CSotD: Refreshing the Storytellers, and the Stories
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We'll lead off the week with a couple of things that should prove interesting, the first of which is that Rina Piccolo is guest-drawing Rhymes With Orange this week.
As Constant Readers know, I like Tina's Groove, but Rina's one-offs at Six Chix are the main reason I keep that strip in my feed, so I'm looking forward to a week of her gag work and suggest you tune in, though I imagine anyone who likes this sort of thing is already a regular RWO reader.
But there's your heads up anyway.
Syndicated cartoonists taking time off is relatively new, and by "relatively," I mean that I can remember when it didn't happen, but I'm old and it's an accepted thing these days, along with syndicated cartoonists owning their own work.
In the Olden Days, O Best Beloved, the syndicate owned the strip and the cartoonist was only a hired hand, replaceable more or less anytime. There are all sorts of stories about this, starting with the who-owns-what wars over the Yellow Kid that sorta/kinda/maybe spawned the term "yellow journalism."
Hearst and Pulitzer were no more encouraging creativity in comic strips than, in a later era, ABC and CBS were encouraging creativity in pitting "The Addams Family" against "Hogan's Heroes."
Or when Nabisco creatively positioned Oreos against Sunshine's Hydrox.
Sure, they want creativity. But, as Joe Martin suggests in today's Mr. Boffo, "creativity" can take more than one form, and guess which one you get paid for?
The Hearst/Pulitzer circulation wars created their own weather, for which reason Milt Caniff's switch from doing Terry and the Pirates — someone else's idea he had been hired for — to creating Steve Canyon is perhaps a more coherent example of the difference between owning your strip and having a gig.
And while some zombie strips have remained in the families of the original artists, others have simply been passed from one hired gun to the next.
However, I leave it to you to explore those links because, while fascinating, they're only background for the topic of vacations and burnout.
The default there used to be, and largely remains, that the artist simply works ahead to gain vacation time, something many of us who are not cartoonists can relate to: It ends up with half the vacation devoted to recovering from the effort of clearing the decks for vacation.
The most prominent example of more creatively claiming off-time was Garry Trudeau, who took a nearly two-year hiatus in 1983 to recharge his batteries, and was also permitted to run a week of reruns from time to time, until 2014 when he put Doonesbury into what appears to be permanent rerun mode, which is nostaglic fun in the infinite space of the Intertubes but is more controversial in print, where real estate is not only finite but shrinking, and Moldy Oldies block new artists and new projects from gaining a spot in the more profitable side of the business.
In the still-mostly-print days, Wiley Miller would allow Non Sequitur's precious print real estate to be taken over by lesser-known strips when he took a week to relax and recharge, which could give them a boost, but I think the more traditional gambit these days is the rerun, which, when it only comes a week at a time, seems a reasonable way to let cartoonists live somewhat normal lives.
Hilary Price's practice of actually handing over the reins is nearly unique (it's happened with other strips, but mostly in emergencies or as a gag) and it's also fun, particularly since she doesn't do it willy-nilly but selects guest artists who share something of her vision and who keep the feature bright while the fact that it gives her a little R&R presumably does the same thing.
Boy, that sure was a long way to go to say, "Hey! Look! Rina's drawing Hilary's strip this week!"
The Empire Talks Smack
This'll be shorter: Over at Bug Martini, Adam Huber is marking May The Fourth a week late with a satire of "The Empire Strikes Back" — and, yes, that headline is what he's calling it — that looks like it's gonna be fun.
Detail work
And, in some related mockery, Boulet takes on the question of why everything in adventure movies has to be so damned complicated.
This is only one clipping from a much more extensive and hilarious piece, which goes beyond the age-old question of why villains have to explain everything and then leave the room, instead of simply killing the hero.
Granted, it still doesn't address my question about jungle movies, which is how, having cut down rickety bridges over chasms and thoroughly pissed off every native community en route to finding the treasure, the hero makes it straight back to Nairobi, a shave and some clean clothes without anything worth depicting having happened.
I would think his return would be a whole lot more adventure-filled than the first pass when nobody knew he was coming and all those bridges were still at least nominally intact.
Go check out Boulet's take. It answers questions nobody asked, and that's a good thing.
Here's the bottom line on storytelling and audience demand:
("Bottom line," get it? Heh.)
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