Comic Strip of the Day.com

Leaders and other parasites

Today's Dilbert takes me back to the mid-eighties, when I was writing for a real estate magazine in Colorado and used to attend the weekly Realtors breakfast at the Holiday Inn.

There were 3,000 members of the Board of Realtors in Colorado Springs and a couple hundred of them would turn up each Wednesday for rubber eggs, lukewarm bacon and endless coffee.

It was a good chance to connect with people and I got a lot of story leads there and made a few friendships, plus it meant that, when I showed up on somebody's doorstep as a writer, I wasn't usually a stranger.

The drawback -- rubber eggs aside -- was the guest speaker, who generally had a magic solution to all our problems, which often involved setting goals. Sometimes you were supposed to repeat them each morning, sometimes you were supposed to write them on Post-Its and scatter them around your house.

There were about a half-dozen things to do with your goals, which aren't enough variations to make these 20-minute pep talks very memorable.

What they all had in common, as Dilbert correctly suggests, was that the people who needed this kind of advice couldn't possibly benefit from it, while the people with the self-discipline to actually follow through didn't need it.

So we'd all sit there every week and let it wash over us like the safety lecture at the start of an airplane trip.

Every once in awhile, mind you, they had someone unforgettable, like the guy who was building a housing development in anticipation of the Space Center moving from Houston to Colorado Springs, or at least the prospect of Colorado Springs becoming an alternative landing strip for the Shuttle.

His expensive, die-cut promotional folder included not just the usual architectural renderings, but an artist's conception of a landscape in which the Shuttle was landing on a wide street in the middle of the proposed neighborhood. He was dead serious and it was one time when it didn't matter who you were sitting next to, because everybody was having trouble keeping a straight face through his earnest presentation.

I never heard that he ever actually got a shovel into the ground, but the Space Center stayed in Houston anyway and I also never heard of anyone ever actually having to move their car so the Shuttle could touch down in front of their house.

Another time, it did matter who you were sitting next to, because the current president of the Home Builders Association addressed us. It was when Lee Iacoca was leading Chrysler into profit following their earlier bailout, and he spoke with pride of how our industry didn't need government support to prosper.

You could sense that a lot of the Realtors, lenders and title company reps were buying this, but the guy next to me wasn't, and we began to tick off to each other the real estate industry's various governmental loan sources, incentives and random benefits, sotto voce, things like FHA, FHMA, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, VA, mortgage interest deductions ...

Just as real leaders don't need books about leadership, so, too, the people who object the loudest to government largess far too often seem to articulate their principled position around a large mouthful of public teat.

The signature item in this guy's houses was that he always put a phone in the bathroom, typically by the toilet paper dispenser. Obviously, cell phones must have diminished the appeal of this unique feature, but not to worry: He's still doing okay.

He's now the mayor of that hyper-conservative city.

And I'll bet he's never read a book on leadership in his life.

 

And on a related topic:

I don't know how much Brad Diller knows about botflies and their brethren but yuck, yuck and also yuck.

Come on. Surely you can't claim that "yuck, yuck and also yuck" wasn't enough of a warning about clicking on that last link.

 

Millions for de fence

I feel bad for my landlords, who were told by their insurance company that it wouldn't cover the house unless they upgraded its ancient wiring. (They're in the main section, I have the apartment at the back.)

Obviously, I feel better about the new wiring, because I've made a few trips to the basement to reset circuit breakers that shouldn't have minded the load they were being asked to carry. It had to be done and I'm glad the insurance company figured that out.

Sometimes, an ultimatum is what it takes, because otherwise the money involved makes it easy to say, "Maybe later."

But here's the reason I like living here: They had already decided this was the summer the house got repainted, and they didn't call that off, despite the cost of the rewiring.

The paint job may not have been a crisis, but, in the long term, it made sense to bite the bullet: The house would have taken some real moisture damage from going another year without it, and the painters also told me they did a lot of caulking around windows and so forth that should make next winter warmer inside.

Which brings us to Matt Davies' cartoon, about the complete lack of prioritization and budget sense at work in the federal government.

Granted, it could be worse: Think of how much we'd have to spend on fencing if the people on the other side of our long, northern border weren't, for the most part, white.

The bottom line is, it makes you think that whoever is doing the prioritizing must have the Willie Horton ad on a continuous loop in their office, because our tax dollars are being spent, not on actual needs or long-term benefits, but on perceived threats drummed up by bigots, ignoramuses and bigotted ignoramuses.

As a result, we can afford to hire border guards to keep brown people from coming up here and taking lousy no-benefit sweatshop jobs, but we can't afford to keep a sufficient number of teachers employed.

We can build a fence to keep out those yardworkers and motel cleaners, but we can't afford to repair our highways and bridges.

And we don't need to build schools. That's a waste of money, when we can simply break the unions, juggle the numbers and then let the parents who give a damn put their kids in the charter-school lifeboats and let us ignore the sinking, overcrowded ocean liners.

It's not all Willie Horton-driven, however. Some of it is based on sound economic dishonesty.

When we did spend money to bolster the economy and repair our infrastructure, the right wing complained that government spending doesn't create jobs.

