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Help Wanted - Must be hard-working, creative and desperate

Rina Piccolo hits the nail on the head with today's Six Chix panel.

There are jobs out there, as long as you don't mind taking two or three and being paid for one.

This is not theory talking; I was unemployed for about eight months after my last newspaper job ended with the death of the paper.

I came across a wonderfully horrifying job offer at www.journalismjobs.com that I sent to a few people as an example of the wretchedness of the market, but I find, looking back, that I only sent the link and didn't cut-and-paste the job description itself. That link has expired, along with, no doubt, whatever poor schlub accepted the gig, which involved doing virtually everything at the paper except running the press and watering the plants.

Which means they probably job out their printing to save money and decorate with plastic plants. Or that they lump those under "and other duties as assigned."

I don't know how much reading-between-the-lines it takes to really appreciate this, but here's a current job description that is typical:

The city beat reporter is our most visible position, responsible for finding new ways to cover local city governement, issues, business and trends. The perfect candidate is intelligent, creative, fast, accurate, courageous and curious with a unique ability to visualize a story and know how to play it for maximum impact on the web and in print. You'll write, shoot photos and video, help with editing and production and be called upon to contribute to the entire editorial operation, not just your stories.

I would note that the same paper is looking for a news editor -- the two jobs are in the same ad, which is a hint as to spending policy at this place -- and the editor's job description includes this important qualification:

News Editor candidates must cringe at typos and missed deadlines and obsess over finding the perfect word. Prior newspaper experience, keen news judgement and proficiency in InDesign and PhotoShop are required for this position.

Which brings up the important question, are they planting typos in their ad to see if I'll notice and bring it up in the interview, or will doing that get me marked down as an insubordinate wiseass?

Which in turn brings up the important question, do I want to work at (A) a place that can't properly proofread its own ads or (B) that would play a juvenile game like purposely planting errors in their ads or (C) neither of the above?

But this is drifting away from Rina's cartoon.

Going back to that "city beat reporter" job, I think most people will recognize that being the city reporter traditionally means knowing the city government and the people in it, inside and out.

It does not mean racing in to grab a press release, listen to a 15-minute news conference and then scurry back to the newsroom and turn into an amalgam of Clark Kent, D.A. Pennebaker, Mark Zuckerberg and a mother bird, spewing out the regurgitated pap in all formats before running out to get another press release and repeat.

Granted, I used to fight this one with my editors when I was a business reporter, back in the Good Old Days 20 years ago.

I used to sit through chamber board meetings and gatherings of the Home Builders Association that didn't necessarily result in a story that day because I knew that the knowledge gained and the contacts created would lead to a much better, in depth story another day.

I'd generally get away with it because I am a faster-than-average writer, so that, even though I was wasting time learning how my beat actually operated, I was still cranking out plenty of stories about ribbon-cuttings and exciting expansions and well-deserved promotions.

But I wasn't being asked to shoot videos and edit the section. I did shoot a lot of my own photos; that's part of small-town reporting and it doesn't add to the time commitment. But I always felt that we in print had a great advantage over the local TV journalists because we weren't spending so much time in the editing booth and could afford to take time to cover a story right.

Reporters reported. Editors edited. Neither had time to do the other's job without shortchanging his own.

And they still don't.

Today, I look at the ads and wonder how anybody can be desperate enough to apply for these absurd portmanteau jobs.

You have to understand that a job like the city beat reporter above, given the size of the publication (15,000 weekly) probably pays less than $30,000 a year, quite possibly a lot less. But, whatever the amount, it doesn't pay enough to make up for the fact that you'd actually be doing two or three jobs.

And being cautioned not to put in any overtime. But to be "productive." Or else.

And that, even if you are productive, as the New Guy -- the guy who is still paying off his U-Haul bill from the move -- you'll be the first one out on the street when the next round of cuts comes along, stuck in Godforsakenberg, Iowa, where the only other jobs are at the 7-11.

And might actually be more fun.

