Comic Strip of the Day.com

4.6 billion reasons to despair

I've been kind of sitting on this Steve Breen cartoon for a few days because I didn't know quite what to say about it.

Beyond, "What is the matter with you people?"

The complicated part is that, while everyone seems to either be ignoring the threat or appears untroubled by it, that could be part of the problem. Maybe all those people saying, "So what?" are Russian plants.

When the problem is professional trolls dominating and directing the national conversation, it's hard to get a grip on what real people are actually thinking.

Though perhaps they aren't.

People are gullible. And we throw Mencken's alleged quote around, but the actual quote is worse than the "nobody ever went broke by underestimating the taste" variant usually cited:

No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

And here's what he said about the Presidency:

As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

If you look to see what else Mencken had to say, you'll find that he was a hateful and unpleasant man. 

However, having just watched the national dialogue over the Roy Moore candidacy, I would add that Mencken was not the last commentator to base his contempt for the opposition on bigotry, though he channeled it through race and creed rather than relying entirely on class.

It's instructive, and depressing, to see how many contemporary pundits feel free to depict the rural poor as the barefoot inbred morons of pop-culture stereotypes.

Do such people exist? Sure.

Are there any lazy, drug-dealing welfare cheats in your city? Ah.

Tom Gauld has a more expansive view of stupidity, and I like it because it emphasizes the voluntary, classless nature of ignorance.

Anybody with a college degree or even a half-credible high school diploma should know better than to rely on comforting bullshit, and should, for instance, sometimes pause and use the marvels of Google to look something up before repeating it.

But I've sat in meetings -- particularly school board meetings but also department head meetings -- in which people said, in nearly this direct a manner, what Gauld accuses them of saying.

If you genuinely think that only backwoods hillbillies brand unwelcome news as "fake," you have either never sat in on these sorts of meetings or you have worked very hard to avoid hearing what was said there.

And good citizens go to meetings from time to time, so, whichever shoe fits ...

 

Mr. Boffo sums up the election of 2016 and everything that has followed, and a whole lot more that has little to do with politics.

Part of the shift over the last generation and a half has been the expansion of information offered by cable and the Internet, and the subsequent loss of gatekeepers.

This was initially hailed as democratization, but the best that can be said at this stage is that we're in a period of deep over-correction in which people continue to believe whatever they're told, only there's no longer any control over who's telling them things.

Case in point: 

Slidell, Louisiana, police arrested this unlikely looking fellow for being the middleman in a number of Nigerian Prince scams. 

There's been a fair amount of on-line laughter over the whole thing.

After all, "Nigerian Prince" scams are the hallmark of things only total idiots would believe, and most of the laughter is coming from people who apparently didn't read the reports to find that he was only a middleman for actual scammers in Nigeria.

Or that the FBI figures the scams have brought in $4.6 billion since 2012.

And let's analyze that astounding figure a bit: When I worked on the US/Canadian border, we'd get called in when the authorities made a big haul, like the van they disassembled in order to recover 54 kilos of cocaine.

Which we all knew, though we didn't say, was not nearly as much cocaine as crossed the border in vehicles which had not aroused suspicion.

Similarly, I rather suspect that the $4.6 billion that the FBI knows about is a mere fraction of actual losses by people, many of whom were embarrassed to report their foolishness or perhaps were afraid they'd be in trouble or maybe assumed (correctly) that nothing could be done.

The persistence of Nigerian Prince scams alone ought to be a clue: If they didn't work, they wouldn't continue to exist.

$4.6 billion over five years is not chickenfeed, and that's only the amount reported.

If they were the only scammers out there, it might be different. However, while being at a small paper gave me neither the time nor the resources to do much in depth, I used to sometimes go after smaller scams -- phony time shares and such -- and I came away with the distinct impression that there is a very large industry devoted entirely to shearing sheep.

Which wouldn't be true if it weren't profitable.

Meanwhile, people continue to surrender their addresses, identities and personal information to Facebook scammers who want them to "Say Amen and share" or find out what character from Star Wars they are or show that they care about a fictional disabled child or that they can, indeed, remember what an egg beater is or name a song that begins with "T."

And to believe that someone doesn't want them to say "Merry Christmas."

And that the Russians are our friends.

 

Indeed, Real Life Adventures. But next year will be different. You can bet on it.

And you probably will.

 

Seven-year bitch(Feb, 26, 2011)

Saturday Short Takes

Sally Forth is hardly the only comic strip riffing on middle-aged people trying to stay up for New Year's, but it may be the only one riffing on the pointlessness of even bothering. 

