CSotD: Big comics, small problems & vice-versa
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Mike Lynch posted this 1939 "Right Around Home" Sunday panel on his Facebook page, and then Tom Heintjes of Hogan's Alley offered a link to that magazine's extensive and example-filled article on Dudley Fisher's feature.
And, as Heintjes said, the archive attached to that article is "guaranteed to lay waste to whatever you had planned for the evening" which is fine but I hope you're not reading this at work, because it will also do the same for whatever you had planned there.
My own comment was that such detail-filled, fun stuff could only happen before they shrank the Sunday comics page itself and then began cramming three titles or more on each page, and the Hogan's Alley article more or less indicates that this was, indeed, what killed the feature.
Oh well.
I won't repeat my rule that people who read comics on their phones are estopped from complaining about how the print newspapers shrink them down, but someone else recently posted pics of their kid with various famous paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago, including Seurat's "A Sunday on Grande Jatte," which, in person, is nearly 7×10 feet huge.
Which, in turn, is slightly smaller than Gustave Caillebotte's "Paris Street; Rainy Day," which is also displayed there in the dimensions the artist intended.
I'm not a particularly avid fan of gigantism in art, but there are those who make it work, and I wish cartoonists still had a canvas worth covering every Sunday.
Speaking of art critics
One of the hallmarks of an effective cartoon is the ability to make the reader say, "Yep. Got that right." Pajama Diaries got this right, sort of.
Without naming names, I had two anonymous female siblings born about a year and a half apart, so that they hit this developmental phase at roughly the same time. Our folks were subtle about it, and I've gotta say that Rob is awfully optimistic on how that plays out, timewise.
However, it does resolve itself. Unclench, parents. Unclench.
You want to something to be upset about?
We've got more immediate problems than pre-teen cosmetics, and cartoonists have turned their attention to several examples. For instance:
Sometimes I see the commentary before I see what sparked it, and this Ann Telnaes piece made me say, "No, he didn't" and head for Google News.
Yes, he did. What a buffoon.
And even the so-called "Biden rule" was, as the GOP applied it, contextually dishonest: Biden simply said that, if such a vacancy occurred in the middle of a presidential campaign, it should be put off until after the election. Not the inauguration. The election.
We really shouldn't have to argue over whether our leaders are actively dishonest or simply too stupid to look into the facts before they start citing precedents that don't exist.
And the hacker hearings had barely begun before Trump's army of trolls (or maybe Putin's) began singing the praises of Julian Assange and decrying the flaws of the FBI and CIA.
Nick Anderson nails it.
Once more, we're forced to try to sort the fools from the liars, but then again, as a famous politician once asked a congressional committee, "At this point, what difference does it make?"
I actually have more respect for the paid trolls, because at least they're not making fools of themselves in public without getting something out of it.
However, it does remind me of the Watergate fallout, when we learned not only about Watergate itself but also about the burglary of Daniel Ellsburg's psychiatrist's office and the secret war on his credibility, as well as about COINTELPRO and the FBI's war on dissenters.
One effect was a lot of people whose phones had been tapped and mail had been opened saying, "See? I told you so!" which was cold comfort by that point.
But another was that a college friend who was then in med school happened to be going through his psych rotation and he said it made it very hard to reason with a particular patient he had who thought his phone was tapped, his mail was being opened and that John Chancellor was climbing out of the TV and following him around the house.
Because two of those things were proven, and that damned Chancellor would refuse to climb out of the TV while anyone else was watching.
Guy's probably up for a cabinet position today.
Still, it's good we got wise to it and tamped down on the abuses 40 years ago, innit?
Not everybody thinks the intelligence community is incompetent, or pretends that they think that.
If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. – Sen. Frank Church
Now here's your moment of zen
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