CSotD: Ethnic humor, perhaps
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I don't often promo new strips, because even with a full development process, they tend to start out a little rough and only find their legs with time.
However, Ali's House is so timely that I'm going to give them a chance to be overly sincere for a few weeks while they establish characters and setting. If it turns out to be "Little Mosque on the Prairie" meets "Edge City," you heard it here first. And if it turns out not to be, you didn't hear it here at all.
The issue is whether it's an ethnic strip or a strip with ethnic characters and settings, and there is a lot of space for failure and success within that continuum.
"For Better or For Worse" famously was a strip about a family, and Lynn Johnston declined to scrub their Canadian affiliation, so fans of the strip learned about Thanksgiving in October and red mailboxes. It was less a chance to educate American readers about Canada than it was to educate people in general about artistic integrity: The Pattersons were Canadian.
At the other end of the scale are any number of strips that are so eager to portray an ethnic group that they forgot to tell a story or to build compelling characters.
Ali's House is definitely ethnic — a Lebanese Arab family in America, and Ali himself runs a falafel stand — so I'm assuming that any cultural lessons we pick up will not be unintentional or coincidental. But if you go to that page and read down the list of characters, they've assembled a cast of familiar but not cliched personalities with a flexibility to go in any number of directions.
It's going on my list, but you may not see it again here for a little while. Shakedown cruises can take time.
Meanwhile, Pardon My Planet offers a gag maybe I wouldn't have thought was funny another day, but I got pulled back into the hospital with some recovery adjustments — nothing serious, but some dehydration and electrolyte imbalance and so forth, which translates to lying around with IVs watching TV on the hospital's basic cable.
My theory is that, if you don't like TV, you should have a higher cable tier, because obviously you have to sort through a lot of drek to find anything worth watching. If you are content to have basic, you must love that stuff because, wow, it's really pretty dismal.
And, yes, if the judge gave me the choice of hard time or daytime television, bring out the orange jumpsuit, your honor.
So, side note: I've got my laptop and my electrolytes are back in balance and I'll be out on the streets again soon, but that's why today's posting is short and late.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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