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.

Comments

[Richard J. Marcej]

As much as I love reading Sarah's comics (and I check out her site for new work often) I kind of wish the bulk of her text wasn't in longhand. Maybe it's because I'm so used to reading printing, but I have a tough time reading her cursive.

[Mike Peterson]

You know, I sometimes have to pause over it to decode a word, too, but hadn't thought much about that until you mention it.

I think I like it for just that reason: It's more like a "letter from Sarah" than a cartoon for everyone. If her blog weren't so personal, I might agree, but I think this adds to that sense of intimacy.

[Brian Fies]

"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."

You're doing God's Work right there, Mike. I was one of those fancy-writin' high schoolers who thought I was hot stuff and got good grades for it. Even then, I had enough contempt for the "tricks" that on one assignment I handed in an essay that deliberately made no damn sense but sounded so great nobody noticed until I pointed it out. To my teacher's credit, she thought that was a hoot. Other teachers in college and a couple of years at a newspaper knocked (most of) the lazy glibness out of me.

I have a fantasy in which I'm a high school English teacher who on Day One announces, "we're going to start with simple declarative sentences that say exactly what you mean as clearly as possible. Maybe in a month or two we'll work up to compound sentences and adverbs." Just strip them down and rebuild them. While it'd be a great service to the bad writers, it's the good writers who'd benefit the most. In my fantasy.

[Brent]

Most of my comprehension breaks in this strip came from her 'r': eg. stony, fnends, enoxmous, strets.

[Mike Peterson]

One of the reasons I like working with middle-school kids is that they haven't been fully programmed yet and you don't need to do a full lobotomy to get them to knock it off.

We also don't do "opinion pieces" which take much less effort to do badly and are well beyond their skills to do well. Talk about the chance to submit things that sound great but have no actual meaning! And yet they're one of the easiest ways to get credit for "self-expression," which is like feeding the dog from the dinner table so he'll stop barking.

[Mary in Ohio]

Beverly Cleary has written many marvelous kids' books - Beezus and Ramona et al were fun and true to life - fun to read out loud, too - but she never won a Newberry til she wrote Dear Mr Henson, which is not even in her top 10. But it's what the Newberry judges wanted.

[Mike Peterson]

The Newbery Awards list is a compendium of books adults think kids ought to read. They're not all dogs, but they are universally extremely earnest and socially positive and many of them, like "Holes" and "The Giver," are now permanent residents on the required reading list. If you feel the purpose of reading fiction is spiritual uplift, then these are all good books. But if you feel the goal of teaching kids to read is to get them to enjoy it, well ...