Fowl Language starts off the day with a cartoon I like, even though it's directed at people like me.
I don't like IMs and I'm certainly not very good at texting and the two factors are not unconnected. If I enjoyed it, I'd do it more often and then I'd be better at it.
But I don't, so I don't, so I'm not. pbffft.
When I first got on AOL, back when that was a thing, which was a very long time ago, I chatted or IMed or whatever it was being called then, for a couple of weeks. Maybe a couple of months.
I'd have a couple of windows going and lots of back and forth and then I realized that the brainpower involved was all expended on the window-juggling, not on the communicating, and that about 95% of the actual content pretty much amounted to variations on Wassup?
It's not you. It's me. Well, it's Cindy, yes.
But it's not being a technophobe. Not every preference is a shortcoming.
My grandfather didn't like talking on the phone. He wasn't afraid of it, he wasn't puzzled by the technology, he just didn't like talking on the phone, so, when you called him, you got a lot of "uh-huhs" for about the first 20 minutes until he warmed up. I don't think I ever heard him actually say he didn't like talking on the phone.
Sure never heard him say it on the phone, though.
Similarly, texting isn't a good thing or a bad thing, it just isn't my thing.
Different strokes for different folks and so on and so on and scoobydoobiedoobie.
I have no problem with texts like "Can you give me a ride?" or "Want to get lunch?" and I'll text back some elaborate response like "OK."
But the massive data dump called for in this cartoon? Yeah, right.
If you really want to catch up with me, try texting "Want to get lunch?"
Then I'll text "OK" and deliver the bundle in person.
Everybody should be somebody
I drove down to Framingham, Mass., this weekend, to hear Pajama Diaries cartoonist Terri Libensen speak at a temple there, and it was well worth the trip because, aside from being a fan of the strip anyway, I got to see how she was embraced by the congregation for the casual warmth and normalcy of the fact that her characters are Jewish.
She did say, in going through the history of the strip, that she had set two standards at the start: That the kids would grow in real time, and that the family would be Jewish.
"And I did that, not deliberately to set the strip apart," she explained, "but to be honest."
There are times when it's a background fact, and times when it comes to the foreground, as in an early series she did about being Jewish at Christmas time.
This strip got a pretty good laugh from her audience on the overhead that afternoon, but I doubt the humor was lost on very many people when it first ran in newspapers for a more diverse readership.
Well, some. But jokes that everybody gets are usually not worth the effort.
And the most delighted laugh of the day came from Terri herself, when a woman showed up with a vertical file with which she had organized all the lists and schedules for her child's bar or bat mitzvah (I didn't catch which), and which she had covered with Pajama Diary strips (and one Rhymes with Orange) on the topic.
Terri quickly shifted from star to fan and took several pics to preserve the moment, but she was also touched, and it was a pretty cool moment.
The craft of creating characters includes giving them depth beyond their immediate function, but it has to be, as she said, a matter of honesty, not simply an attempt to stand out.
The family in Terri Libensen's strip has to be Jewish, just as the family in Lynn Johnston's strip had to be Canadian.
Sometimes, the ethnicity is the point of the strip: "Gordo" could hardly have been set anywhere but in Mexico, and the conflicts between Maggie and Jiggs only worked in the milieu of the Irish immigrant.
Other times, ethnicity and culture are the skeletons, the invisible support upon which the characters are hung.
Go ahead: Make your own list. You'll see.
And along the way
As I drove down to Framingham, I listened to the Tall Tale Radio interview Tom Racine did with Eddie PIttman, both of whom I'll be seeing in Kenosha this fall.
I would suggest that, even if you're not coming to Kenosha, you should listen to this podcast, because a lot of what he and Eddie and Lucas Turnbloom had to say about creating and so forth is universal and valuable. And often funny.
Eddie's new book, Red's Planet, sounds good. I just sent it out to one of my young reviewers, but simply hearing the Tall Tale discussion made me suspect it will be on Grandpa's list for some birthdays or Christmases this year.
And another Kenosha plug:
Guess which countries execute
the highest number of people?
I'm not a huge fan of animated comics, but I'm a huge fan of Ann Telnaes, whose work I've followed for years and who is also headed for Kenosha this fall.
This is a use of animation I heartly approve. I wish everyone who did these short animations would skip the dialogue and gags and work, instead, on reveals.
This works. Especially the pause before the end.
Finally, did you know about this?
I was poking around in some newspapers from 1945 and stumbled across a political cartoon, or at least a substantial bit of social commentary, by Otto Soglow, far better known for The Little King and New Yorker gag panels.
I'm going to have to find some time to go back and poke around in that era and see if I can turn up some more. I had no idea he was doing this kind of newspaper work.
Scratch that earworm:
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