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.
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