CSotD: Quick Takes
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We’ll start today’s collection of Quick Takes with a quick take of its own. The idea of Duke joining the Trump administration is exciting, but I’m not sure it can work in Doonesbury’s once-a-week format, which is a shame, but Trudeau’s best work was not done in quick takes.
He did extended narratives, building characters and extending storylines over a period of time, so that characters like Duke and Honey, but also like Andy and Joanie, lived in their own established universes, which set up single strips to stand alone because readers knew and supplied the background.
Doonesbury is hardly the only strip that works like this. When I interviewed Bunny Hoest, she talked about how readers described the Lockhorns as if that simple one panel had a beginning and then went on past the immediate depiction. But while Leroy and Loretta are also established characters, Doonesbury created a deeper, more nuanced world with a large variety of unique characters that was rare if not unique.
And I say “was” because, while I enjoy the Sunday each week, I don’t get that same sense of stepping into a different dimension every morning, and while it works for Mike and Kim to ponder middle-aged life or for talking White House gags Sunday, it doesn’t have the feel of the old daily strip.
Here’s an example of a gag that makes the reader go beyond the immediate setting. First of all, Burbe uses the well-established Trojan Horse, which is popular at the moment but needed no explanation even before the film came out, and so the base joke is the authorities worrying about one person while hordes of others go past.
The obvious connection is with migrants, though that requires that you see them as a threat. Burbe is Lithuanian, and I don’t think migration is a major issue there, but it’s a concern throughout Europe and she’s addressing a universal audience or she wouldn’t create English-language versions of her work.
As someone who lived on the US/Canada border for several years, the connection I make is Customs, since, as a reporter, I’d get called up there to see whatever load of drugs they’d intercepted, but we always knew that, however impressive the bust, it was spit in the ocean of stuff that was getting past them.
Staying on the topic of The Authorities, I pay particular attention to Molina when he addresses this sort of issue, since he had to leave Nicaragua to be safe, given his criticism of repressive government.
Thousands of Venezuelans have been deported by ICE since the kidnapping of Maduro, there has been no move by the Americans to promote free elections there and now we’re seizing their petroleum, all of which makes Molina’s combination valid and striking.
I was delighted to see John Branch raise a topic that has had me scratching my head. I have no doubt that certain political operatives of a certain political party have been exploiting islamophobia, just as they’ve been exploiting ignorance about transgendered people.
But while I am aware of how pig-ignorant many people are about how our government functions, I continue to be astonished at the slack-jawed idiocy of people who think that the tiny minority of Muslim immigrants here are going to install sharia law.
I understand that bigotry blinds them to the obvious probability that many of those immigrants, though still practicing their religion, came here to get away from theocratic extremist dictatorships. But good lord — whosever lord you prefer — they ought at least to know that two percent of anybody cannot possibly muster the majorities needed to overturn local and state laws, much less gain the three-quarters of states they’d need to amend the Constitution.
I swear we’re deporting the wrong people.
For all the speculation about Dear Leader’s stability, he’s not the only world leader who is attracting that sort of speculation, and I’ve been hearing rumblings that match Jonesy’s cartoon. The extra-long table tells you who he’s depicting, and Putin was already being spoken of as a germaphobe, but as the Ukraine war continues to stagnate and nearly half a million Russian soldiers have died, there is talk of Putin beginning to lose stability.
Three years ago, let’s not forget, a mercenary army marched on Moscow, though their leader was persuaded to call off the rebellion, and two months later he and some other leaders of the rebellion were killed in a totally accidental airplane explosion.
Such tragic accidents inspired Guy Venables to crack wise over the resignation of Russia’s ambassador to Britain.
And here’s something I didn’t know. I’d heard rumblings about Britain being concerned about the Falklands once again and that Trump said he wouldn’t help them defend the island against Argentina because they didn’t cooperate with him in attacking Iran, but it all seemed a bit theoretical until I saw Adams’ latest.
Back in the last war down there, there was a strong indication that the Falklands, while lovely and pastoral, were primarily a source of penguins and that the back-and-forth with Argentina was largely an issue of national pride on both sides. The people there were mostly British, which gave them some claim, but there were less than 4,000 of them, which seemed less than persuasive.
When I saw that newspaper next to Andy Burnham I did a little Googling, and it seems there’s rather a large pool of black gold, Texas tea, under those islands, or near them, which ratchets up the sovereignty question dramatically.
Dunno if oil is good news for the Falklanders or not.
Juxtaposition of Mediocrity
DD Degg did a good takedown on the Baltimore Sun’s decision to let their newsroom start doing editorial cartoons with AI, a move that drew condemnation from real cartoonists on social media and proved my point that editors don’t understand cartoons.
The Sun is full of excellent writers, but you can tell these over-chatty, actionless panels were assembled by writers, not created by cartoonists.
Cartooning is a two-part skill, and several successful cartoonists have the wit but lack the artistic chops. This collection, however, has neither, and no art — real or artificial — could rescue the dreary, committee-built results.
Near enough isn’t close enough.
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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