The last time I made midnight I was in my 50s and it was only by happenstance: I'd been working on something and noticed it was 11:30 or so and decided I might as well greet the New Year.

So I turned on the TV and flipped around to find Dick Clark or a reasonable facsimile thereof -- I wonder how many people my age even know he's dead? -- and stumbled on the Rolling Stones, playing for a hooting crowd of celebrants none of whom had been born when the Stones mattered.

And I wonder how many of them even know Brian Jones lived?

Anyway, they were playing "Satisfaction" and I thought, "This would be really cool if it were the first time they'd been back together in, like, 30 years or something. But, as it is, it's really kind of ... pathetic."

At which point I realized that it's less a matter of being too old to stay up but, as Sally suggests, one of having outgrown it all.

Anyway, Ces has now been writing the strip for 20 years and has written a piece about the transformations he brought to it.

 

Artisinal Trailer Trash 

Betty's slacker co-worker has now bought his tiny house and has just discovered the main glitch behind (or, specifically, under) tiny houses: They pretty much cost the same as regular houses, once you put them on a lot and hook up the utilities.

And rent a storage locker somewhere for your stuff.

For anyone with dreams of a tiny house in the country, you'd better talk to someone who has built out there, because the cost of running electricity and cable to an isolated house can be gob-smacking. And you'll have to dig a well. And you'll have to install septic.

I guess if you find a lot in the city that has already been developed so you can simply tear down the house that's on it and drop your tiny house onto the spot, then it might be cheaper than building a new house with insulation, storage and a more private bathroom.

Or fixing up the place you just tore down.

But the price of a tiny house is not the cost of a tiny house, and here's the soul-crushing truth, my friends:

A tiny house is simply a mobile home made of wood.

The big difference being that the folks who make mobile homes have been at it a long time and have figured out all the design issues.

As have the folks at Airstream.

Not that I'm against the concept. I have often thought about buying a good camper and taking off with the dog, a cell phone and whatever mobile wi-fi I can find.

Though the dream got a few dents when I found out Steinbeck's inspiring odyssey was bogus.

That's not about being old and cynical. It's about having been around long enough to think things through.

I'm pretty sure. Give me another decade to ponder.

 

 Luxembourg Ain't Your Kind of Town 

Speaking of getting away from it all, the folks at Prickly City are looking for alternatives, and their quandry reminds me that, even before I was old, I was pretty cautious.

Back at the dawn of time, which is to say, early 1969, I had a Canadian girlfriend whose father was a prominent provincial official, and we had a conversation about what would happen if I got drafted.

There was, as she noted, no doubt that I'd find a home in Canada with her and with landed immigrant status soon to be converted to citizenship.

However, I told her it would have to wait until after jail, because I would still want to return to the States from time to time. We disagreed over whether or not this was stupid.

Well, we broke up, I never got drafted and Jimmy Carter pardoned the exiles, so I guess it all worked out, except maybe that first part.

And I guess it's related to that issue of whether you tear down the house and build new, or invest in rehabbing what you've got.

It's a whole lot easier to be wise about tiny houses than about this. 

 

Thunder Among the Magnolias
But speaking of things that probably have to be torn down, I'm glad Jeff Koterba offered this cartoon about the Rachel Jackson Magnolia Tree, because, aside from his suggestion of how destructive that giant Tweetbird is, the response to the tree's trimming is depressing.

A spate of Melania-bashing emerged with the announcement that the tree, planted by Andrew Jackson to honor his late wife, would have to come down, which it didn't.

But this decision was totally ex-officio. Also, well-reasoned. Not all trees are sequoias, and a 200-year-old tree can be past its life expectancy.

Bashing Melania -- who has kept a very low profile as FLOTUS -- for the decision feels to me like the line from Wilde: "Do not speak ill of society, Algie. Only people who can't get in do that."

And, besides, there's this, from that linked article, about the last time they messed with the magnolias:

On March 31, 1962, a workman with a shovel accidentally severed the connection between the president’s office and the Strategic Air Command, which would have allowed Kennedy to launch a nuclear attack.

Even if the thing were completely healthy, I'd approve the project.

 

More Best Ofs:

This came in after yesterday's blog posting went out. Actually, three others did, too, but one was too lo-res to read, another was covered over in pop-ups and auto-play ads and the third had cutlines but no images.

So I guess the backshop takes this week off, too. But this one works:

 

Kevin Siers

 

Magnolia Blossoms Fill The Air

 

Don't read this. Read that.

