CSotD: Production Notes
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Dog Eat Doug makes an oblique commentary on the life of a comic strip: It starts out wandering a bit, then finds its legs, hits the groove and, too often, the groove becomes a rut. It doesn't hurt that Brian Anderson is, when he's not drawing Doug and Sophie, doing fantasy work and that he does use cats and squirrels — in a somewhat less absurd form — to break things up.
This is too much, but intentionally so.
Comic strips are, of necessity, based on fairly simple premises: You have a cast, a general location and the overall concept: Husband and wife, talking animals, workplace humor, whatever.
It's not unlike TV sitcoms, and a good example of excellence through creative adaptability in that case was the Mary Tyler Moore Show, which began with the premise of a single girl moving to the city, but somehow hijacked itself into her workplace with only occasional forays into her personal life, and which organically transformed a nondescript group of coworkers into one of the most dynamic ensembles in TV history.
And then everyone tried to copy it by assembling, on the spot, a predetermined ensemble of wacky coworkers.
But you can't capture that dynamism by plan, you can't order everyone to be spontaneous on the count of three.
Similarly, in cartooning, a pair of cartoons came along that changed everything: The Far Side, and Calvin and Hobbes.
And there have been a lot of "One-Two-Three — Spontaneous!" attempts to capture their magic ever since, very few of them creatively successful.
Both Gary Larson and Bill Watterson recognized the point at which they had gone from the groove into the rut and ended their strips. There are fans who wish they had continued, but there was nothing left in the tank.
The TV schedule is similarly full of sitcoms with nothing left in the tank. Even MTM stuck around too long, degenerating into Ted getting married and adopting a kid and other post-shark-jump inanities, and proving that lightning only strikes once by attempting to spin off the characters of Phyllis and Rhoda into their own shows.
Comic strippers would do well to binge watch a little MTM and ponder.
And please don't introduce unicorn-riding squirrels in comfy shorts to your strip.
It was only hilarious today. (But it was!)
Meanwhile, in another commentary on the art form, Soup to Nutz points out a fundamental issue with puns in comic strips, and Rick Stromoski drives his point home through the fact that, except in the last panel, the pairing of "lead" and "read" are interchangeable and we don't know which pronunciations he is using.
And I greatly admire the way Stromoski simply lays it out and lets it — no pun intended — speak for itself.
It isn't hard to find examples of strips in which a pun is telegraphed because the two words involved are spelled differently, which simply doesn't work. There are even some in which, in the last panel, the character admits it.
Breaking the fourth wall has its place, certainly, but that is not it. If you can't pull off a pun without telegraphing it, the solution is not to make a joke of the futility but to ball up the paper and think of something else.
Both of these strips broke the fourth wall in a different way today, providing a bit of a peek behind the scenes of an art form that is nowhere near as easy as its simple lines and fonts suggest.
Granted, it's easy enough to critique and comment upon.
Damn, I'm glad I don't have to come up with fresh material 365 times a year.
Meanwhile, back in the real world
I've said several times that the kids of Parkland remind me of the Children's Crusade that, in its literal 1963 form, helped bring an end to Jim Crow and, later, in a more metaphorical form, drove LBJ from the White House and (eventually) ended the Vietnam War.
Joel Pett's cartoon reminds me of an element in that effort: The chants of "Hey, Hey, LBJ: How many kids did you kill today?" outside the White House reportedly broke Johnson's heart and contributed to his decision not to seek a second full term.
Even Nixon — who instigated much of today's toxic divisive atmosphere — was confused and upset by the demonstrators, to the extent that one night when DC was filled with antiwar protesters, he snuck out and went to the Lincoln Memorial and spoke with some of the kids there.
However, I wouldn't want to leave the impression that I think it was the same.
Specifically, the kids who went South to register voters and break up segregation faced a more daily threat of violence.
More to the point with regard to this cartoon, Johnson was already conflicted in that he had, however imperfectly, championed civil rights and he had inherited the war, leading David Levine to depict him as King Lear, surrounded by Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey and Wilbur Mills.
And even Richard Nixon, for all his manipulations and criminal activities, had a heart and a conscience.
I do not believe the Parkland kids have that advantage in this confrontation.
I believe that Donald Trump and perhaps less obviously the GOP leadership, are sufficiently narcissistic and deranged that it is an impossible tactic and goal to attempt to turn them the way a cowboy might turn the lead cattle in a stampede.
Still, there is hope: As Guido Kuehn suggests, the NRA is intent on changing the nation's motto, but their blood-stained hands are visible to all.
I think the Parkland kids have the advantage already which the anti-war movement only acquired at the Democratic Convention in Chicago: The whole world is indeed watching, and, while the trolls and paranoid lunatics of the far right may be more vocal, both popular sentiment and the numbers — five million NRA members in a nation of 323 million — favor the kids.
Keep on keepin' on.
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