Because apparently the people who replaced the narrow, aging bridge on the Interstate near my place were about to volunteer to do it for free, and the people who make concrete, asphalt, rebar, signs, vests, shovels, rakes, hard-hats and workshoes were all going to donate the materials.

And when those workers on the road and in the factories and quarries were promised paid jobs, they were required to promise not to spend the money on groceries, clothing or anything else. 

That would be in violation of the lunatic fringe theory that, while government spending might accidentally create "jobs," it can't create "wealth."

No matter how much money may be spent there, grocery stores and malls do not return profits or generate sales tax or property taxes, nor do their owners and employees pay income tax.

Except when they pay too much tax, which is all the time, which doesn't count.

And, certainly, companies looking to expand don't base their decisions on whether they have good roads to ship their goods to market, or safe and efficient airports, or adequate police and fire protection in their communities or a competent, educated workforce. 

We'll build jails, of course. Got to. Willie Horton, you know.

And we need to make advanced, expensive but outmoded weapons that the military doesn't want, just in case we're called upon to fight a war in the mid-20th century rather than the new-fangled kind.

But remember that building airplanes and aircraft carriers doesn't involve jobs or create wealth. For instance, McDonnell-Douglas-Boeing is run by a monastic order.

War is good business: Invest your son (and daughter, now!)

Though, to give credit where credit is due, looking at what we pay our soldiers and how we support our veterans, I'll give Congress props for some excellent cost-containment on those pesky meat-puppet line items.

And that's what it really comes down to: Whether you're talking about the federal budget or your own budget as a homeowner, it's all a matter of sensible spending:

If you don't waste money rewiring, you achieve additional savings by not spending money on insurance premiums.

At which point it's just plain foolish to pay for painting a house that's going to burn down anyway.

Pallettes of Plenty

Some days, it's a struggle to find something. Other days, it's a struggle to narrow it all down.

I prefer the latter, but I'm not in a mood to narrow it all down, so let's have a look at this day of cartoon plenty, in no particular order:

Kevin Kallaugher's latest is yet another cartoon about the NSA, but it's more about diplomacy and looking into Putin's eyes and seeing someone you can work with and all that good stuff.  

Best of all, it's a cartoon about Snowden that doesn't reference "Where's Waldo?"

Snowden cartoons that don't reference Waldo are, I think, becoming an endangered species. Geez, folks, give it a rest.

Which reminds me to remind you that KAL had a successful Kickstarter a few months ago and published an awesome collection of his work, none of which is obvious, derivative or repetitive. If you missed the chance to get it then, he'll sell you one now.

 

I will, at some point, do a round-up of Mandela cartoons, but this Jeremy Nell piece isn't going to wait. Jerm can be more ascerbic at times than I need, but when things threaten to get drowned in sentiment, he's the cure.

In this case, it's part of a larger and much needed cure, because, much as we all love Madiba, it's time to stop counting on him to do the work.

And I got one of those links from friend-of-the-blog Rico Schacherl, co-creator of Madam & Eve, which continues its work, poking the beast:

Cartoonists do their best work in times of crisis, which means cartoon lovers should probably hope for bad news and bad times. Unfortunately for South Africa, its cartoonists have been producing some good work lately.

I'm sure we'll be back.

 

But, until then, thank goodness for "That Is Priceless," which has no social mission beyond provoking giggles.

And Pros & Cons, which ditto. And which is just coming off a short arc that was wonderful but didn't provide a one-shot entry point for me to feature. So go here and catch the whole thing.

 

I check Penny Arcade every day, but I don't stay long, in part because that's more often than they update, but mostly because its main focus is gaming and I'm not a gamer and so I rarely know what they're talking about.

But I know this one. I'm praying for the continued good health of my current Windows 7 computer because I don't want to be put at the mercy of innovation-for-the-sake-of-innovation. It wasn't broke but they went and by-gawd fixed it, whether anybody wanted it fixed or not.

And if those technogeekyhipster folks at Penny Arcade are pissed off about it, too, then maybe I'm not just a grumpy old man.

I am a grumpy old man, yes. But I like to think I'm more than just that.

Meanwhile, however, get off my desktop, you damn kids!

 

I don't often feature classics -- ie, "reruns" -- but, as more evidence of the "when it rains it pours" theme we're working on today, Calvin & Hobbes replayed one of my absolute favorites this morning.

I'm in the midst of planning our annual training session for new young reporters, and one of the things I'll be doing is talking to their parents and trying to explain the difference between checking their kids' work for grammar and spelling, or saying, "Shouldn't you include the author's name after the book title?" and hovering over them offering "suggestions" in the sense of writing the thing yourself.

But I can usually tell when I've got what I call "science fair parents" on my hands, because the resulting pieces sound like what grown-ups think kids write like.

Which ties into today's C&H because there are way too many Mabel Syrups out there writing what adults think kids want to read.

Which, in turn, conditions kids to think that's what they're supposed to want to read. And so the glut of Coriander Salamander stories continues.

The cause-and-effect impact of adult expectations also poisons their writing. One of my primary coaching jobs is deprogramming the kids from writing what teachers reward them for writing and getting them to write with authenticity, in their own voices.

Parental forgeries are easy to spot. The writing that makes me scratch my head and wonder if the kid really did it is so far in tone beyond the chipper glibness that gets an A+ in school that I know the parents didn't do it.

