CSotD: Friday Short Takes
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Filling in for Mike Peterson while he’s on assignment in picturesque Mtigwaki, Ontario, I’m Brian Fies.
Today I'm spotlighting three comic strips I liked and explaining why I liked 'em. It doesn't get simpler than that.
In one sense, Zits is the sort of family strip that's been in the paper for a hundred years. Mom, dad, son, friends; food, fun, responsibility, school. But the Zits guys, writer Jerry Scott and artist Jim Borgman, keep the premise fresh and funny. One of the things they do best is use the unique iconography of comics to deliver a gag. Comics excel at symbols and metaphor.
Scott and Borgman also keep up with what those crazy kids are into nowadays. On a comics page where some characters still talk into telephones attached to the wall with a spiral cord, they mine smart phones and emojis for humor.
Today's gag wouldn't have made any sense 10 years ago. The unusual panel layout, centered around the circle in the middle, really catches the eye. The camera and microphone icons are important because they reinforce the idea that we're seeing Jeremy and Sara's conversation as it pops up on their screens. Jeremy's emojis explaining just how much he reeks are clever (how many individual icons can you think of that convey the idea of "stinky?"). Zits does a lot of this sort of formalistic playfulness on Sundays, but it works on the smaller daily canvas, too.
Scott and Borgman routinely exercise different parts of their readers' brains. I like that.
Today's Dilbert by Scott Adams may not have stood out to me were it not for its juxtaposition with Zits. Where the callow kids in Zits use modern technology to communicate and bond, the jaded adults in Dilbert use it to isolate themselves. Maybe the problem isn't the tech, but what you do with it. Dilbert's universe is generally much more cynical and unpleasant than Jeremy and Sara's. Both attitudes have their place in a well-balanced humor diet, but I know which universe's characters I'd rather hang out with.
I won't lie. After I found two strips built around smart phone gags, I went looking for a third just to see if I could make a theme of it. Then I came across today's Pardon My Planet by Vic Lee, and liked it so much on its own merits I decided to forget the theme.
Maybe it's just me and my life and my dreams, but this hit home. It's not laugh-out-loud funny, but it's dry, wry, and pretty insightful, I think.
My first interpretation: the character is filled with regret because his dreams are incompatible with society's reality. Having a career, a home, a family, a few bucks in the bank–however you want to define "the American Dream"–meant giving up other ambitions that really mattered to him. But I think you could read it another way. Maybe his dreams held him back. How many people make themselves miserable striving for dreams that may not even get them what they really want? How many people are their own worst enemy?
As I said, maybe it's just me.
If today's CSOTD was too short for you, I'll make up for it tomorrow. Check in over the weekend for a loooong (but interesting, I think!) interview with two cartoonist friends of mine whose day jobs involve working with one of the greatest comic strips of all time.
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