The thoughts I wrote about on youth and writing yesterday had been bouncing around for a few weeks, but came into focus when I read JP Trostle's "Nautilus," a graphic memoir of his mother's death and the extended mountain of stuff she left behind.

It was a moment of "Yes - this is what I mean!"

This was not a story a kid could tell. I'm not sure how old Jape is, but he's not a kid and there is a perspective to his story that shows he's been around the barn a few times.

It reminded me of the piece Brian Fies did when the wildfires destroyed his home. It's a realization that, while the thing that happened to you is a vehicle for something creative, it's not about you. It's not about the fact that it happened to you.

If it had happened to someone else, you might have gotten a piece out of it, but you'd have to interview them and put yourself in their places and be spot-on in feeling what they felt. When it happens to you, you already know that stuff.

Assuming you've been around long enough.

He did a nice job and you should go read it. And he asks that, if you share it, you use the Facebook or Twitter buttons so he'll get credit for the traffic.

 

Elsewhere in Good Stuff to Look At

A number of cartoonists have put together year-in-review packages. It was, indeed, one helluva year. Here are some places you can go remind yourself of that, and if you explore them all you won't notice that I'm not blathering on about them:

Kal Kallaugher

 

Ann Telnaes

 

Patrick Corrigan/Michael De Adder

 

Joe Heller

 

Politico's Roundup

 

Tom Toles

 

 Signe Wilkinson

 

Have a lovely day.

Truth, mathematical and metaphorical

Let's ease into the day with a Nick Anderson cartoon pointing out something we all knew: The man is a pathological liar.

Permit me to elaborate:

There are people like OJ Simpson or Jeff MacDonald who, under the severe stress of horror, respond by creating an alternative reality. That's lying in the sense of telling a story that is counter to the facts, but it's involuntary and perhaps understandable.

It shouldn't get them off, but they can be pitied.

However, pathological liars don't have trauma to explain things, nor are their lies confined to a single event or topic. It's pure compulsive madness.

I once worked with a woman whose tall tales were the wonder of the rest of the staff, until one day I was talking about the concentrator at the mines in my old hometown, a speck on the map 2,000 miles from where we were standing. I said it was very tall, at which she piped up and volunteered a specific height for the thing, not even rounded to 10 feet.

Which was a stunning example of a senseless, groundless, compulsive lie, but, then, she didn't have access to the nuclear codes.

Or an army of devoted followers.

 

Or, as Darrin Bell suggests, an entire structure -- and even a second one -- to back up a bizarro version of reality.

I wasn't about to call home for verification of the concentrator's actual height, but Trump's brazen boast about his legislative record is an example of a lie much easier to track down and disprove.

Here's its latest iteration:

We got a lot of legislation passed… I believe—and you would have to ask those folks who will know the real answer—we have more legislation passed, including the record… was Harry Truman, a long time ago. And we broke that record, so we got a lot done.

Here's the count, from some people who know the real answer, of comparable legislation signed by every president in the past 65 years, except for Ford and Johnson because of the circumstances of their initial elevation.

That link is worth following, because they go over the topic in depth, discussing, for instance, numbers of significant bills as opposed to post office namings and so forth.

I don't suppose it matters if he is deliberately lying or simply pathological. It still leads back to the above video, and Bell's cartoon.

God help us all.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Betty)

 

(Non Sequitur)

I'd have laughed at both of these, but I'm not sure I'd have passed them on a month ago.

Millennial bashing is as uncool as as the bashing millennials do to others, while, as noted recently and not recently, I don't believe in these media constructions of Millennials and Baby Boomers.

But I recently had an epiphany that explains why so many of the graphic novels and graphic memoirs that I see on-line provoke little more than a shrug, and ditto with cartoons that expose societal shortcomings and political outrages.

Not "bashing."

Just sayin'

I'm glad there was no Internet when I was in my 20s, because I labored for more years than I like to confess over a pair of novels that, had it been possible, I would no doubt have posted for all to see.

Instead, they are in a box under my bed for my grandchildren to read, not as great literature, or even good literature, but simply for some sort of ancestral insight.

They don't suck. What feedback I got from publishers and professional authors was that it was clear I had talent and wrote well, but my novels just weren't compelling. They weren't about anything unusual or enlightening or interesting.

As one critique put it, "We all went to college."

Which, strictly speaking, isn't true: A lot of my high school friends never went to college.

But they don't give a rat's ass about what happens in college, and everyone else already knows what happens in college.

So you'd better come up with some majestic freakin' insights, and nobody ever does.

Until considerably later.