There is no greater burden than an older sibling

Edge City seems to have a predeliction for picking up little moments in family life that haven't yet been hammered to death on the funny pages. They don't slam every ball over the fence, but they get a lot of extra base hits, while just the originality makes the strip worth following (and they do wallop their share into the stands).

Sibling rivalry isn't new, and there are strips where the kids aren't presented as a sort of unitary bloc of obnoxious behavior -- for instance, Jan Eliot of "Stone Soup" and Bill Amends of "Foxtrot" differentiate their kids enough that either could have a field day with this theme. They're probably touched on it, but Edge City is where I'm reading it fleshed out as a full story arc, and I'm giving points for that, because it's no small matter.

Here it is, the first day of school and I already hate this teacher. It's not that she remembers Carly's older brother. I don't expect amnesia. But I would like some discretion, and I've seen this from both sides.

Whether it inspires unrealistic hopes or unjustified foreboding, it's almost impossible not to judge the younger sibling based on the older. But, either way, it's unforgiveable to talk about it.

I mean, to start with, it's extremely unprofessional. But it's also rude.

It didn't often happen that teachers discussed my older siblings to my face, but I knew it was an issue. They were top of their classes while, if I were in school today, the counselors would have me pumped so full of behavioral adjustments that I'd have to trail an IV stand down the hall.

I was not only a waste of great potential, but I was also a grave disappointment in light of their previous experience and, yeah, some of them told me that outright. 

The younger daughter of a girlfriend faced the same thing: It wasn't just that she had her own academic issues to deal with, but she was following an older sister who was an honor student, and so she wasn't expected to just do well. She was expected to be like her sister and was more than once directly, specifically asked why she wasn't.

Meanwhile, my boys reversed it. My older son was much like me, and I got to endure the same "great potential" lectures on parent/teacher night that my parents used to hear.

Little brother, however, was more like his mother and was comfortable in school. But he has told me since that it often took him a few weeks or months to get out from under the thumb of teachers who felt that having the younger brother of the Great Potential in class meant getting out the truncheons on Day One.

In his case, he could readily overcome his teachers' prejudice, because he not only turned in his work on time (and kept his hijinks below the radar) but was a high honors student. Had he only been average, he might not have escaped so easily.

I don't take this stuff lightly. I've seen too many examples of how bad it can be.

I was at a reunion a few weeks ago and had a good conversation with a buddy who is a Vietnam veteran that began with my telling him I'd run into a mutual friend who had experienced a very hard landing on his return from Vietnam but is now clean, sober, married and happy.

We talked about the experiences of some of our schoolmates, and I recalled sitting in a diner with another fellow back in 1966, trying to talk him out of leaving school to take a factory job in Rochester.

I admitted, and my buddy quickly and whole-heartedly agreed, that I couldn't come up with much of an argument for his staying in school. He was a good guy, but he had a familiar name in the community and started each school year on the faculty hit list because of his older cousins and siblings.

By what should have been his senior year, he was two grades back and there was no reason to expect that he was suddenly going to be offered a break.

However, dropping out of school turned out to work in his favor. The factory job didn't last long, and when he found himself at Parris Island, something happened that he'd never experienced before: His last name was on his uniform, but nobody down there paid any attention to it.

They didn't give a damn what his name was or what his older relatives were like. What they cared about was that he was a bright, willing recruit who could drop and give them 50 -- or 100 if they wanted -- and that he could pick flies off the wall with a deer rifle at 100 yards.

He got blowed up real good over there, but he overcame the worst of his wounds and returned, not a "better man" -- he had always been a good man -- but a man who knew his worth for having finally been given a fair chance to show it.

Is that really too much to ask?

I want to see where Patty and Terry LaBan take this storyline. Not into the dark places I've just dragged it, I'm sure, but I'll be watching with interest nonetheless.

As said, it's inevitable that teachers will remember siblings, and it's not fair to demand they be superhuman and completely wipe the comparisons from their minds.

But every kid deserves to start with a clean slate, and good teachers do their best to provide it.