In fact, the mother of one of my best writers said their daughter just disappears into her room and then comes out, hands them her piece and asks what they think of it, and they read it, then kind of gulp and say, "Very nice." 

Nobody would dare submit that level of writing and claim a 10-year-old had done it.

And speaking of kids and reading and authentic voices ...

 

You need to go catch the rest of this Sarah Laing piece. Really: Go.

And then shut off your computer and do nothing, while you've still got time.

The confluence of justice, nostalgia and obstruction

I dislike political cartoon sites that are set up to present "differing opinions," because they often -- too often -- have to dip pretty deep into the barrel to come up with a counterpoint, which then gets equal billing regardless of its actual merit.

And it also does not allow for disagreements that aren't strictly binary.

Response to the decision in Shelby County v Holder has been mixed, and, while I kind of wonder where analysis and sentiment tangle in this one, the disagreements haven't been point/counterpoint so much as "What was the point?"

 

Stuart Carlson voices the opinion on one side, which is that the decision guts the Voting Rights Act, and he's hardly the only cartoonist who ties the decision into the Civil Rights Movement of a half-century ago.

But "a half century ago" is key here. I'm generally pretty confident in the analysis provided at Scotusblog, and this "plain English explanation" of the decision is both readable and, in my mind, at least convincing if not reassuring about what it all means. 

Here's the main point:

The Court did not invalidate the actual preclearance provision of the statute.  But it did something just as significant:  it struck down Section 4 of the Act, which contains the formula that is used to identify the state and local governments that have to comply with the preclearance requirements.  The upshot is that although the preclearance requirement survives, none of those jurisdictions have to comply with it unless and until Congress can enact a new formula to determine whom it covers – a prospect that, given the current state of gridlock in Congress, might not happen for a while or even forever. 

 

Or, as Mike Smith opined:

I would agree with those who feel it is a betrayal, if we were still in thrall to the Dixiecrats and their refusal to grant civil rights to African-Americans in the South.

But the dysfunction in Congress is not based on racial animus, except to the extent that the elephants in the legislature refuse to discuss the elephant in the room, which includes the number of conservatives in a variety of decision-making positions who have been caught circulating watermelon and bone-through-the-nose email jokes about the President and his family.

However, blaming racism for the lack of civil discourse over the past six years oversimplifies the crisis and misses the point of what's going on.

Yes, a lot of the opposition comes from people who hate Negroes. And who are careful to include the President's middle name anytime they mention him, just to point out that he's not a real American.

And who spread ridiculous, hateful, paranoia-inducing lies about his background, his achievements and his actions. Granted.

But there was no racial animus involved when these same slime-merchants were spreading vicious, outrageous, unfounded lies about John Kerry's war record.

Prove me wrong: Elect Barney Frank president. He's white, so that will end all the below-the-belt stuff, right? I mean, no pun intended.

To point fingers at racism misses the point, and the problem.

The court didn't say voter suppression was acceptable. They said we need to look at where it's happening now, not where it took place in our parents' or grandparents' day.

I don't have a problem with that, as long as we do look.

F'rinstance: While some Florida counties are listed, the established preclearance list does not include Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, and Volusia counties, the ones for which the Gore campaign demanded a recount in 2008, or Leon County, in which, along with Miami-Dade, significant charges of voter suppression arose in 2012. 

Nor is any part of Ohio targeted for oversight.

Now, on the one hand, the "You're no better up North" argument has been thrown around to excuse Jim Crow laws and Jim Crow customs. And it's no excuse for those practices and traditions.

But the court noted in its majority decision that things have changed in the past half-century, and, if the South isn't off the hook, the list of places in need of scrutiny and oversight has not been kept current.

As I see it, the challenge is to update, not to exonerate. 

Here's the analogy: If a particularly bad stretch of road is posted at 30 mph, but then the county widens it, straightens out some of the worst curves, regrades it to help cars hold when it's wet and repaves the section, you need to look at that 30 mph speed limit. It doesn't mean you take it up to 65. Maybe 45 is all that is justified. But it deserves reappraisal.

Similarly, a stretch that was posted at 55 may have deteriorated, due to shoulder washouts, growth of trees that block sightlines and crumbling pavement. If there are an increasing number of accidents there, it's time to reassess that speed limit.

And, honestly, the way things are going, something as simple as reassessing speed limits probably wouldn't be likely to happen either. I don't know how much Joe Heller was referencing the Shelby v Holder decision in this, but he's defined a problem that goes well beyond that particular issue:

My only quibble is that it's not incompetence. They're very good at what they are attempting to do. And they're doing what they were elected to do.

Which certainly doesn't "beg the question" -- heavens forfend! -- but it should make you wonder: If the oversight list in the Voting Rights Act was so critical and so effective that we should tremble at its loss, how did that gang of foot-dragging obstructionist yahoos manage to gain such power?

 

 
Well, yes, Jeff, but that's a given.

The Voice of the Moobster

(NOTE: Today's post is not about brilliant cartooning. It is about cartooning as part of local coverage, and local coverage as the forgotten factor in why newspapers once mattered.)

My brilliant career as a political cartoonist took place over about a two year period from 2006 to 2008, and was not only short but was only on the writing end, with the art provided by an on-line friend, Jason Togyer, who worked for the appallingly small stipend that was all I could scrape together from my appallingly small budget as editor of a weekly newspaper with a four-figure circulation.