This isn't "college" but it's close enough and it makes the point: By the time JD Salinger wrote "Catcher in the Rye," he was 32 years old and a combat veteran who had had several successful and unsuccessful writing ventures and 16 years to process what being 16 was like and what it meant and how to comment on it insightfully.

There is a thing in astrology called the Saturn Return, and, while I don't believe planetary position can be causal, I do think that turning roughly 29 is a significant time of life.

It's roughly the time when JD Salinger's novel made him a major author, and roughly the time at which I shoved my novel manuscripts under the bed and turned my attention to types of writing for which I was more suited.

I'm not ashamed of anything I wrote as a young man, but I'm not eager to share it with the world because, as the critics said, it was well-written but not compelling.

So here's my point:

In these days of easy on-line self-publishing, there are a lot of very competent cartoons out there that I don't find compelling.

Look, we all went to college.

And those of us who aspired to the arts all got out of college and struggled to find jobs.

And we all looked around and discovered corruption and hypocrisy.

The economy is worse today, but nobody's being compelled to go die in a rice paddy. We all face challenges.

And I'm certainly not saying you shouldn't put them up there and see if they take off.

I'm just saying this:

Bourbon will get you high if you drink it straight out of the still.

But it loses no potency, and tastes a whole lot better, if you let it sit in a barrel for a few years.

Especially if that barrel has been a bit charred.

 

Moment of Zen (while waiting for Saturn to return)

Moment of Zen (after it's been and gone)

Debating nonsense, living with truth

Drew Sheneman leads off by confronting the notion that lowering taxes will encourage reinvestment in a business.

It seems like utter nonsense, but it's at least a debatable economic theory.

As long as we leave out logic, history and human nature.

What is not debatable is the fakery of speeches from Dear Leader declaring that companies which have announced year-end bonuses are doing so as a result of his tax package.

The idea that major corporations could make such a move in the few days since the legislation was passed is either ignorance of how things work or a deliberate lie. Even if -- a huge "if" -- the company could make such a rapid decision, the bookkeeping required would make it impossible to process within such a short time.

Granted, someone could say, "Let's make arrangements for a bonus, but don't announce it until we see how the tax package fares in Congress."

But they wouldn't. 

Worse than Dear Leader's self-serving, transparent bullshit are the rightwing cartoons that back him up.

Whether a cartoonist is deliberately lying about this stuff or is too lazy to do a little homework or is simply a damn fool makes no difference: It's still spreading misinformation.

Speaking of which, I haven't been able to verify that Eisenhower actually said this quote that is going around the Internet, so I'll pass it along not as verified history but as obvious wisdom.

Taxes are paid on profits. If you want to reduce your taxes, reduce your profits.

Whether or not General Eisenhower ever said so, it makes no goddam sense to pay taxes on profits and then turn around and spend your profits on something that's deductible.

Whether you are taxed at 90% or 9%, the goal remains to reduce your tax burden by claiming as many business expenses as possible up front.

Any damn fool knows that.

In fact, one quote I can verify is that, when Candidate Trump was accused by Candidate Clinton of not having paid federal taxes, he said, "That makes me smart" and then, moments later, denied having said what a nationwide audience had heard him say.

DANA BASH: My question for you is, first of all, it sounds like you admitted that you hadn’t paid federal taxes and that, that was smart. Is that what you meant to say?

TRUMP: No, I didn’t say that at all. I mean if they say I didn’t, I mean it doesn’t matter. I will say this, I hate the way our government spends our taxes because they are wasting our money. They don’t know what they’re doing. They’re running it so poorly. Whether it’s spent in Iraq or wherever they’re spending it, they are wasting our money. So I do hate the way our government spends our money.

I don't know whether to distrust him because he doesn't understand how the economy works or because he is a pathological liar.

What I do know is that maximizing business expenses is how a business reduces its taxable income and that, if you're going to lose the money anyway, you'd do better to "lose" it by expanding your business than by simply forking it over to the government.

The idea that, if you hand over less to the government, you'd spend your own resulting income on jobs and expansion rather than on polo ponies and trips to fancy golf clubs in Florida is nonsense.

Whether Eisenhower said it or not.

I'm willing to debate counterintuitive, counter-historical economic theory.

Only don't tell me that major corporations make major elective spending decisions in a matter of days.

Because it insults my intelligence and makes me very angry.

 

How the Other Half Lives

I said yesterday that Agnes and Trout live in a world of matter-of-fact poverty, and today's strip underlines the idea.

These little girls play it for comedy, but it's too real in the three-dimensional world, where we have backtracked on the mission of LBJ and Bobby Kennedy to level the playing field for the next generation.

