CSotD: I’m not really a Christ figure, I’m just drawn that way
Skip to comments
A new comic is born. Well, sort of. Over at Between Friends, Kim is finally getting down to creating her strip and she had me at "Kate Mathis."
Or maybe in the festival of credits she bestows upon herself at the start. (You forgot "letterer," Kim.)
Or maybe it's the way Kim Matthews has been dithering around over this strip, while Kate Mathis has such an expression of steely determination.
But the name thing is pretty good as an indicator that nothing any better will follow.
That said, a quibble: Slight transpositions of real names are nice, but it's hard to beat the deeply meaningful name with the initials JC, which I think everyone learned in eighth grade with "The Red Badge of Courage."
Which I guess maybe Canadian kids don't have to read.
But I hope they learn about Christ figures in literature somewhere, because you just can't write without one, and I remember a story in one fiction-writing class in which a character was named "Jesse Christopher," which should have won an award of some sort. Call it the "Brass Lumpkin."
Anyway, good luck, Kate.
I mean, Kim.
A flaw in the anointment
If Kim does get her exciting new strip launched, here's where you won't see it: Yahoo!
Alan Gardner points to a NY Post article about how Yahoo has taken down its comic strips, and let's just stop right here and ponder why the NY Post thought that was newsworthy, given that they dropped their own comics page a year and a half ago.
All the other coverage I turned up focused on Yahoo — which everyone seems to be calling "beleagured Yahoo" — taking down its streaming video service.
I think I'd rather be known as "Jesse Christopher" than "beleagured Mike Peterson," which sure sounds like the prelude to "He looks so natural!"
Though, to put a finer point on that, hearing news about beleagured Yahoo is kind of like when some actor dies and your response is, "Wow — Was he still alive?"
Makes me wonder how Angelfire is doing.
In any case, Yahoo's official statement on the matter notes that "we're constantly reviewing and iterating on our products as we strive to create the best user experience," to which I can only respond, "You iterate on it, you're gonna clean it up."
Apparently, Yahoo had a UClick deal and now doesn't, which reminds me to remind you that you don't have to depend on beleagured iterators to get your comics each day. Simply consult the various resources in the right rail of this blog and make an honest fan of yourself.
If you truly begrudge spending a total of less than a dime a day for the entirety of Universal and King Features, you really need to never, ever, ever post anything about artists deserving to be paid for their work.
On account of you know how Jesse Christopher feels about hypocrites.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Facebook has always been a free-flowing font of folly, and enough to make you long for the days before Yahoo was beleagured, when the Internet was still exclusive enough that only the newbies believed the Mrs. Fields Cookie Recipe story and when trolls were deliberately malicious people and not simply incurable fools.
I don't know if it's a measure of how much things have changed or just a sign of how old I am, but it used to be that, when someone was caught passing on the Mrs. Fields story, they were embarrassed and chagrinned and never did it again.
Now you have to "hide" the postings of childhood friends and favorite relatives whom you don't want to "unfriend," but who cannot under any amount of pleading be persuaded to visit Snopes before they make an ass of themselves in public yet again.
Which is annoying enough, but when they are passing on bigotry and sedition, it makes you long for the days when trolls were truly, intentionally evil and not simply witless numbskulls being played as suckers.
Upon Further Review
Scott Stantis continues this theme of remembering the Good Old Days in Prickly City, where conservative Carmen is confronting the potential of a Trump candidacy.
There once were giants on the right, and if today the GOP could drum up a Scoop Jackson or a Howard Baker or a Lowell Weicker, they'd walk away with the next election.
Unless the Democrats could find another Birch Bayh.
At least, I'd like to believe that, though perhaps one ought not to wax too nostalgic, given that none of those people were nominated back then, either.
Still, they acted as tails on the kite. I wish there had been secret video cameras when Senators Goldwater, Rhodes and Scott explained the situation to the beleagured crook who had gotten the nomination and then lied, cheated and rat-f***ed his way into office.
That's a conversation we should all watch, if not as a warning to the current crew of rat-f***ers, as a reproach to those who coddle them.
According to that story, the three senators didn't advise him to resign. They just told him he had no friends on the Hill.
You young folks will have to accept on faith that were was a time when that was not only possible, but mattered.
This strip wouldn't be nearly as funny, BTW, if Stantis liked Hillary Clinton, or embraced the lazy, vacuous "they all do it" faux-wisdom of a Will Rogers.
Though more of them seem to, as a lot of good, decent people have thrown up their hands and walked away from the thankless task of maintaining decency within the halls of Congress, or have left in search of another strategy.
It's a shame you can't have rational conversations on Facebook, yes.
But it's a tragedy when they can no longer take place on Capitol Hill.
The last time we let it get to this point, let us not forget, three-quarters of a million Americans ended up killing each other.
Comments
Comments are closed.