We were amateurs doing it mostly for fun, but I can tell you that, rudimentary as they were, readers enjoyed them, which is the way decisions used to be made, back when newspapers mattered.

The above is my favorite, the Moobster, created at a time when budget pressures were forcing school districts to consolidate. Maine is only 39th in area among all states, but it's a giant in New England, three times the size of Massachusetts, and is divided into two cultures: The seacoast, famous for its lobsters, and the forests, wherein dwell the mighty moose.

But, in hard times, one must do more with less, hence the Moobster.

Our first cartoon was also on the topic of consolidation, specifically of our schools. It was about how, while combining districts probably made sense in Portland and Augusta, we had very small kids on the bus far too long in our massive rural districts already, and consolidation would create ghastly rides of more than an hour each way.

It depicted a small child in pajamas, clutching a teddy bear and pillow and getting on board the school bus under a moonlit sky, with his parents telling him good night.

This one, on the same theme, depicted the superintendents of the various districts in our area, with Gov. John Baldacci, architect of the cunning plan, in the role of the farmer/father.

As you see, it is not only colorized but framed. I was surprised and delighted to see it in one of their offices, and to learn that an education lobbyist in Augusta had presented each of the superintendents with that present.

I was also delighted to hear from our state senator that he had shown the cartoon to the governor, who took a look and then spun on his heels and walked away without comment.

Greater praise no cartoonist can achieve.

This one is a fairly simple and straightforward piece, but local cartooning doesn't have to be terrifically original if it hits the target. In this case, the town of Wilton had successfully managed to hire a new chief of police who promptly obtained the retirements of a cadre of good old boys who had seriously impeded justice.

I don't know that the caption was needed, but I asked Jason to include it because it wouldn't harm anything and it might extend the message to those who needed a clue

What I do know is that this is the other one I saw framed, in this case, in the office of the new chief, and I'm sure it met with favor well beyond his breakfast table. One of the fallacies of the "you're in a heap of trouble, boy" depictions of rural police is the idea that good ol' boy law enforcement is what the locals want.

Bullies are bullies and a town with bad cops is a town divided. Wilton's house cleaning was welcomed by a strong majority, which is why it happened and why this cartoon, simple as it was, struck home for people.

We did a few other cartoons commenting on things like mud season and the changeable spring weather, which is not really "political" so much as "local" cartooning, and I'm certainly not suggesting that any of this stuff is brilliant and needs to be immortalized. 

But it sure would be nice if more newspaper owners understood the bond between a local paper and its people, because it's not just school children who have to deal with the downside of mindless, accountant-driven consolidation.

Our readers enjoyed cartoons that commented on, saluted or simply depicted the local scene, and I remember when more newspapers did that. And I think the industry would be better off if they still did, but I guess those days are over.

Here's what nobody seems to know, or to remember, or to realize: It's easy to look down your nose at papers that run pictures of the Cub Scout Awards Banquet and feature those "Little Old Lady Columns" about who's back from the army and who celebrated their wedding anniversary and what the quilting club is up to.

But "all politics is local," and a newspaper can do worse than to serve its readership by writing about their lives and their concerns.

Our little old ladies' columns included issues like how emergency responders wanted Maine DOT to replace a condemned bridge before somebody died for lack of quick response time, and were part of how our readers knew, for instance, exactly what school consolidation would mean for our own kids and who was for it, who was against it and who was blowing smoke.

You hear horror stories about small towns rejecting the new crusading editor, but they don't want crusades. Crusades are some egotistical crap you learn in j-school and that plays well at big papers in big towns where nobody knows anybody and journalism is some abstract, elite game.

A good local paper knows where to dig, when to dig and how and why, so that, when a local woman was murdered in the office of her business, we didn't cover it as breathless fodder for some cable cop show. But when the usual boyfriend/ex didn't turn up in 48 hours, we started working to let our readers know whether it was a personal thing or if there was some random maniac on the loose, potentially putting them in danger.

The state cops weren't too pleased with our probing and I had my notes subpoenaed and -- Maine having no shield law -- it looked like I might have to spend some time behind bars. But they backed down and later the chief investigator confided that they knew I was just doing my job and he was just doing his. No harm, no foul.

The important thing was that I had a publisher who not only let me do my job but encouraged and demanded that I do my job, and he reported to an owner with the same attitude towards him.

But then the publisher moved on to a bigger paper (as depicted here), and the owner retired and sold out to a chain and they brought in the bean counters and things changed and it stopped being fun and I wasn't able to do my job anymore and so I moved on, too.

And I wish that was a local story, but it's not.

It's a microcosm.

Ou sont les Neigedens d'antan?

Well, the game is afoot: Edward Snowden is wending his way across the friendly skies in search of a sheltering country. But, as Jack Ohman's cartoon suggests, it's a mystery that all these supposedly whiz-bang snoopedy-snoops can't catch him.

 

I noted earlier that, by proclaiming his guilt, he protected himself from being quietly disappeared. Fair enough.

Pat Oliphant suggests, however, that perhaps there is a point at which being a famous fugitive becomes kind of self-defeating and ridiculous.