 

(Side note: I live about five miles from the Center for Cartoon Studies, whose library is on the banks of the White River. While the building was threatened, and may have been irreparably damaged, by Irene's floods, their collection is safe. I was going to go by yesterday and see how they were doing, but the street was blocked off and full of mud. However, here's a report from Tom Spurgeon at Comics Reporter.)

It's not ordinary when it happens to you

I don't often pick a cartoon based solely on its artwork, and this Damien Glez cartoon certainly has a deserving message beyond its art alone.

But in other hands, it would be "yep, he's right" and move on to the next one.

There is something obscene, after all, in the western nations obsessing over the problems of too much food -- the headline on the magazine is "July/August - Stay on the Line!" (in essence, remember your diet) -- while others have none.

But other artists have pointed out the incongruity. It's not a fresh or stunning observation.

Until Glez takes it up and insists, through his art, that it is not a commonplace observation at all.

Funny thing about natural disasters -- he said, posting late amid power failures, flooded streets and picturesque covered bridges reduced to kindling -- they become a steady drumbeat on the news and it's easy to become deaf to the beat.

But for each person effected, it's not a common occurrence. And Irene wasn't as big a storm as we thought it might be, but if you were plucked out of your car by firefighters, and then watched it swept down the Connecticut River, if you are seeing your house tumble into the waters, if you are the owner of a store that is now three feet underwater, it's likely hard to say that Irene wasn't so bad.

Yes, the Sahel seems constantly on the edge of crisis. We see the stories on the news, we see the pictures of women in their robes, the tiny children, and we think, well, there it is again.

But Glez reminds us that it is fresh for the people there, and with his artwork, he dares us to look into the face of death without a sense of immediacy, and relevance.

Down by the (Potomac) Riverside

Joel Pett offers a thoughtful perspective on the new MLK memorial on the National Mall.

I'm old enough to remember the Civil Rights Movement, but just young enough to have not quite been an active part of it. I say "active part" because we're all part of it still, in the sense of "You're either part of the solution or part of the problem."

I worked at a summer camp in 1966, the summer before my senior year in high school, and waiting on tables was a large part of our duties in the job. The kitchen staff was black and we became friends with the younger guys, who were college students.

Two of them were actively involved with the Civil Rights Movement down South where they lived and they told us of the extensive training sessions they had, simply learning to take abuse without fighting back, which was an essential part of the movement under Dr. King, and one that carried over into first years of the antiwar movement.

It was a hard thing, to care passionately enough to go out in the street but to restrain that passion when you were being attacked. On the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, it's worth pausing to think about what they went through and to remember the lives lost in the voter registration drives and other activities that made up the movement in those days of glory.

It was perhaps inevitable that passive resistence as the primary tactic of the movement did not last forever. To be effective, a movement has to grow beyond a small, dedicated group, but, as it grows, core principles become diluted.

You can be cynical about that and speak bitterly about hangers-on and dabblers, and I have. Forty years ago, I wrote a song about the showboat type who used to get up and harangue the crowd at anti-war demonstrations that included the line, "While there's war, I've got it made; I never would have gotten laid if it weren't for that damned old Vietnam War."

But we also need to bear in mind that, about the time I was singing that song down at the campus coffeehouse, Peter Yarrow said in an interview that a lot of people thought demonstrations were the movement, and demonstrations were not the movement.

He's right, of course, and the movement goes on.

Joel Pett is right, also, and his deliberately minimalist style belies the maximalist depth of this cartoon.

You'll never look at Almond Roca the same way again

Frazz may have crossed another line today, but it cracked me up. I spend a lot of time around people who do seem to think their dogs need little treats shaped and colored like T-bone steaks, and who put them on expensive diets because they are convinced their pooches are gluten-sensitive.

Mind you, Vaska's buddies do not fall into this category. In fact, the big issue this summer has been his best friend Bogey's predilection for finding -- and consuming -- vintage sashimi along the banks of the Connecticut River. Laughter is a gift, even horrified laughter and especially horrified laughter you are trying to suppress while helping Bogey's owner attempt (unsuccessfully) to cancel the banquet.

Bogey is a generous giver.

