes in college, in which the group was commenting on a story I'd written about a senior in high school. In the scene under discussion, he had come home from taking an unspecified SAT/ACT, changed clothes and was heading over to his girlfriend's house.
As he's out the door headed for his car, his mother raps on the livingroom picture window and asks him where he's going, when he'll be home — the usual — and he answers back, both of them exaggerating their mouth movements rather than screaming to be heard.
Someone singled it out as brilliant use of symbolism, of how they were separated by this invisible barrier and had to struggle to communicate.
I'd only written it because, well, that's kind of how stuff happens when you're a high school senior with a driver's license and a car.
But, yes. Yes, indeed. It was a brilliant use of symbolism, wasn't it? Indeed.
Point being that most of this analysis is pretty much a load of balloon juice unless you're talking about someone like James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon who deliberately creates puzzles.
I don't even think Salvador Dali — as much of a self-aware showoff as he was — ever actually sat down and consciously planned out his brilliant symbolism, though he may have become aware of it midway through.
All this cosmic analytical vivisection may help explain why it works for you, but it's got f-all to do with how the artist created it.
Good creative stuff just happens as a result of being in control of your medium. It's possible that John sketched that panel from a couple of different points of view and settled on that one, but I highly doubt it.
What I do know is that he didn't sit back and thumb through a well-worn volume of the works of Carl Jung while he contemplated the challenge.
The good touches in art are unconscious or subconscious or something, and it really doesn't matter.
This was a good touch.
On Beyond Prufrock
I'm not a huge fan of "boy am I old and out of it" humor, mostly because I'm increasingly old and out of it, but the former is beyond my control and the latter is a conscious choice.
Still, today's Barney & Clyde got a laugh from this old man.
When Steve McQueen — known at imdb as "Steve McQueen III" — started popping up, his accent and his being alive kind of tipped me off that he wasn't who I first thought of. 'Cause I'm that smart!
I shrugged it off as, well, McQueen isn't an unknown last name and there are plenty of Steves in the world, though fewer than there used to be. (And almost no Stuarts at all, but I digress.)
Steve McQueen I would have been Terry McQueen if he'd used his actual first name. (Steve McQueen II has only one credit, as wardrobe assistant for "A Boy and His Dog". The wardrobe assistant on that one probably just scuffed dirt into things and tore them.)
By contrast, Spike Jonze was born Adam Speigel. And I'm sure there's a story behind it all, but I'm a grumpy old man and I don't care, unless it turns out that his mother really did think he was playing piano in a whorehouse.
A theater major I knew in college changed his name from James Hawthorne to Hawthorne James before going on to greater things, I assume because there were already three James Hawthornes and a Jim Hawthrone in Hollywood.
I thought there was a rule about it in the Screen Actors Guild, but maybe it only applies to actors and, if so, kind of sporadically.
I note, only coincidentally on this same topic, that Hawthorne's bio gives his date of birth as 1935, which — given that he was a year behind me in school — suggests that his first and last names weren't the only thing that got swapped around when he went to Hollywood.
I mean, geez. I embrace my age, but I'm not trying to enhance it.
On the other hand, I suppose it's all a matter of perception.
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