Now he says he joined Booz Allen with the goal of infiltrating the NSA and exposing their secrets, which makes him sound like a Double-Naught Spy, more caught up in the romance than in the cause.

If nothing else, it kinda makes you wonder what the big deal is: If I'm supposed to be freaked out by all this all-encompassing, totally intrusive snooping that probes into every corner of our lives and reveals our deepest secrets, how did Ernesto "Che" Snowden get a security clearance? 

He should stick with the story of the idealistic young man who, finding himself in the belly of the beast, recoiled in horror and had no moral recourse but to denounce the scoundrels.

This revolutionary take not only undercuts the whole "they're probing into everything" story but makes you wonder why he didn't just slip off someplace sensible instead of, as Tom Toles suggests, running from unlikely pillar to improbable post.

I'm trying hard not to let the Grumpy Old Man surface, but this really does remind me of the starry-eyed revolutionaries of Olden Days, who would go down to Cuba as part of the "Vinceremos Brigade," which involved a carefully guided tour followed by some bracero work in the cane fields.

As with Snowden, the frustrating thing was the conflict between sympathizing with the overall message and wishing for something more effective or at least less transparently, counterproductively foolish.

That is, unless you actually plan to have a guns-in-the-streets revolution, the goal should be to move the uncommitted to your side, and publicity stunts only work if they gain sympathy. When they are divisive, they empower your enemies.

The opposition is going to try to paint you as disloyal, as a pawn, as a fool. If they can succeed in doing that, they can keep the majority allied against your cause.

Which is how you play the game. How you don't play the game is with egotistical political stunts in which, like Tom Sawyer's hoodwinked buddies, you happily and eagerly grab the brush and insist on applying the paint yourself.

From the standpoint of a sympathizer, it's frustrating to be allied with people who appear to be dingbats and poseurs, but there is a real reluctance to denounce them because it comes across as renouncing the base cause.

That's not just about Snowden and the NSA and the Patriot Act. It's a well-established dilemma.

As I've mentioned before, I interviewed Bobby Seale in the early '80s, and he said one of the biggest mistakes the Black Panther Party made back in the day was failing to separate themselves from the poseurs and hangers-on, including the biggest poseur of them all, Eldridge Cleaver, who, like Jane Fonda, had a great talent for attracting cameras but not much of a grasp of goals and tactics.

He didn't mention Jane. That was me. But the pair of them were like the Rick Santorum and Michele Bachman of the 60s Movement, and they pretty much did for the Movement then what the Tea Party crazies are doing to the Republican Party today.

Here's the deal: Change means work, and most people don't want to climb out of their comfort zone to make changes in their world. That's a fact that every successful revolution has to deal with.

And as we go through the 50-year commemorations of the Civil Rights Movement, it's important to recognize that the mass of Americans did not want to get involved in a difficult situation and would have been content to let things kind of maybe we hope work themselves out without us having to actually get up and say something and do something.

But when nice, clean-cut young Negroes sat at a lunch counter and asked for a cup of coffee, it made America look and say, "Well, that seems reasonable."

And when peaceful bus riders were beaten by thugs while the authorities stood by, it made America say, "Aw, now that's not right."

And when young people in a peaceful march were met with firehoses and police dogs, it made America say, "All right, that's enough."

Which is why there were so many people on the mall to hear Dr. King, and Peter, Paul and Mary, and everyone else that day, and so many more at home saying, "Good for them!" and even, "I wish I'd gone."

It's popular to denounce those who watch from home, and it's appropriate to apply a bit of a goad, to increase the crowds who get up out of their chairs and show up.

But it's foolish to ignore the power of the zeitgeist, particularly in a democracy, and it's doubly foolish to actively alienate the silent majority. You need to have them on your side. That's how it works, and that's the only way it has ever worked.

If Snowden wants to be a hero of the revolution, he needs to stop, focus and get his story straight. 

Because, even in an age of one disappointing sequel after another, his movie looks to be headed straight to DVD.

 

Good stuff worth seeing

Today's Bizarro is an excellent example of a silly gag done well.

There's nothing wrong with silly gags in general, but it takes a smart touch to pull them off. It's not enough to think of the phrase "divine intervention" in this other sense of "intervention," though, yes, you could get a chuckle from a panel in which Buddha, Vishnu and other avatar/deities sit on folding chairs and tell God he has to get his act together.

But the specific example of why he needs to straighten out elevates that chuckle into a real laugh and takes the gag from the ridiculous to the sublime.

And speaking of heavenly gags, today's Speed Bump is improved by going in just the opposite direction.

Any dialogue would destroy the gag entirely, and, while the dumbfounded "uh-oh" stare is hardly unprecedented, the fact that his face is turned away lets us imagine his expression.

And I'd say either Dave Coverly does his own coloring or he left some extremely specific instructions that St. Peter's abdomen had to be yellow, because cartoonists whose work is left to the tender mercies of syndicate colorists can go on for hours with horror stories of strips in which a character talks about his love for strawberry ice cream while clutching a cone of green ice cream, or compliments a red dress while looking at a blue one.

However, the joke works even if St. Peter isn't a firefly, and I know this because I laughed before I picked out that element. And I would not have laughed if he had been a butterfly and the supplicant had been outfitted with a pith helmet and a net.

