CSotD: Two Rubens, Two Davids, No Waiting
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One of the occasional features of "Tom the Dancing Bug" has been Super-Fun-Pak Comix, a dadaist piece in which Ruben Bolling mocks really drab, spiritless comics.
Now Super-Fun-Pak Comix (that's a different link) is a feature of its own on the GoComics site, presenting one drab, spiritless bit of mockery at a time.
At a time when an excellent-but-unrecognized strip like "Watch Your Head" has given up on syndication and gone for a web-based total reboot, and Derf has abandoned "The City" to focus on graphic novels (scroll down for both very recent references), this is a bit of meta-ness that maketh the head to spin.
It certainly maketh my head to spin, because my day begins at Comics Kingdom (the KFS site formerly known as DailyInk) and then I go to GoComics for another page of strips, followed by a separate page of GoComics editorial cartoons, after which I have two collections of open-all-in-tabs bookmarks of various freestanding things.
So, as the most recently-added of my strips at GoComics, Super-Fun-Pak Comics comes as roughly the 132nd strip of my morning, as well as at a bridge point between the somewhat family-safe, general appeal portion of my morning surf and my venture into the somewhat edgier categories of political cartoons and webcomics.
There's some pretty inventive stuff in syndication these days and some stuff on the web that is not ready for prime time, and I sample a very wide menu from the staid to the out-there.
However, it's still a break point, and the impact of having Super-Fun-Pak Comix hit right there reminds me of "Stuff Up The Cracks," the final cut in Frank Zappa's 1968 album, "Cruising With Ruben and the Jets."
After an entire album of nostalgically-affectionate-but-intentionally-drippy parodies of doowop songs, Zappa concludes the album with a brief bit of modern-style guitar work that either says, "This is what we could have been playing all along" or perhaps "One day, the music you think is so good now will sound as silly as what you've just been listening to."
Or something. It's a fool's errand to try to pinpoint the intentions of either Ruben. But here's the song anyway: You figure it out.
Mothers of Super-Fun-Pak Invention
In a completely other corner of the universe
David Horsey, who would be featured here even more often if he didn't do such a good job of commenting on his own work, has just won the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Journalism in cartooning for 2014.
I'm a long-time fan of Horsey's work, going back to his years in Seattle, but I would have to say that he deserves the recognition now more than he might have before, because, while he has always come through with some devastatingly wonderful stuff, he has also been known to rely more on his artistic chops than his insights between those bravura pieces.
Maybe the move rejuvenated his processes, maybe there's some other stimulation at the LATimes or in LA generally, but, whatever the cause, his work in the past couple of years has been noticeably more consistent and worthwhile and, while every political cartoonist drills a few dry holes, he has really upped his game and significantly cut down the ratio of meh-to-yay in his portfolio.
Speaking of portfolios, I haven't seen an RFK Award portfolio if there is one, so I'll just drop in a few of my favorites from back when I used to grab cartoons for use in the classroom.
(Sept 20, 2000)
(Oct 29, 2000 — Following the attack on the USS Cole)
(Jan 14, 2001)
(March 18, 2001)
(April 2, 2004)
Congrats on the award, to an artist whose work I plan to continue to steal often, unless it becomes too obvious that my readers are consistently seeking it out on their own. And probably then, too.
Your call is very important to us …
Yeah, Dave Blazek, what's with that?
I worked at a newspaper that built an addition onto the building and installed a call center in a brilliant plan to centralize phone solicitation for the entire chain, a revenue-generator that kind of collapsed when phone solicitation moved overseas. But, until it went dark, I got to see how all the screens in this room full of computers would, at a particular time, go blank for a coffee break and then, when they came up again, be in another town in another state. (Often pegged to time zones, by the way.)
The screen included where you now were calling, plus information and a script for the current offer being pitched. Calls were auto-dialed and, when a connection was made, my recollection is that some information popped up, though, at the time (mid-90s) it wasn't all that sophisticated. Still, it included name and address, which is what we're talking about.
The caller would say, "This is George from the East Overshoe Bugle. How are you today?" and then, "Do you subscribe to the Bugle?" and then, if the answer was yes, there were a couple of cheerful customer-service questions about the quality of delivery, etc., and they really did record the answers.
If the answer was no, then the caller went into the pitch.
This, you will note, was all being done during the hamster-in-the-wheel stage of computer software.
Today, it would not be hard, much less "impossible" (Is anything impossible anymore?), to set up the software such that, when a customer was shifted to a live operator, the information already given would shift as well.
Yes, there should be some verification that the shift had worked right — last 4 digits of your SS#, DOB, mailing address, some quick ID check. But there's absolutely no need to start all over again with each transfer.
There are enough times that someone calling customer service will either already be pissed off, or will be likely to become pissed off in the course of the conversation. Pissing them off for no particular reason at all seems at least pointless, if not actually counterproductive.
Though, wait a minute.
Come to think of it, I only saw the outbound form of the beast, where, whether or not you can make people actually like you, keeping them from hanging up is extremely central to the mission.
Inbound customer service, by contrast, puts a premium on how many calls you can get through how quickly. Pissing people off so that they hang up would actually be a good thing, since it not only increases calls-handled-per-hour but also avoids the additional time, effort and cost of having to do something to help them.
Never mind. Carry on.
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