CSotD: But some walks are more helpful than others
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There's a traditional practice in comicstripology of analyzing news to project lead time, and a more modern practice of analyzing it to project print circulation of a strip.
Which is to say, if a strip can comment on current news, it's probably web-only or nearly so.
Print clients like having strips in hand well in advance, and Sundays are the most lead-time-critical, since most papers have them printed for them and shipped in. (The no-rub inks of Flexo printing are much better for color-heavy comic sections but most newspapers don't own Flexo presses.)
Hauling back a strip in the face of developing news requires (a) remembering that it's out there and (b) some quick potential-damage control.
Hilary Price has an enlightening blog entry on a recent double-dose of substitute Rhymes With Orange strips, one of which was based on editorial taste, the next on unfortunate timing (yes, I've already spoilered that one above). If you don't track her blog, you really should: She's as funny there as she is in her strip.
And the sequence of tap-dancing outlined in her current blog entry is educational as well as amusing. Syndicated strips have to be responsive to a wide-spectrum audience, and those that rise above pie-in-the-face gags must do some wire-walking.
In any case, Price may or may not be more thoughtful than most cartoonists, but she's certainly more outwardly reflective than average, and thus worth listening to.
Meanwhile, however, let's not neglect the potential for a piece of fortunate timing to fall into a cartoonist's lap.
Terri Libenson's lap, to be precise, because today's Pajama Diary strip hits just as this study from, of all places, Hilary Price's alma mater, has gone semi-viral.
Of course, to some extent, the Stanford study is only confirming what any creative type could have told them. When I was in the newsroom, I learned that, if the story didn't come together, the solution was not to sit and stare at it but to get up and leave.
In good weather, a simple walk around the block. In foul weather, a trip back to the press room, which, during the day, was large, cool and quiet, and walking through it was like a trip to the dinosaur room of a museum if dinosaur skeletons had long rolls of paper stretched through them.
But the critical thing is to hit "delete" first, because part of what is holding you back is the delusion that what you have already accomplished was worthwhile.
If that were true, it would have led you to the next step.
Instead, your own stubborn insistence on believing in the quality of that very clever start is holding you back because, while indeed very clever, it is also irrelevant to the thing you're trying to create.
Plus it sucks.
If you insist on wrestling the beast into being, you'll recognize its indisputable suckiness the moment you see it in print. Much better to delete it now, while there's only one copy and no one else knows you ever thought it was any good at all.
In any case, the next step is to get up and get out and free your mind, because sitting there staring at the screen will only result in what golfers call the "yips." You won't be thinking of a new approach; you'll be thinking of how you've failed so far.
Are you listening, Connie? We need to find you a puppy.
Those of us who work at home should, one might think, find it easier to break off an unproductive streak, but Libenson's frequent strips on the subject of distractions notwithstanding, there are, particularly when the kids are in school, long, uninterrupted stretches when, if you'd like, you can stare at that blank sheet pretty much forever.
And my kids haven't come home from school in over 20 years. Hence the dog.
I joke that the only people whom I know in three dimensions own dogs, but it's not much of a joke. As a telecommuter, I spend hours in virtual conversation with people who live nowhere near me. It's only at the dog park that I interact with actual, standing-there, real live humanoids. And their dogs.
When my dog was young, twice-daily trips to the dog park were genuinely necessary to keep him from bouncing off the walls.
Three years on, he's growing into his houndiness and doesn't need nearly so much stimulation, but getting up and taking him out every day at about 8:30 and then again around 3 is what keeps my fingers from grafting themselves to the keyboard and my brain from melting down entirely.
However, walking on red carpets doesn't count
Ann Telnaes with a 2006 cartoon and some excellent links on tomorrow's White House Concubines' Dinner.
This is the most poisonous, ghastly symptom of Potomac Fever in journalism and the more it is covered by the media, the more the media begins to look like a large, inbred, narcissistic group of lickspittles and toadies.
Which, honest to god, only the most visible of them are. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the most visible of them have a self-promotion mission at which they are very, very good.
It's how they became so visible in the first place. (Did you think it was merit-based? Sorry.)
"Ghastly" covers the I-wish-I-were-making-this-up red carpet walk, in which famous journalists go through the very puppet show that we ridicule and despise actors for, without any indication that they realize what pompous, preening, vacuous asses they seem to be. ('Seems,' madam? Nay, it is. I know not 'seems.')
"Poisonous" is the impact on local newsrooms, when young journos look at this vomitous display and think it is what they should aspire to.
And, yes, Ann has a link to the famous Colbert presentation in which he eviscerated that roomful of jackanapeses and managed to offend them by telling them what everyone outside the cloistered daisychain of the Beltway thinks of them.
And, consequently, what those watching on television think of everybody in the media.
Thanks, guys.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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