Dog behavior in comics has been much more realistically depicted since Mike Peters had Grimm drink out of the toilet and created a new meme for cartoonists to riff on. Butt-sniffing and leg-humping have also become fairly common in the comics, and, of course, for decades, 90 percent of fire hydrants seen in comic strips have been there to receive, not dispense.

And now, litter-box snacking has come out of the closet. So to speak.

When I had a cat, the litterbox was actually kept in the furnace room, with a baby-gate that kept the dogs out but was, of course, no obstacle for the cat.

The horrors of your dog enjoying a bit of Almond Roca from the cat box now and then is a city issue, however, dwarfed and I daresay even eclipsed by what is apt to happen out here in the country when someone decides to ride their horse down your favorite hiking trail.

Horseriders hereabouts do not carry plastic bags.

As for dogowners hereabouts, we scoop poop when it's on a groomed surface and ignore it if the dog has gone off into the brush. If the dog goes on a groomed surface within three feet of the brush, we use the Pelé method to correct his placement -- sort of the opposite of what golfers are known to do, and with the same furtive glance to see if anyone is watching.

But I did see someone shin-deep in the White River, attempting to scoop what their dog had deposited there, which was pretty amusing considering how hard it is to scoop something out of water with a plastic bag to begin with, never mind chasing it downstream at the same time. And, no, it doesn't float. It drifts.

Back in town, however, I am a very strict supporter of pooper-scooper laws, in part because I happen to agree that poop on the sidewalks and in the parks is unpleasant and in large part because those who don't scoop give the busybodies a bit of totally unneeded leverage over all of us who own dogs.

You can tell the communities where the blue-noses have achieved that leverage because they can't just post a sign saying, "Please clean up after your dog - it's the law!" but have to add a snotty little sermonette. 

It's like smoking indoors. People who are going to scoop will scoop, people who aren't going to scoop won't scoop. Make a law, write some tickets. But nagging only adds to the unpleasantness without making the slightest difference in the rate of compliance.

Especially when it is hypocritical.

In the case of this particular sign, there was an infestation of crows in the same park last fall. Huge flocks perched in the trees and the walkways were an eighth of an inch deep in bird feces. Now, you'd think that the city of Lebanon, having demonstrated its fastidious fear of dog poop, would go totally ET on the place, cordon off the area, tent the park, bring in the HazMat team ...

... or maybe that they'd just ignore it and hope for rain.

Then this spring, somebody raised a ruckus about dogs in the cemetery. I'm not talking about people letting their dogs run in the cemetery, but people walking on the gravel path, dog on leash, going from one part of town to another.

Fortunately, it only provoked some hemming and hawing on the part of the city council and a story in the paper, because that's a pleasant, quiet shortcut to the grocery store that avoids about the only busy part of the entire town, and it's a nice little walk. And, of course, you have your plastic bag in your pocket -- doesn't everybody?

I was glad nothing came of it, because, not only is it an enjoyable shortcut, but, if dogs were banned, I'd have never come across this stunningly unlikely combination of name and symbol. 

(Yes, I know the symbol in this case doesn't mean that. Why? Did you think it was really him under there?)

 

Can't or won't? Cantor won't.

When the East Coast earthquake struck, it gave Fredericksburg, Virginia, home of the Free Lance Star, a pretty good jolt. Cartoonist Clay Jones reported dust coming out of the ceiling tiles, an evacuation of the building and a general sense of impending doom.

Now, less than a week later, Virginia is in an official state of emergency in anticipation of Hurricane Irene, while, as if to hold a dress rehearsal, yesterday's storm did a pretty fair job of knocking things over.

All of which makes it doubly annoying to be just outside Virginia's Seventh Congressional District, and to have that district within your paper's distribution area, given that the pubic servant who represents the epicenter of the quake is House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (emphasis on "can't" as in "can't be bothered" as well as "cant" as in "repeating catchy words without pondering their meaning.")

To be fair, Cantor said yesterday that the government would find funds to help with the earthquake damage. They would simply have to remove a few babies from life support and put some old people out on the streets in order to do it.