It reminds me of a time in the summer of '68 when a buddy and I hitched into Chicago for a concert and were dropped off on an edge of town that meant walking through some mean streets to get to the Loop. 

The sidewalks were crumbling, the storefronts were empty, anything within reach was vandalized. It wasn't scary -- long hair would usually get you through neighborhoods controlled by the Panthers or the Blackstone Rangers -- but it was infinitely depressing.

Up ahead, we saw a crowd gathering on the sidewalk and, as we drew nearer, a flashing light on top of a vehicle. When we got there, we found an animal control van and a shepherd mix being put in the back while some very young black kids cried and their mother comforted them.

"It's okay," she said. "He's just going to jail for a few days."

I didn't say it was a funny story. It might be funny in Agnes. A lot of things are funny in cartoons that you'd never want to see in real life.

But this is indeed the perspective we offer more and more little kids so that the fat cat in Sheneman's cartoon can enjoy his untaxed profits.

 

And so ...

I'm not sure exactly when that stroll through the get-toe happened, but it was just a few weeks before the streets of Chicago were filled with people chanting "The Whole World Is Watching."

We can't count on Mayor Daley hosting a nationally televised display of what's going on these days, but we can ask cartoonists to shine that spotlight, and we can reward them when they do.

I'm on record as not thinking much of awards, but here's a contest that might be worth entering -- hat tip to Cartoon Movement -- and here's a list of others, provided by the AAEC. 

Some of the prizes even include the words "Pay to the order of ..."

Hey, even Robin Hood had to feed his Merry Men.

On the Second Day of Christmas ...

No, Carmen, you didn't.

And be careful what you wish for anyway.

It seems odd to be coming back from a day that was not only full of three-dimensional real-world distractions but in which even Facebook, that repository of confrontational misinformation, had turned for the moment into family photos and warmth.

It was a pleasant respite, but coffee break's over.

Still, we can mark the season a little more, if not for the full 12 days at least long enough for this: Sean Stephane Martin noted on the aforementioned Facebook that, in the various cinematic versions of "A Christmas Carol," the lonely misery of Scrooge's life is often secondary to his love of money, despite the fact that the two are firmly linked by Dickens.

To which I responded that I thought it was odd that, of all the retellings, it was Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol that most captured that point, "odd" because, of all the versions, it's certainly the cheesiest, with cheap animation and songs far short of Lerner & Lowe or Rogers & Hammerstein.

But it did indeed make the point, not only with that piece, but, later, with the greed of the people who came to Scrooge's (projected) death bed to strip it of his earthly goods. 

Which suggests that perhaps the Scrooge/Trump cartoons we've seen in the last two weeks might better be exemplified not in the cruelties of the tax reform and the harsh indifference to suffering, but rather by that humiliating vote in the UN on the Jerusalem question, in which the world stood up against the bizarre threats mocked in this Clay Jones cartoon and demonstrated that, indeed, we're all alone in the world.

I suppose the optimistic approach would be to remember that Scrooge's nephew wanted to invite him back into the family, and Bob Cratchit at least blessed him as the provider of the meager feast his family could enjoy, despite, in both cases, objections from others who refused to credit the hateful old miser with anything.

I'm willing to pity Donald Trump, packed off to boarding school by a family that had given up on him, but, then again, it is possible to feel compassion for someone without condoning the damage they do, and let's put Samuel Johnson's famous quote into more context than it is usually given:

Murray: 'It seems to me that we are not angry at a man for controverting an opinion which we believe and value; we rather pity him.'

Johnson: 'Why, Sir; to be sure when you wish a man to have that belief which you think is of infinite advantage, you wish well to him; but your primary consideration is your own quiet. If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards."

The problem being that Trump is in a position to do actual, not just theoretical and annoying, damage.

But it's comforting to know that the world, which began this year looking at us with curiosity only slightly mingled with horror, has not been seduced and is willing to let steadier hands take the tiller, despite the boastful, hostile threats of the former captain.

And, as said here before, the challenge is not to convert the Deplorables, who are True Believers and will never change, but to awaken the moderates who have been heretofore willing to let others carry the load. 

In which effort I turn to this collection of tips, for which Matt Wuerker rounded up Pat Bagley, Barry Blitt, David Horsey, Kal Kallaugher, Mike Lester, Ann Telnaes and Signe Wilkinson to explain how they draw the President.

 

Now for a little post-holiday clean-up: 

Agnes managed to score at Christmas, within her modest means.

It takes a deft touch to keep us laughing at Agnes and Trout: If their lives were any more pitiful, the strip would turn into Little Orphan Annie, while, if they had anything more in the world, it would simply be Lucy and Ethel.

