Alex is a British comic strip about business, and I'm willing to admit that my years of writing about business, combined with childhood subscriptions to Swift, Eagle and finally Punch may have set me up for this one.
However, it's not so businessy and British that it won't work for a general audience elsewhere, and today's strip is a wonderful misdirection crackup.
I really like Alex, because it toggles back and forth between actual commentary on business practices and more office-politics oriented gags, which means it's got more edge than most business comics, which tend to be either "people around a table looking at a graph on the wall" or "my boss is an idiot and my coworkers are dorks."
I laugh at those, too, but it's more a laugh-of-recognition than an "I never thought of it that way" laugh. Or, in this case, a laugh-of-whiplash from the reversal of expectations.
Actually, we'd been given a little set up on the previous strip with a variation on the "everybody knows and nobody cares" element further exploited in today's strip.
I missed it, however, because the "pretending you are present" reminded me of one of the first cartoons I had semi-sorta-published, back in 1971.
My wife was editorial assistant to a religious book publisher, and one of her duties was an internal monthly newsletter. Her boss, the priest-and-publisher, had been off at a conference somewhere and she had observed that his absence triggered a lot of other absences.
So when she was puzzling over what to put in the newsletter, I drew up an office gag in which the dialogue read,
"Is Father back from the conference yet?"
"I don't know. Count the cars in the parking lot."
Swift once said that satire is a cracked looking glass in which people recognize every face but their own. This cartoon taught me that, when they do recognize their own faces, they don't think it's funny.
I still think it's funny, though years have rolled over its head.
But, then, I laugh at all sorts of rude and judgmental things. I even thought this ad was funny when it popped up in my feed yesterday like the Bishop of Chichester's breeches.
It reminded me of a place I worked that started a "Casual Friday" policy but then, after a few weeks, had to follow up with an internal memo explaining what the term "casual" means in a professional context.
Good brand name, though. The company motto reflects the aspirations of their customers: "Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard."
In a completely different junction of 'business' with 'comics'
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal creator Zach Weiner has a Kickstarter for a book he is doing with French cartoonist Boulet.
They've already reached and exceeded their goal, but that's increasingly not the point anymore, at least for creators with an established and supportive fan base. It's less about making a project happen and more about fronting the money to make it really cool.
That is, a publisher might say, "Well, I dunno, maybe we can try but first I want you to jump through these hoops and also we're only going to do it on crappy paper in black-and-white because we don't want to lose money in case our sales reps don't convince the bookstores to put it where people can find it and besides we have these 'Tenth Death and Rebirth of Superman' titles we're pushing ... "
If you've already got it sold, sell it. And if you can sell a bunch, keep the price down to where you can sell a whole bunch.
Which they've pretty much done. At this point, if you jump in for $25, you get a copy of the book, which is hardbound, plus an E-edition copy, which isn't cheap but isn't particularly expensive either, and the potential for cool upgrades from there brings the unit price well under what you might otherwise spend.
And as more people jump in, the stretch goals (which have nothing to do with yoga pants) make the project increasingly attractive.
If you've seen the gorgeous book that Kal Kallaugher was able to produce using Kickstarter-plus-stretch-goals, you already understand. If you haven't seen that, well, you have a chance to see someone else do something cool.
Whether or not you want to support this one, it's a trend worth watching, because I know a lot of cartoonists whose traditional publishers offer pretty minimal production values and promotional support for collections of their work and who deserve more. This is where it happens these days.
And Kickstarter is still available for more modest and speculative projects. But that's a different category, because, at that level, the creator may not have the virtual cred necessary to attract enough support. I'd suggest that anyone thinking of launching a Kickstarter campaign really do an honest assessment of their on-line presence and how many people are gonna show up for the party. If you don't have a solid base, well, keep your goals modest and realistic.
Incidentally, I hear stories of Kickstarter campaigns where the goal is reached but the project doesn't happen. I personally have never experienced that, but, then, I tend to bet the favorites.
If you go for the longshots, well, as they say, never bet more than you can afford to lose.
After all, Kickstarter is simply a microeconomic form of venture capital, and every venture capitalist takes a risk.
There are, however, an increasing number of these sure things out there for those of us who are, of necessity, risk-averse and must leave performing miracles to the angels.
And one more thing
Friend-of-the-Blog Richard Thompson posted this piece of art on Facebook and I commented that he should put it on a coffeemug and danged if he didn't.
He also put it in a book, but that wasn't my idea.
You should get both. (That was my idea.)
Comments