And he was able to get to the heart of the issue: “Obviously, the problem is that people in Virginia don’t have earthquake insurance.”

Dammit, people, the private sector is doing its best to sell you solutions and you're just not cooperating!

Clay's rant on the topic is more local and more interesting than anything I might say, except to add that, for those who thought the federal government's response to Katrina was inadequate, folks, you ain't heard nothin' yet.

Which, come to think of it, is a quote from a movie about a cantor.

The good kind of cantor, that is.

Speaking of funding

Contrary to reports, I do have two nickels to rub together. Or at least I did. Now I'm sending one of them here, and, if you like cartoons and wouldn't mind spending upfront basically about what you'd spend later for a DVD of this film, you should do the same. You'll even get that DVD, once the project is funded and finished.

And if you've got three nickels, well, come on, you can't rub them all together at the same time anyway:

Yet another clash between humor and reality

Funny you should mention it, Non Sequitur.

In one of those odd quirks of timing, the Washington Post had an article Monday exploring the concept without trying to be funny: "Philosophical counselors rely on eternal wisdom of great thinkers" was about, well, "philosophical counselors," who offer people advice based on Epictetus and the gang.

Wiley Miller is only joking, of course. A couple of years ago, I ran into him in Portland at the Maine Comic Arts Festival and, on the way back, spotted this hot dog stand in Freeport.

They don't hire philosophers to run hot dog stands in Maine. They hire vending executives.

Wiley knows that. He lives there. He was kidding.

But the philosophical counselors are dead serious, which puts Wiley's intentional humor and their unintentional humor in a dead heat of the ridiculous.

I like Epictetus and have given the Enchiridion to people several times. I didn't realize that (according to the article) I could get $80 an hour for doing it.

Epictetus is an excellent philosopher to recommend to people because (A) he's really easy reading and (B) he's really easy comprehending, though not so easy actually integrating into your for-real emotional responses.

Epictetus was a Stoic, and, while our language has transformed "stoicism" into "not reacting to anything," it actually involves picking your battles and repeatedly asking yourself that age-old question, "What's really bothering you?"

For instance, he suggests, if you go to a dinner and aren't treated with the favor you feel you deserve, you need to think of it this way: If you go to the market and don't like the price of lettuce, you don't have to buy it, but you can't feel cheated. You didn't get lettuce, but you still have your money.

Similarly, if you aren't treated like an honored guest at some important person's house, it's likely because you haven't been enough of a suck-up. So you shouldn't feel cheated: You didn't get the best seat at the table, but you still have your self-respect.

Epictetus does not discuss how to feel if you have been a real suck-up and still got a lousy seat at dinner, but I suppose it's as if you had paid the higher price for the lettuce, got it home and realized it was full of bugs and rust spots. At that point, you shouldn't be angry at the seller for giving you bad lettuce but with yourself for not having examined it more closely before paying a premium price.

A lot of Epictetus's advice is to stop being angry with other people for being greedy, dishonest and unpleasant and learn that the problem isn't that they are who they are, but that you keep expecting them to be who you'd like them to be.

But, of course, learning to turn the problem in upon yourself is only helpful if you are then prepared to actually change your expectations of the world, which, again, is easy to understand but a little trickier to apply. Particularly if your problem is that you already do too good a job of blaming yourself for everything bad that happens around you.

Stoicism is basically the prayer of theologican Reinhold Neibuhr: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

It's probably more helpful than, for instance, trying to get people to apply the teachings of Bishop Berkeley to their personal problems:

"My father doesn't love me."

"Well, you can't know for certain that your father even exists."

The article explains that "There are about 300 philosophical counselors in 36 states and more than 20 foreign countries who are certified by the American Philosophical Practitioners Association, along with another 600 who practice but are not certified."

The notion of being certified by the American Philosophical Practitioners Association made me laugh aloud. Epictetus specifically advises not to call yourself a philosopher but to let your actions demonstrate what you are. He also warns that, if you go back to your hometown and announce that you've become a philosopher, the people you grew up with will make fun of you.