There was never a real explanation for Lucy's desire to be famous or her chasing after celebrities, and we simply accepted her as a loveable eccentric, but Agnes really has a hole that she needs to climb out of, which adds significantly to the appeal of the feature.

 

But if you need a Scrooge to laugh at, there's always Stan at Pros & Cons, whose well of compassion could be emptied with an eyedropper.

Cops, firefighters, nurses and reporters work on Christmas, and I always hoped for no real news: No serious crimes or housefires or accidents. The challenge was to fulfill the mandatory "Who's working on Christmas?" story assignment with human interest or perhaps something amusing.

In this case, perhaps amusing only to half the parties.

 

I like Brewster Rockit's take on 2017, mostly because the Fidget Spinner coverage itself was not unlike a satire, as feature writers desperately sought to find an angle other than "Hey, lookit that!"

So we had stories about teachers having to prohibit them in class, which punched the "Threat to Society" ticket, and then some kid old enough to know better took one apart and swallowed a piece, which became "Fidget Spinners Could Kill Your Child," either a truly fine story or something to get the features editor off your back, depending on your sense of professional pride.

(Brewster here hits on the only assignment more miserable than fad coverage: The dreaded year-end roundup.)

 

Welcome back, Ted

Finally, some nice holiday news: Ted Forth has recovered from the death of his father (which was very well-done, by the way) and is once more a loveable doofus.

And if you think the origins of Boxing Day are hard to trace, try to figure out Wren Day.

And if you think the Star Wars Holiday Special was bizarre, ditto:

Shona Lá an Dreoilín

 

 

An Old Fashioned Christmas

How old fashioned? This old fashioned. My dad made Christmas cards each year back before a whole lot of technical advances, and here is the plate from his 1951 card to prove it. If you mouse over it, you'll see that I slugged it "cut" because that's what graphics were referred to back in the days of hot metal.

Hence the term "cutline" in place of what civilians call a "caption."

And here is the result, which went out to all our friends and relations and that's my nearly-two-year-old butt on the left. His job became more challenging as the years went by; eventually he had to fit seven of us into it. 

Though somewhat aged in the interim, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and, to celebrate both the day and my dad's card, here is what else people could contemplate on December 25, 1951, and I'm putting Ella Cinders first because her title got snipped off:

(Mark's not in this strip, but I'm going to assume that's the Cherry he'll eventually marry.)
(I'm puzzled. It's not Snuffy, but Loweezy is name-checked, and it's still Barney's strip.)

Now here's your moment of ancient Yuletide zen:

At some point in my wee childhood, my folks got a silent 8-mm version of this 1951 film and it was added to things we needed to watch regularly.

When I say it was silent, I mean the film itself and not the projectionist, who was in the back of the room muttering to himself and dealing with sprockets and bulbs and other aspects of a 1950s technology that has since been marvelously improved. His ability to consistently stop just short of profanity fills me, in retrospect, with wonder.

Christmas, With Love And Squalor

Jeremy gets grief in today's Zits, but he brings back some memories for me, plus a little gratitude that my mother was a lot more mellow than his.

While Christmas Day is, indeed, a huge family celebration, it seems to crest pretty early in the morning, fade in midafternoon and then just kind of peter out entirely.

Sometimes, when we had returning family and out-of-town relatives, we'd mount a Monopoly game or something in the evening, but even that amounted to the gaming group in the diningroom and everyone else kind of zoned out around the house.

Christmas, like Hannukah and Ramadan, ends at sundown.

Two memories of astoundingly different polarities:

The earlier one, the jolly one, was that the local bar was open Christmas night, which sounds less astonishing now than it did a half century ago, when commercialism was not yet the backbone of everything.

A lot of places weren't even open on Sunday back then and nothing at all but the hospital was open on Christmas.

But the bar -- officially "The Bluebird Inn" but universally known as "Chappell's" because that's who owned it -- was the local gathering place for anyone 16 and over. The drinking age was 18, but underage high school kids were welcome to drink soda, feed the jukebox and shoot pool or play the shuffle-bowling machine.

And, if they were lucky, after they'd hung out there for a year or so, the fact that they weren't 18 would be forgotten.

The owner and bartender was Gert Chappell, and, if there were any connection at all between this bluecollar deerhunters' hole in the wall and the polished, urban "Cheers" beyond the cluster of regulars at one end of the bar, it's that Gert was what Carla might have turned into by the time she was 80 or so: Short, gruff and absolutely ruling the roost but a sweetheart inside.

