While I'm adjusting to apolitical weekdays, here are a pair of worthy publications I've been meaning to review.
Ed Stein's Sleeper Avenue is a sometimes sweet, sometimes slightly biting, memoir of growing up a half century ago, and he's gathered his stories into a book format.
I was looking back in my archives for a sample from a previous posting and found that putting "Stein" into the search box produces too many results that include his discontinued editorial cartoons and strip, Freshly Squeezed, which is a compliment to Ed, assuming that my approval is a good thing.
I came across this, written when he was launching Sleeper Ave, and I stand by it today:
I liked his editorial cartoons in the Rocky and thought Freshly Squeezed was far and away the best of the new suburban angst strips, which is to say, it's the only one to which I wouldn't apply such a dismissive term. But lately it seems like Dagwood and the New Yorker got together and produced a litter, what with all the befuddled middle-aged guys in ties suddenly seen wandering around the funny papers.
The parents in Freshly Squeezed -- which is still available in reruns at GoComics -- weren't in that befuddled demographic and were more in league with the folks in Pajama Diaries and another, alas, discontinued strip, Edge City. (Which is also still available, if you'd like to go back through the files.)
I like smart, thoughtful people who are, as Ed's title suggested, "squeezed" and trying to get through jobs and parenthood and marriage and hold everything together, but I suppose some Grand Panjandrum somewhere has realized that aging, befuddled people are the prime audience for newspapers today, and for a world in which those darn kids wear their pants down low and twerk and stare into their cellular telephones all the livelong day, dagnabit.
Okay, we'll skip the full rant for now.
However, if the befuddled strips aren't targeted to me, one thing I have noted in grandfatherhood is that young people actually do enjoy hearing what life was like a couple of generations ago, as long as it is presented in an entertaining way and not as a morality play intended to reform them.
That more pleasantg approach is pretty much what Sleeper Ave is, taking in topics of the time like polio or the coming of television, but also the tornado that swept through his hometown of Waco and what it was like to be one of a very small number of Jews in the area.
Ed's part of a sort of collaborative, Beacon Reader, which is similar to Patreon but which pools its funding and is specifically dedicated to journalism. If you put $20 in the kitty, he'll send you a copy of the book, which, given that it's 220 pages in full color, seems like a pretty good deal to me.
Intelligent Silliness
Meanwhile, my pal and frequent collaborator Christopher Baldwin has scored with a graphic novel based on Little Dee, his web strip about a small, lost girl and the animals who have adopted her.
"Little Dee and the Penguin" has an interesting insider backstory, because when Chris told me he'd signed with (coincidentally?) Penguin, I was delighted that he had the gig, of course, but bothered that his publisher wanted Dee to have a backstory.
As a webcomic character, she hadn't needed a backstory: She just wandered out there and so there she was in the middle of the woods and on with the story.
But the book people felt that kids would want to know where she came from and why she didn't have parents and so forth.
I didn't so much disagree with them as worry over what this might do to the combination of whimsy and sweetness Chris had created, my concern in part motivated by having watched from the inside as a very successful web strip went through the syndication process, in the course of which adaptation it was improved and adapted to the point where it sucked and subsequently failed.
No such problem here. Chris sent me an advance copy (i.e., with editing and colorwork yet to finalize) and, while I'm still not convinced the backstory was absolutely necessary, it has been added in a way that doesn't ruin the story and will, in future volumes, I suspect become completely unobtrusive.
This is a graphic novel, not a collection of strips, and while the plot is pretty loose, there is one, which includes that backstory in an integral way, but mostly has to do with a penguin and a lot of running around and being in airplanes.
Mostly "spontaneously borrowed" airplanes.
What I particularly appreciate is that Chris has been able to retain the curmudgeonly attitude of Vachel the Vulture, the appealing dimness of Blake the Dog and the Greek Chorus role of kindly Ted the Bear, and blend them into a style of humor I associate with Rocky and Bullwinkle.
That is -- as in this encounter between Blake and a mountain goat -- it will appeal to youngsters but provides chuckles for parents as well.
This, then, is a book that you wouldn't mind reading to a small child and that will retain its appeal for kids old enough to read it to themselves.
Including you.
By the way, Little Dee continues as a twice-weekly strip, and the current piece reminded me of a Rhymes with Orange that, in postcard form, has been on my refrigerator for some time, so here is your
Juxtaposition of This Day with One in 2004
Which also brings to mind that dogs of less complicated lineage are on parade at Westminster and, if you are so inclined, you can watch them on TV tonight and tomorrow night.
I used to watch every year, mostly because my dogs were so fascinated by it. However, my current canine roommate has never shown the slightest interest in television and so this nearly slipped past me.
However, since I'm housesitting my granddogs tonight, we may tune in and see if they enjoy it.
Now here's your moment of Zen-Ten-Ten
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