Given that Epictetus is not unique in providing that sort of advice, it's comforting that only one-third of the people who hold themselves out to be "philosophical practitioners" bother to get certified with the APPA. There's an "All Cretans are liars" paradox hiding in there somewhere, and I'd recommend going to one of the other 600.

And I assume "Achilles and the Tortoise" also come into play. At the end of each $80 session, your philosophical practitioner says, "Well, I think you're halfway there ..."

Bad memory, false rumor, scary realities

The New Adventures of Queen Victoria sent me on a bum trip down memory lane this morning, not only based on my own bad memory but on a rumor that seems to have been incomplete.

The rumor was that the Houston Chronicle was going through a design change that would put an end to its "build your own comics page" feature.  This turned out to not be the case: According to the Chron, the redesign will wipe out existing pages and you'll have to go back and do them over again, but the feature will be restored once they work out how to set it up within the new design.

At the moment, the link for building your own page no longer appears on the site, but it's still there and it still works, though this might not be the best time to build a page, if you're just going to have to do it over again anyway.

So that was the false rumor, and part of the memory was a conversation I had with a syndicate head back in about 2000, when the San Jose Mercury News, the Philly News and the Chron were the only places where you could build your own comics page.

This was before the syndicates launched their own similar services and I was told that licensing those three sites had been a mistake made in the early days and would not be repeated.

Setting yourself up on those pages was the handiest way to see the comics that weren't in your local paper. The alternative  -- unless you knew how to program and could create your own application for snagging them each day -- was hunting them down one at a time, an unpleasant task in the days of dialup.

And, since each of the three papers had a slightly different selection, the trick was to build a page at each, call them up and then go make coffee while they loaded. Maybe take a shower and shave, too. But there they were.

Philly was first to fold the service, but the paper was in an overall tailspin anyway and had apparently assigned the comics to a chimpanzee, since it was not unusual for the page to stop updating for a few days, or for the chimp to forget to change the year on a comic link, so that you would suddenly be reading the one from this month, this day, but a year ago. Rex Morgan is hard enough to follow without suddenly having characters from three arcs ago step into the story again.

There was always the thought that, if they would simply hire someone competent, they could get some good value out of the feature, but I don't think that thought ever amounted to an actual "hope," and the death of the Philly page was not greatly mourned except as a wasted opportunity on their part.

And now we come to the spot where my faulty memory comes into play.

The idea of Edgar Allen Poe launching an archive of GeoCities sites is, indeed, as frightening as anything he wrote in real life. It is also not an entirely imaginary concept.

In the words of Count Floyd, "Scary! Scary!"

But even scarier is that I was thinking of "Real Cities," the corporate abomination that destroyed the San Jose Mercury News comics feature as part of Knight Ridder's death wish. "Real Cities" was a brilliant plan to make all the Knight Ridder web sites, and several allied web sites, look exactly the same, including having the same lead stories and basically scrubbing mention of the actual city into whose slow-loading un-navigable homogenized hell you had wandered.

GeoCities (and Angelfire and some other early web hosts) definitely hosted some ugly-ass pages -- yellow background with red lettering was not unusual in the olden days, as well as midi files that played bad music you couldn't shut off except by muting your own system.

But RealCities was a job killer. It didn't just mean that local papers were laying off their own web people because the corporate page did most of the work. It helped kill traffic, too, which hastened the spiral newspapers were already in. These ugly, dysfunctional sites went against so many basic principles of journalism, marketing, web design and good sense that it's hard to believe the idea got out of its first meeting.

It did, and here's the only positive I can find: I have often railed and ranted and frothed at the mouth over the self-destructive idiocy at the head of the industry and I probably come across as a bit of a crank. But here's something from the time capsule to show what I mean:

This chipper, uncritical 2002 article with the "I can't make this stuff up" headline "Who Needs a Pretty Website Anyway? Knight Ridder Digital CEO Hilary Schneider inherited a business that critics hate and bean counters love," explains the brilliance behind infuriating readers in order to please advertisers.