Gert stayed open on Christmas night not because she was greedy but because she knew a lot of us came home from the military or from college or from wherever and had a narrow window in which to both visit with family and also catch up with friends.

And I don't know what she'd have done with her time that night anyway, given that her own family was grown and scattered except for her son Donnie, who had walked into a baseball bat as a young child and froze at about four but was now a very large man in his late 40s.

Donnie did all the hauling and stocking and other heavy lifting for Gert, and while folks make jokes about "the Village Idiot," our little village looked out for Donnie and took care of him.

So anyway, we knew that, if we headed down to the bar in the evening, we'd find a lot of our friends there and we could do some catching up with people who, if we hadn't caught them there and then, we'd have missed entirely. 

The result being that, with apologies to Jeremy's control freak Mom, I have some very good, warm memories of Christmas nights at a bar she'd have been horrified to even drive past, much less let her child walk into.

The second memory is somewhat related but a whole lot more downbeat, because my brief foray into talk radio only lasted a year or so, but happened to overlap Christmas, and I got a few days off because we had purchased a holiday package of Christmas carols back-to-back with cut-ins for commercials and a five-minute news segment at the top of the hour but no chit-chat.

However, the thing ran out at 6 pm Christmas Day and my show was 6 to 9 pm. The program director told me they could figure something out so I could spend the day with my family, but I said that anybody who was listening to talk radio on Christmas night needed to hear a familiar voice.

Maybe I got that notion from Gert, but wherever it came from, it turned out I was right and you can read the rest of the story here.

That also was a Christmas to remember.

 

Meanwhile, back at the drawing board

There will be Christmas cards in tomorrow's posting, but Kal Kallaugher gets his in today so that everyone can gather around and pour a little wassail and sing.

I always love Kal's artistic skills and I agree with his politics, too, but today he gets particular bravos for the fact that his lyrics scan.

I can't decide if I'm puzzled by cartoonists who can't master scansion in their song and poem parodies, or if I'm puzzled by the way they go ahead and do those parodies anyway, but enough of them clumber and clatter on nonetheless, that it's sure a whole lot more impressive than it ought to be when a parody comes together this well.

Which I guess amounts to a hearty helping of faint praise to Kal, but I'd like the art even if he hadn't nailed the verse.

 

And a genuine moment of God-Bless-Us-Everyone

If you follow the cartoon journal of friend-of-the-blog Richard Marcej, you may have found it a bit depressing over the past .. geez ... three freakin' years.

That makes today's entry a truly fine Christmas brightener, and kudos to him not only for the job but for timing things with such serendipity that his life-to-cartoon gap dropped the news on Christmas Eve.

Well played.

And I hope now he can get back to movie reviews and entries about sports, cats and dating site mishaps, because the only thing more depressing than reading about his endless job hunt surely must have been living it.

Time for you to laugh at this one, pal:

 And to all, a happy

Deplorable animatronics and other follies

So Animatronic Trump has come to Earth and I'm blaming Ray.

Animatronic Trump is nearly as scary as the real one. I've never been to the Hall of Presidents or the Magic Kingdom at all, though I did visit Disneyland back when I was 9 and Donnie was 13, before Disneyland began banning men with long hair from the park but nearly 20 years after underpaid, undercredited animators went on strike at Disney Studios.

Which is to say that a bloated display of jingoism there is hardly something I have to see to believe, nor do I apologize for rejecting the patriotic equivalent of praying on streetcorners. My parents -- Greatest Generation membership notwithstanding -- used to shake their heads over a similar show at Roadside America, which literally overshadowed the cool little trains and houses we came to see. 

But folks eat this stuff up, so wotthehell, and the question really is not whether Walt Disney was the friend of the workingman and a Great American, but rather how such a talented group of artists could come up with such an off-target statue.

Michael Cavna convened a group of political cartoonists to analyze and diagnose Animatronic Trump and explain where it went wrong and how to properly depict Dear Leader.

In fact, it's more than "a group" but rather what I think we can call "a distinguished panel," consisting of Matt Davies, Kal Kallaugher, Mike Luckovich, Scott Stantis and Disney-veteran Ann Telnaes, who contributed the above image.

And I hasten to point out that, if she were ever a disgruntled former employee, she is today one of the most thoroughly gruntled people I know.

So it's fair commentary.

The whole thing is a must-read, not simply for the swipes at the statue but for the genuinely expert insights into how to draw Trump.

A couple of them mention his hair, and I happened to notice yesterday, in the videos of him signing autographs at the airport in Florida (which, by the way, seems oddly unpresidential), that the sun was shining through the front half of his swept-around-comb-over, giving it the look of cotton candy or perhaps fiberglass, which made me in turn think that he's really backed himself into a corner.

