Technical storytelling praise first: That final panel is brilliant, combining his horror at what he has done to this poor woman with the triumphant little "got what I wanted" in the lower right corner, which shows some mixed emotions when compared to the larger captioning in the box. In fact, the entire panel is a delicious pudding of mixed messages, with the seven panels leading to it a great build up that makes it work.
The only thing that isn't amazing about this K Chronicles is that Keith Knight does this sort of thing all the time. What makes his observational comedy stand out is how he is able to show a normal response to the insanity around him, "normal" in the sense of not being arrogant or above it all or "so much smarter than the stupid people of this world."
By Contrast: The move that made Seinfeld a solid comedy -- aside from surrounding a guy who couldn't act with people who could -- was to depict the main characters as shallow, pretentious, selfish jerks.
Keef never comes across that way, and when, having discovered a flaw, he does game the system, he usually feels guilty about it.
More often, he reacts to good luck ("Life's Little Victories") as pleasing but random, something he enjoys and celebrates but nothing he particularly deserves, except in the sense that we all deserve a little good luck now and then to balance out what bad luck does to us.
And Also By Contrast: George Wallace (not that one, this one) finds and points out all the inconsistencies of how people behave, but he reacts with anger.
Keef is almost never angry, just puzzled or amused or maybe saddened. The result is that, instead of making you feel that he shares your outrage or that he shares your superior understanding of life, he makes you feel that, yeah, we're all just pawns of fate, trying to get through life without breaking anything.
And yet he never becomes the clown who can't do anything right. He's a fairly smart guy doing his best and he generally does all right. We're all fairly smart, we're doing our best and we generally do all right, too.
But then, just when you think things are going pretty well, you ask a simple question and two people lose their jobs and the fact is, you were gonna eat the clams anyway.
Though it's good to know that they were Ipswich clams.
Keef was having a pretty good day at the old drawing board. Here's his (Th)ink panel, which was also in contention for CSotD. Unlike K Chronicles, he's not beyond expressing a little hostility in this more politically-oriented feature:
Comments