The problem with that would be that butterfly collecting is such a well-organized adult obsession that the gag would kind of turn into a polemic. The jar of lightning bugs is such an innocent child's pursuit that a threat of eternal retribution becomes hilarious.

And note that it is a very young child's pursuit. There is more intent and more of an opening for serious criticism in the old saying, "The boys throw rocks in sport, but the frog dies in earnest," and a gag based on that wouldn't be any more funny than the anti-butterfly-collecting version.

This is the one that works.

A deft touch.

And now, from an example of less-is-more to an example of how rewarding some real complexity can be, as exemplified by the most shamefully ignored strip in syndication, Watch Your Head. 

"Shamefully," to begin with, because of editors who think, because they have a strip featuring a cop who is married to a nurse and the couple has a couple of kids, that there's no reason to pick up a strip about college students. That point was convincingly argued five years ago and not a damn thing has changed.

But even if you refuse to acknowledge that glaring issue, you're still left scratching your head over editors who don't realize that they might attract some readers under 70 if their comics page featured strips about things like going to college or working at the mall.

Which isn't to suggest that anybody is going to shell out 75 cents every morning for a paper because of a comic strip. Rather, the selection of strips is generally reflected in the overall choices the paper makes: If the comics page is edited for the exclusive pleasure of old farts, it's a good bet the whole paper is put together with them in mind.

Then again, you might decide to add the strip because it's so well done, but let's not be silly here.

I don't know how Cory Thomas persists in the face of such indifference to such good work, but I'm glad he does, because WYH has a Doonesburian level of character development that makes it not just fun to read but rewarding.

For those just joining us: When the strip began seven years ago, Robin was a Halle Berry-like honor student upon whom our main character, naive and geeky fellow-freshman Cory, was besotted. Dana was her roommate and not much defined beyond "not-Robin."

Since then -- oh dear oh dear how detailed to get? -- well, we followed Robin home for the summer and explored her relationship with her dysfunctional mother and learned why she was such a striver and then Haagen Dazs replaced Halle Berry and meanwhile Dana emerged as the group's Voice of Reason and Cory and Robin finally kind of got together and that sure fizzled and then Dana married Kevin, who is the only Canadian at Oliver Otis University, which is a running gag in the strip because nobody wants to say what else he is the only one of at this traditionally black college and meanwhile, in a story arc that explained why campus radical Omar is such a hard-ass on racial issues, Cory met his long-lost adopted sister.

Omar's that is.

Oh, never mind. Dana and Kevin are having a very small housewarming party at their very small apartment.

Just read the strip and enjoy the ride.

When I wrote a geography curriculum for newspapers-in-education programs three years ago, I recruited Cory Thomas to provide the artwork. That's not a disclaimer but a further indication of how much I like his work. Check it out.

Ozymandias Construction Company, LLC

Tony Auth is Philadelphia based, which gives this cartoon a little extra punch: The Jersey Shore took a massive hit in "We Can't Call It A Hurricane But That's What It Was Sandy" and that's a local issue for his part of the world.

The shore is back up and running, but, while some of the mine-mine-mine crew objected to using public money to bring tourists back, the area can now resume having a positive economic impact on the region.

I don't know that it's necessary to even address the tax rebels on this one, beyond, "Don't you people know how anything works?"

Maybe we can offer a compromise: Tourism will only be promoted with the industry's own funds and, in return, they won't have to pay any bed taxes, sales taxes or corporate taxes.

That's only fair, right? And it's certainly worth another $1,400 a year in your own taxes to uphold this principle, right?

Good. Now let's take a question from someone who has a chance in hell of passing this civics course.

Should we rebuild private homes in an area prone to hurricane damage? Or, more to the point, should the public pick up any of the tab for those who choose to do so?

That's a much more interesting question, and it's one that seems to come up after all sorts of disasters.

When I was a kid, there was a place called "The Land of Make Believe" in Upper Jay, NY, one of the many kids' places that were built in the post-war boom before affordable air travel made trips to Anaheim possible and made regional family parks somewhat obsolete.

But repeated spring ice-jam flooding in the Ausable River wiped it out one too many times, and its creator, Arto Monaco, eventually gave it up.

However, there are still homes in the Ausable's floodplain, and not the nice, expensive homes in that area, which are up on the hillsides.

People make snide jokes about tornados being attracted to trailer parks, but it's more the case that crappy homes are built in dodgy locations. Can we regulate construction to the point where they can't live there anymore? I don't think that's right, but maybe demanding better berms would be a reasonable accommodation.

But poor folks aren't the ones living in most beachfront communities, nor in the foothill communities of California and Colorado, where wildfires have wiped out some pretty snazzy houses.

For two years in a row, I've had a young reporter file a story about being evacuated, one from her home in the path of the Waldo Canyon fire, another from a summer camp near Black Forest, and it doesn't matter a lot to me whether the fires are part of climate change or a cyclical thing that will be over about the time those kids are my age.

I note, however, that Colorado is undertaking some reviews of building codes, and I would also note that much of the damage from Katrina was not due to the storm but due to poor maintenance of levees.

A combination of making reasonable demands on both homeowners and the government seems sensible to me. Expecting one or the other to shoulder the entire burden is foolish, but I wonder how often you could probe beyond the knee-jerk reaction and find that there isn't, in fact, a serious effort being made to find the balance.