Three years later, Knight Ridder announced its intentions to fold its tent and disappear, which it did, generating probably the loudest thud of all the thuds in the industry.

See? I'm not delusional. The industry really was being run by idiots, with the cheerful support of business writers who were equally reluctant to admit that they couldn't see the Emperor's New Clothes.

I am vindicated!

Except, y'know, for the part where I build a blog posting by cobbling together a false rumor with a mis-remembered web name.

Well, it was scary anyway. Very scary. How scary? This scary:

Geeks, nerds, dweebs and commercial viability

In "Heart of the City," Dean is working on a new superhero comic and Heart is, as if often the case, less than impressed. Mark Tatulli seems to get more attention for his pantomime strip, "Lio," than this older, more conventional strip, but there's a lot to like in Heart.

This is a moment of self-effacement for Dean, who, after all, has a cat named "Spock," but, more to the point, it's an odd moment of coincidence, given that Rollingstone has just gained some attention in the comics world with this ungracious and at times incomprehensible interview with prominent comics auteur Grant Morrison.

Among other things, Morrison rails against people who call comic book fans "geeks," which I found odd, since, at least on this side of the Atlantic, the term is almost universally applied to people who are absorbed in technology. Obsessive comic book fans would be more likely to be called "nerds," I think, and the big difference is that "geek" has become a term of (perhaps begrudging) respect generally and one that is genuinely embraced within the geek community.

Granted, I have a lot of geeky friends who are also way too knowledgeable about certain techno-related sci-fi TV shows like Dr. Who and the various iterations of Star Trek and in the Star Wars franchise.

But, except when they are translating the binary jokes in "Foxtrot," it's not really geeky. It's nerdy, and most of them would acknowledge it, just as my department head in college used to cheerfully admit to being a "Baker Street Irregular." He didn't praise Doyle as high literature, but he didn't feel particularly guilty about enjoying Holmes, and that's as it should be, particularly when it isn't the only thing you can point to in your life.

Now, Dean is not calling comic book readers "nerds" or "geeks," but "dweebs," which is a different accusation, and this story arc may have been inspired by the 50th anniversary of a couple of iconic Marvel titles, including "Spiderman," "The Fantastic Four" and "Thor," as well as the rebirth of "Captain America."

I was 11 years old and on the verge of emerging from an extremely dweeby childhood, but I wasn't there yet and, to this day, I retain a lot of dweeby memories that, yes, make me identify with the original Peter Parker and whatever the doctor's name was who turned into Thor. (I'm not a nerd. I'm a dweeb. And I think Thor's secret identity disappeared fairly soon into the storyline.)

Those comics came out while I was at summer camp, where, cut off from TV, we read and traded comic books constantly as our only outlet in a world of canoe races, tennis lessons and games of "Capture the Flag," all served up with an undercurrent of constant bullying that made the ability to put on a mask and beat the crap out of evil-doers a very attractive fantasy.

Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne were simply pretending to be dweebs in real life. Peter Parker was the genuine article, and that was a game-changer.

Clark Kent knew he was Superman all his life, and any crap he took was part of the plan. But Peter Parker was genuinely picked on because he really wasn't anybody special, and so, when he suddenly became Spiderman, he also became a vindictive smart-ass looking for payback.

In "Lord of the Flies," Ralph flees to the miraculously-timed protection of a rescue party, but there are no rescue parties in real life. The way you overcome having been bullied in the real world is to become a bigger dick yourself.

Hello, Peter Parker!

But let's get back to the name-calling, because Morrison (and others) talk about the death of the printed comic book, and that's a topic worth pondering.

Comic books and comic strips are not the same thing, despite being examples of storytelling through sequential art. And mainstream super-hero comic books are not graphic novels, a term I'm not comfortable with because most of my favorite "graphic novels" are, in fact, "graphic memoirs."

Graphic novels are a hot commodity among publishers right now, and comic strips are making the transition to on-line, though, as has been said here before, it's the form and not necessarily the specific strips that can make that transition.

