CSotD: Playing Ketchup
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The whole Kendall Jenner/Pepsi thing kind of blew by me until it blew up. (Best link you'll click all week)
My celebrity spokesperson commercial exposure is pretty much limited to Marie Osmond who, as you may know, lost 50 pounds on Nutri-System.
Those commercials made me wonder why she wasn't still working, and then I looked her up and found out she is still working, just not anywhere I'd be apt to come across her.
Which makes her different than Kendall Jenner because at least I knew who Marie was, even if I didn't know who she still is.
I didn't know who Kendall Jenner was, though I do know what I'd have had to be watching in order to have come across her and I'm not sure I'd admit it anyway.
It's kind of like a reverse IQ test.
Anyway, Clay Jones has this covered, and, while he — and apparently everybody else in the world — takes it more seriously than I do, he's got a point:
Hey, corporate activism is OK. Using causes to sell your sugary product, not so much. Starbucks comes to mind as a company that knows how to support causes without milking it for profits.
My immediate thought was that Coke did this same sort of thing several decades ago, and everyone loved the "I'd Like To Buy The World A Coke" ad, but, upon further reflection, there's a big difference between putting a bunch of international kids on a hill in Italy to sing together and projecting your product into the middle of a demonstration, even (as Clay notes) a strangely generic one.
I also remembered that there was an odd little TV show in South Bend at the time called "Beyond Our Control" which was produced by high school kids and was, basically, SCTV before there was an SCTV.
They made their own hilltop commercial in which a bunch of ethnically diverse kids holding ketchup bottles sang and swayed sweetly until one of them spilled ketchup on another who flinched and spilled on someone else and the whole thing turned into a brawl, with the closing crawl being that they'd put these kids on a hilltop to remind you of what the world is really like.
Maybe Pepsi should have just re-shot the end of the commercial and had the cop nail her with a blast of pepper spray.
In less trivial matters
The sudden shift from Putin's Pal to firing missiles into Syria caught most of us by surprise, but that's the sort of thing that happens when you're dealing with someone with no coherent policy and very little impulse control.
Austrian cartoonist Marian Kamensky offers this panel, which I note is not intended to reflect the response of Assad and Putin to the missiles themselves, but, rather, simply welcomes Trump to the ongoing bloodbath.
Jimmy Margulies had previously responded to the cluck-clucks of concern from a White House that had, up to now, been perfectly willing to leave children in harm's way, and nothing that has happened since has removed the stain of hypocrisy there.
It would be far better to accept a few thousand refugees than risk touching off armed conflict with the Russians, but, again, dealing with Trump is like fighting a drunk: It's not the skill or strength you need to fear but the utter gonzo unpredictability.
The airstrikes came as a surprise, and my wanderings through both syndicate and individual cartoonists' web sites turned up no response yet from this side of the Atlantic.
However, a look into the newsroom at Cartoon Movement — whence I pulled Kamensky's piece — showed several cartoons on the topic representing a number of points of view, and I suspect the number will continue to grow.
I am, at this point, less interested in parsing the viewpoints than in pondering reponse time and deadlines.
There are, on American cartoon sites, a number of panels about the Gorsuch nomination and the "nuclear option," and that's certainly a major story that demands coverage.
But it's also a developing story and I suspect that a lot of cartoonists were prepared to comment somewhat on the basis with which they prepare cartoons at election time or for the Super Bowl — if it goes this way, I've got this, if it goes that way, I've got that.
The final inking awaits the news, but deadlines can often be nudged and, if they can't, you at least know when the cartoon has to be in and when it's going to run and can plan accordingly.
When something sudden like this happens, we get a glimpse into the Rapid Response capabilities.
It's pretty obvious that, at Cartoon Movement, cartoonists post their own work whenever they like, and that's also the case for self-syndicated freelancers in this country who maintain their own websites.
Beyond that, it gets murky, because an American cartoonist may leap into action, but there is often a chain of necessary, prescribed actions between the pen and the Internet and, barring a 9/11 major catastrophe, a bureaucracy that will not budge.
I'm increasingly curious about that chain, because I see cartoons on Facebook or Twitter or on newspaper sites that don't pop up at GoComics or Comics Kingdom for another day or two, but I also see things appear instantaneously everywhere and I see times when new work by certain artists doesn't appear on GoComics or Comics Kingdom for two or three weeks.
This suggests that those sites are responsive and that any delay is in the artist's individual chain.
I'd throw some of that onto the back of the artist: If there is an unmoveable two-day gap, it may be a matter of a system you can't challenge and a battle you can't win.
But, damn, if there's a kink in the hose and your stuff simply isn't getting posted in a timely manner, you need to raise hell.
Anyone in the industry should understand that letting yourself be perpetually scooped is not okay.
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