There are things that can be done. And should be.

I don't know how far back from the seashore houses should be, or how they should be built or -- depending on how likely it is that the same stretch of beach will be hit again -- how much insurance should be paid by individuals as opposed to government.

But, if I lived in the region, I'd sure want to have that discussion, and presumably Tony Auth isn't the only person asking about it. At least, I hope he isn't.

Meanwhile, here's a story about local building practices that amuses me:

Hurricane Gilbert hit Jamaica during New York's 1988 apple harvest, which was on my beat, so I went out to talk to the pickers. They were concerned and wanted to hear from their families, as anyone would, but they weren't panicked, because they earn a decent living by Jamaican standards, and most of their houses are of cinderblock construction so will withstand the hurricane, though a tree could fall on the roof or the local road might wash out.

It's the wooden houses that get blown away in hurricanes. 

Then, following the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, I interviewed an expert in plate tectonics, who said that most of the Third-World housing in the Pacific zone most prone to shifts is wooden and somewhat flimsy, which means it sways in earthquakes, while cinderblock houses fall.

And, since only the rich people have cinderblock housing, this has prompted people on some islands to wonder, in the wake of a tremblor, why God is angry at the rich people.

Which is an odd twist on Bat Masterson's observation: There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump of a world of ours. ‥. These ginks who argue that way hold that because the rich man gets ice in the Summer and the poor man gets it in the winter things are breaking even for both.

 

Discourse in the Age of Snark and Commerce

As I've mentioned here before, I don't often feature David Horsey's work because he accompanies his cartoons with a well-spoken rant that generally covers anything I would have said. 

This particular cartoon-and-rant is no exception, but it does give me an opening to go off on another rant without violating the Prime Directive, which is to feature cartoons I liked rather than to drop snark on those I thought sucked.

I blogged about the Iranian elections recently, and wrote:

 

I'm not waiting for Western cartoonists to chime in on the story because most of them won't and some who do will simply mock the elections as a sham because, well, Iran is full of crazy bad guys in turbans and so there you go. (Okay, so prove me wrong!) 

 

Since then, the cartoons have begun to appear, and I was wrong -- about "some." Only Horsey has gone against the prevailing tide of "it's all a raghead sham." 

The same chickenhawks who were beating the wardrums when the Iranian government suppressed the results of the last elections are now working to suppress the impact of this one, and to undermine any attempts by the Iranian people to force their nation into the 21st Century.

Which might fail if they didn't have so many willing collaborators among those allegedly tasked with holding them accountable.

And it's not just Iran.

Maybe I'm just in a personal cycle where this stuff bothers me more than usual, but it sure seems that finding thoughtful political cartoons has been damned hard lately.

I'm really trying hard to say more today than, "You suck!" given that my distaste for people yelling "You suck!" is what launched this blog a little over three years and 1240-some posts ago.

But one of the cures for people yelling "You suck!" is, at least theoretically, to try not to suck, and I'm not getting a lot of cooperation from some people who, dammit, ought to know better and who, double-dammit, have previously done better.

Granted, refusing to do cartoons that suck can conflict with the mission of keeping your job and feeding your family, which is why we get Pearly Gates cartoons when any beloved public figure dies, and drawings of somber people saluting gravestones every Memorial Day and Veterans Day.

Two years ago, I did an entry on Ann Telnaes and her post-9/11 cartoons. It's worth revisiting that link, but the relevant point here is her frank admission that being in a two-income family gave her the freedom to draw cartoons that she knew editors probably weren't going to put in their newspapers. 

Which means she got the release of venting on something she truly cared about, knowing that, at least on some occasions, only her on-line fans would get to see the results.

This is a luxury she readily acknowledged, just as she readily acknowledged that it is sure as hell not the way you prosper in syndication.

She's a Pulitzer Prize winner, but, once you've spent the stipend, you're as likely as anyone else to be eating beans and rice, since, as has been demonstrated, the opinions of the Pulitzer judges will not protect you against being laid off in an industry that truly and deeply and sincerely does not give a rat's ass about the quality of what they put out there as long as it attracts a crowd, any crowd.

Think I'm kidding? This is how bad it has gotten.

It's not just newspapers, of course. Look at your TV schedule, and, if you're a glutton for punishment, look at your TV.

It's been noted on the Daily Show that "The Learning Channel" is an ironic name for a channel devoted to making people stupid, and, come on, when the National Geographic is not just willing but eager to roll in the mire, who do you look to for anything?

So I guess I can't blame political cartoonists for grabbing the low-hanging fruit, not just with sentimental slop over dead celebrities and national holidays, but by doing gags in place of commentary and by riffing on buzz-worthy but phony scandals like Benghazi and the IRS/510c4 kerfuffle.

The practice of cheap gags and of pandering to sentiment instead of stimulating discourse is not new.

Twenty years ago, there were cartoonists who would rather make jokes about Bill Clinton's sex life and his love for junk food than comment on any of his policies. And there were cloth-eared editors who chose those gags because, y'know, cartoons are supposed to be funny, right?

