CSotD: The Cathy Rule & The Wild and Wacky
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Filling in for Mike Peterson while he’s on assignment to the surprisingly hectic Lost Forest National Forest, I’m Brian Fies.
Many pre-Internet years ago, in an effort to better understand how comics work, I did an experiment whose results surprised me.
Like most people who read comic strips in a newspaper, I have those I like and those I skip. For my exercise, I set out to read all the strips every day, clip the ones I considered the best and the worst, tape them into a notebook, and write a paragraph or two on why I thought they were good or bad.
When I forced myself to think about it, I discovered that some of the strips I liked were actually among the weakest, relying on a small handful of twists and tropes to generate variations on the same gag every day. On the other hand, I discovered that some of the strips I’d turned up my nose at were actually pretty strong.
Most dramatically, over several months, about one-third of the strips I pegged as the day’s best were Cathy by Cathy Guisewite. I hadn’t considered Cathy much more than a flighty neurotic (“AACK!”) I wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with, and whose life I certainly didn’t want to read about every day, until I actually studied the writing and the art. Guisewite’s gags were solidly constructed to set up a premise and deliver a punch line. Her artwork wasn’t sophisticated but it was clear, and served the characters and story. Being “better drawn” would not have improved Cathy and probably would have hurt it.
I’m not trying to talk anyone into loving Cathy. However, my exercise did lead me to create something I call my “Cathy Rule,” which is a sort of filter I use, especially when encountering something new: Does a comic do what it’s trying to do (regardless of whether I’m its intended audience)? Does its storytelling style help it do that (regardless of whether it appeals to my taste)? Creative work can succeed on its own terms even if it's just not for me.
Applying the Cathy Rule to not just comics but books, movies, music, etc. has broadened my critical and artistic perspective considerably. I recommend it.
The Wild and Wacky
Sportscaster Marv Albert used to go on talk shows with clips of "the wild and the wacky in the world of sports." Today I've compiled some comic strips you may never have heard of that fit that description. To be clear, these are comics I like; there are plenty of other wild and wacky comics I find merely strange, indulgent, offensive or poorly done.
This'll be a good workout for the Cathy Rule.
Dinosaur Comics by Ryan North has a gimmick: it uses the exact same artwork of rampaging dinosaurs every day. Only the dialog changes. Today's contrasts a pretty deep thought by biologist Richard Dawkins with a mundane discussion of what's for dinner. North's been getting away with this for more than 10 years (!) now.
This works for me because North is fundamentally a good, smart writer, whose comic book work has included Adventure Time and Marvel's Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. He has a master's degree in computer science and his dog is named Noam Chompsky. I think Dinosaur Comics raises interesting fundamental questions about the language of comics. There's something about the rhythm of these six panels that lends itself to a certain type of gag construction. The close-up in Panel 2, the break in action (change of time or location?) between Panels 3 and 4, the figure standing alone in Panel 6: it becomes a poetic structure, like a sonnet or haiku.
I can sense your eyes rolling. I may be overthinking it, but there's something about Dinosaur Comics that keeps it fresh and entertaining even though it's looked exactly the same for more than a decade. In fact, I find that the more of them I read, the richer the joke becomes. It's kind of amazing what North's managed to do with his bizarre concept.
I discovered the Comic Strip That Has a Finale Every Day by John "Scully" Scully, whose artistic style looks a lot like Ruben Bolling's, on GoComics.com. Like Dinosaur Comics, the artwork for this feature is exactly the same every day. Unlike Dinosaur Comics, so is the text. Each day's strip is identical. Creator Scully says he figured that since finales are always popular, every installment of his comic strip would be its last.
Honestly, I don't read the Comic Strip that Has a Finale Every Day every day, but there is some comfort in knowing it will always be there for me. If you want to get deep, you might ask if it's a commentary on the repetitive themes of newspaper comics, the artificial excitement of meaningless milestones, or a Möbius comic strip commentary on life, where every ending is another beginning. (Eye roll.)
For me, the best part is the readers' comments. Most readers get the joke but some seems genuinely puzzled or even angry. The Comic Strip That Has a Finale Every Day only appears online, yet I've seen people complain that it's somehow taking a valuable slot away from a needy cartoonist, as if there were a shortage of electrons. (There isn't.) I smile when it pops up in my feed and I think I'd be sad if it ever actually ends.
I'm conflicted about today's New Adventures of Queen Victoria by Pab Sungenis. On one hand, it's a great example of today's "wild and wacky" theme, being a comic strip that's always illustrated by antique clip art (pictures that aren't protected by copyright). On the other hand, today's particular strip takes the kind of swipe at Melania Trump's plagiarism that I criticized yesterday for being too easy.
Oh well. I contain multitudes.
The stylistically mashed-up collages often give the strip a Terry Gilliam "Monty Python" feel. Though Queen Victoria doesn't appear in today's strip, she is a frequent character, her eyes sometimes bulging in surprise or anger. The strip frequently slips into absurdist or meta humor, in which it comments on the fact that it's a comic strip itself. Last Sunday's strip was all text: an "End User License Agreement" whose terms and conditions included, "As used in this agreement, the word klaftwetler means fish, but not shellfish." I think it's a clever strip.
These three comics look like comic strips, while at the same time stretching the boundaries of the form a bit. Of course they won't interest or entertain everybody. As with Cathy, I'm not out to make you love them. But I think there's some value in what they do and how they do it–well, maybe not the Comic Strip that Has a Finale Every Day, whose pointlessness is part of the point.
Eye rolls are optional.
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