Filling in for Mike Peterson while he’s on assignment driving La Cometa Halley through Oaxaca, I’m Brian Fies.
Why "Planck Length?" Because a regular feature of "Comic Strip of the Day" is Mike's "Short Takes" commentary on strips that struck his fancy. Today's comments will be even shorter than short. The Planck Length is the smallest measurement of distance that has any physical significance, about 1.6 x 10-35 meters. Shorter than that and you're lost in a foggy smear of unplumbable probabilities where reality has no meaning.
But enough about politics.
Brevity by Dan Thompson breaks a few boundaries today. What caught my attention was the tiger. You'd expect he'd be looking over at Calvin, presuming he's some realistically drawn version of Hobbes, but if you follow his gaze he's really eyeballing the zebra. When playing poker with a top-of-the-food-chain predator, I think Han Solo's advice applies: "Let the Wookiee win."
Speaking of Calvin & Hobbes, today's Wallace the Brave by Will Henry cites what may turn out to be Bill Watterson's most enduring contribution to civilization, the word "transmogrifier." As far as I know, Watterson invented it about 30 years ago, and it still turns up all over the place. Also, as a old-school Trekkie, I can't let "photon phasers" pass unnoted. There are "photon torpedoes" and "phasers" but no "photon phasers," although when you think about it that's probably more scientifically accurate (phasers do shoot photons, whereas a torpedo made of photons makes no sense at all). Wallace the Brave is a smart, charming strip that's worth a look. I especially like today's clouds and warpaint.
People say that a gag is "funny because it's true," but I'm not sure today's F-Minus by Tony Carrillo is even funny; it's just true. Lately it seems like there's been a spate of folks defacing national parks and monuments, including some who try to gussy up their vandalism as "art." It takes a special brand of narcissism to think you have something to add to a landscape that's been amazing people without your help for eons. Of course the urge to cry out "Look at me, I was here!" is deeply human. Settlers carved their names on Independence Rock, Wyoming in the 1850s, and ironically their vandalism is now protected as a part of history. Still: Bill + Kelly are jerks.
Today's Deflocked by Jeff Corriveau flashed me back to a boss who adopted "Work smarter, not harder" as his motto, when what he really meant was "Work more hours and get a lot more done without costing the company money." "Work smarter, not harder" instantly became the punchline to every joke, the response to every frustration, and the corrective action to every failure. I've occasionally adopted Mamet's solution: skip the middle man (e.g., baking) and just eat the ingredients. Especially the chocolate chips.
Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich, the creators of Real Life Adventures, can just stop spying on my house right now. Except in our case, "smelter" could be replaced with router bits, jeweler's loupe, orange traffic cones, or a Bluetooth Star Trek communicator (which my kids totally got me!). We come up with some oddball needs in our house, and the phrase "You know what I could use?" is often followed by an unspoken negotiation: get it now, or put it on the birthday/Christmas list.
Finally, I don't think it's a violation of CSOTD's Prime Directive ("no snark or abuse") to discuss how important color can be to the success of a gag--or how poor coloring can mangle one. Everything in today's Brewster Rocket by Tim Rickard hinges on the donut being white. Its unwhiteness provides an unexpected peek behind the comics-making curtain.
Typically, cartoonists turn in black-and-white art to their syndicates. Some cartoonists do their own coloring but most don't have the time. The syndicates contract out coloring to people who have to work fast and don't get paid enough to linger. In this case, I also noticed that the Talking Donut People were established as being brown in the previous day's strip, where their color didn't matter. So it's very easy to imagine a colorist working on a week's worth of Brewster Rocket, thinking "There's another one of those donuts I just colored brown," and doing the same here.
Still: anybody reading the strip afterward should have caught it. I think I can hear Rickard's teeth gnashing from here.
Thanks for introducing me to Wallace the Brave - I think I'll add that to my daily list...
Also, kudos for explaining where politics comes from ;)
Posted by: jo | 07/21/2016 at 07:04 AM