I actually got in a near-fist-fight some years ago with an editorial page editor who got pissed when I showed him this Foxtrot and then had the nerve to express astonishment that he didn't get it. Which is to say, when he assumed the Roger Fox role for real:

Every time you think the bar can't go any lower, they bring out the shovels and prove that "rock bottom" is only a challenge, not a limitation.

This isn't just about Iran, but about the whole issue of how democracy can function in an atmosphere of willful ignorance and cynical, profit-driven misdirection.

It's not just whether or not we're going to be led by the nose into yet another Middle Eastern war. That doesn't matter, because there is no draft and so there's no danger of Congressmen's kids or the children of business leaders being sent off against their will.

And we'll run touching cartoons of proud, sad eagles saluting the graves of those who do end up going.

Under which we'll offer links about Miley Cyrus's sideboob, 10 Foods You Should Never Eat and that housewife in <yourtownhere> who makes $57,000 a year working at home.

 

The Evil Empire and its State

I could probably rant forever on this topic, but, first of all, Tom the Dancing Bug has covered enough bases that I don't have to (Seriously, check it out: Seven of the Top 15 grossing Broadway shows are live versions of movies), and second of all ...

Okay, there's no "second of all," except maybe that Saul Steinberg got it so iconically right that every graphic commentary about Gotham's arrogance is inevitably compared to his piece, and never to his detriment.

What's kind of weird is that, while Francis Dahl made a good living poking gentle fun at his home city of Boston, about 80% of the cartoons in the New Yorker skewer the smug self-assurance of its inhabitants with a touch of genteel venom that, well, is part of what makes the place so fantastic.

I think I'm overly sensitive because of living out west for a couple of decades, during which time I repeatedly had to explain that growing up in New York did not mean being able to see the Statue of Liberty (which is in New Jersey) from my front porch.

Saranac Lake, cradle of Garry Trudeau and Corey Pandolph, has billed itself as "the green side of the Big Apple," but nobody else knows that the Adirondacks are even there. The Bronx is up, the Battery's down, and the remaining 99.4% of the land mass is airily dismissed as "Upstate."

It can be amusing when the NYTimes dispatches some modern version of Stanley (no, no, not the flat one -- this one) out into these savage, unexplored hinterlands, like the reporter who, in covering a Phish concert in Plattsburgh, reported that you could see Vermont across the river. 

Ah, yes. The river we call "Lake Champlain." And that's not Vermont, it's New York. In fact, it's still Plattsburgh. You're just gazing across the bay, dahling.

Or the one sent out to discover the smallest city in the state for a story on the 1990 census, who reported that Speculator is so small (How small is it?) that "it doesn't even have an ATM."

Heh. How'd you discover that, hot shot?

For some reason, the rest of the state seems divided between those who embrace the city and can't get there often enough, and others who would happily take a giant chainsaw, make a cut at Yonkers and let it drift out into the ocean, but I'm really in neither camp.

I'd cut it off at Kingston.

 

Give this one another try:

If you haven't been following Luann, you might want to tune back in.

Not for any particular arc, though these from yesterday and today -- in which her very-long-distance BF is visiting from Australia -- have some real promise, but because Greg Evans has taken on the original Luann as a creative consultant and co-writer.

I'm not a huge fan of legacies, though some work out pretty well, but this is different than simply passing on the strip to Junior. Karen Evans explained her role a few months ago in this posting, and I featured the changeover then, including some previously unreleased commentary from our interview on the topic of the "Luanniverse" as well as the "oh-oh, busted!" moment at which Evans said, "Wait a minute. Are you that 'Mike Peterson'?"

If you have passed on the strip because of the vagaries of the Luanniverse, it's time to give Luann another shot.

Karen Evans' presence began as a subtle nuance, but has grown to the point where it has made a substantial difference in the feel of the strip, taking it from "Daddy looks affectionately at his daughter" into a more three-dimensional piece on adolescence, families and lifeitsownself.

 

And speaking of women in comics:

 I don't know that Luann will ever reach the level of "Stone Soup," "Pajama Diaries" or "Between Friends," and that really isn't its mission, but women-driven strips are a different animal and are, as a whole, one of the best improvements to hit the industry since, I dunno, the invention of ink or something. Nor are those three the only ones in the mix, and it's one helluva step up from overdrawn checkbooks and crumpled fenders.

This year's Reubens included a public program at the Toonseum in Pittsburgh, highlighted by a panel of women cartoonists reflecting on the trend, and you may have missed that, but you can catch a very good interview with "Between Friends" creator Sandra Bell-Lundy on Tom Racine's "Tall Tales Radio."

Tom's podcasts are always worthwhile and I particularly like to load up a few for road trips, but in this one, he and Sandra really get down to the process she went through in setting a tone and creating the characters for her strip, and, from the fan's point of view, it's one of the best he's done.

They do talk about how much other cartoonists enjoy the wonky insider talk about nibs and Bristol board that is a large part of most Tall Tales podcasts, but this one is for the readers, and not just of "Between Friends," because I'm sure other women in the genre have gone through a similar process.

Thoughtful stuff. Don't wait for your next road trip.

 

Here: This ought to square things with my Westchester-raised mother and those offended by the Broadway crack. The Statue of Liberty/New Jersey thing stands as called. (BTW, that's me on the couch.)

i like new york in june, how 'bout you? from Batuhan Kaygı on Vimeo.