Comic books are, I think, in trouble, and it is the nerd factor that has created the problem. As a kid who read comics, I knew who Jack Kirby and Stan Lee were, but, for the most part, comic books were a cheap pulp confection churned out by nameless drudges behind the curtain and, when I went down to the store with my allowance on Saturday, I could choose between two candy bars or a comic book.

Sometimes, an "annual" would come out. It would be 50 cents and I'd have to think hard about how much I wanted it, because that would pretty much wipe out my allowance for the week, but it would be worth it, because you couldn't read the whole thing in one sitting.

Today, comic books are more ambitious. The art is better, the reproduction of the art is better, and, as a consequence, you're not going to buy a comic book for the equivalent cost of two candy bars, unless your idea of a "candy bar" is some kind of Ghiardelli cacao deluxe designer bar.

And the storytelling is more complex, but it's not that much better. Once in awhile, there's something in a mass-market comic book that is more intriguing than the usual, but it's still formulaic and it's certainly not on a level with Maus, Smile, Fun Home or Mom's Cancer.

And yet, if you buy a super-hero comic book, unless you plan to spend hours poring over the art and examining the inking and lettering and picking out the give-aways that tell who did the penciling -- that is to say, if you're just buying it because you want to read a comic book -- well, then you're just spent five bucks or more on a very quick read.

They're no longer a mass market medium, which creates a problem. If they are content to be a niche form, join the crowd. There are a number of independent niche comics, and nobody gets rich but the art continues.

If, however, they still want to reach a commercial audience, they've got to appeal not just to the nerds, but also to the dweebs.

The dweebs are where the money is, but you have to sell to a lot of dweebs to make it work.

Unplanned Classic: Kids in the Komix

I was trying to thin out the boxes of stuff in my closet this weekend and came across this example of "Freckles and His Friends" from the 1920s, probably 1923 or 24. Back in the 1990s, I produced a weekly historical piece for the Press-Republican of Plattsburgh, NY, that involved going back through all the papers from 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago, and this would have been in the 75 years ago category.

It tickled me then and it tickles me now, because there's some bite in the gag and I suspect that Merrill Blosser really liked kids. I don't think the various creators of the Katzenjammer Kids ever paused over the fairness of whipping a boy for misbehaving, but the image of a mother chucking rocks at her kid cracks me up and I think Blosser does a nice job here of putting whippings into some perspective.

"Freckles" got older and is better remembered as an Archie-style teenage strip, which is where it more or less froze in time, and you can find quite a few examples, including a fairly long sequence of strips from 1945 at a fan site here.

The 1945 iteration was how I saw Freckles in the 50-years-ago papers of that period, along with Alley Oop, Out Our Way, Our Boarding House and Red Ryder, with Priscilla's Pop coming in right towards the end of my tenure, having started in 1947.

Out Our Way remains one of my favorites of all times, and Our Boarding House was always good for a chuckle, while Oop was a good deal more dynamic and interesting in the hands of its original creator.  As for Red Ryder, it must surely have earned its legendary status among kids of the era from the radio show, the movie serials and the apparently relentless marketing, rather than simply from the comic strip because the comic strip itself was pretty rudimentary stuff.

Priscilla's Pop was no great shakes, either, but I happened to have printed one out from September 15, 1948, that seems timely at the moment:

First panel: Well, Priscilla, have you learned anything in school yet?"

Second panel: "I've learned the difference between kindergarten and first grade."   "Splendid! Tell me about it!"

Third panel: "Kindergarten was the bait. First grade is the trap."

And a note of interest for comic nerds: Note that these strips were both formatted to run in the square stacked layout as given here, with bounding boxes, but that the Freckles archive linked above shows Freck in the horizontal strip layout during the same period. While offering a single panel in both formats is new (pioneered by Non Sequitur but followed by several others), the syndicates have, contrary to some comics lore, long offered three- and four-panel strips in both formats.

And, no, I didn't end up throwing out a whole lot of junk this weekend, but I did come across some cool stuff I'd forgotten I had, which is worse because now it's out of the boxes and cluttering up my living space.