That is, I wonder how much more his hair can take and how much longer there were be enough of it to pull off this silly charade. I can't help but think it would have been a lot easier for him if, several years ago, he had simply gotten himself a well-made toup.

After all, people know that Sean Connery and William Shatner wear toupées, but they're well-made and not terribly distracting and who cares?

But once you've taken your hair to a place where anyone talking to you has to keep thinking "Don't stare - Don't stare - Don't stare," it's much more difficult to simply back away from it. It would be like President Grant shaving and then donning a fake beard.

I suppose you could order a toupée replicating your established look, but cotton candy melts and fiberglass would create serious itching problems. 

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Mike Luckovich)

(Dwane Powell)

However much two-thirds of us laugh at Animatronic Trump, there is a significant segment of the population that eats it all up, and who are True Believers and unshakable Deplorables.

And not only could Trump shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing their support, but Obama was right when he said that the more you take away from them, the more they cling to their religious doctrines and their dogmatic belief in the Second Amendment.

And they are so firmly entrenched in believing what they are told to believe that they got pissed when he said that.

However, between the unreasoning fear Luckovich depicts and the absurd Lotto Nation hopefulness Powell draws upon, they are beyond simply vulnerable as targets for the cynical manipulation that has built them into a political force.

So I laughed at both of these, but it's gallows humor. Between them, these guys have captured the essence of the Republican base.

The cartoons are valuable, but only as a humorous reminder of what thinking people are up against, because, to begin with, most of the Deplorables won't even see these. Many of them don't read papers, while many others only read papers whose editorial slants they accept.

Cartoonists are already getting pushback from editors who don't want them constantly criticizing Trump, because it upsets their readers.

Which reminds me of when, in the Chicago Eight Seven Trial, Judge Julius Hoffman refused to allow former Attorney General Ramsey Clark to testify, "because it might tend to prejudice the jury in favor of the defendants," to which his illegitimate son Abbie commented that he thought that was the point of putting on a defense.

Also, I have noticed that one paper which is home to a moderate progressive cartoonist has begun alternating his work online with cartoons by rabid rightwingers, which addresses the objections of Deplorable readers by declaring that everything is pretty much a matter of opinion, in the best of totally chickenshit on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other tradition.

For my part, I'd rather have a rightwing paper on my doorstep than some mewling display of moral cowardice. 

Anyway, it's important to continue to point out the foolishness and the fear that motivates the Deplorables, not in an attempt to convert them, which won't happen, but to rally moderates to recognize the stakes.

And to provide a few laffs. Lord knows we could use them.

 

Speaking of Whom

The ironically-named Cardinal Law died, and much as I hate Pearly Gates cartoons, I like Chan Lowe's take.

St. Paul wrote to Titus: "They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate."

And Titus -- perhaps not the same Titus -- had the response, shorn of niceties because what's nice about it?

Too harsh? Go forward to 5:26.

 

Oh the Lawsuits You'll Prompt!

An update courtesy of Johanna Draper Carlson on the ongoing infringement suit brought by Dr. Seuss's estate against Comicmix, which ran a Kickstarter to fund a book called "Oh The Places You'll Boldly Go," based on the Seuss piece of nearly the same title and Star Trek.

This illustration is from the complaint, which goes into a great deal more detail on why they feel ripped off rather than satirized.

Where to begin? Well, with the fact that I am not a lawyer and nothing I say has any force in law and so forth and so on.

And that I'm in favor of free expression and, in particular, of the right to satirize and to create parodies.

But, then again, I'm in favor of protecting intellectual property, and, while -- as noted here quite recently -- I'm deeply against the outrageous extension of copyright under the Sonny Bono Law, "Oh The Places You'll Go" is less than 20 years old, only 27 years old, and, while the author/illustrator is dead, I don't think copyright protection should be. Yet.

The court has recently ruled against Seuss in saying that, while you can trademark, for instance, the Cat in the Hat's hat, you can't trademark an entire artistic style.

But I think Comicmix is making too much of this ruling, because all it does is shift the argument to the copyright status of the content rather than the artistic style of the rendering.

This means that you can have interchangeable artists working on comic books, which is great for Marvel and DC, though I'm not sure it's much of a victory for the interchangeable artists.

When I began writing children's stories to be serialized in newspapers, I got it down in writing that I was the copyright holder and they were not "works for hire." But that's hardly an option open to everyone.

Marvel and DC own the rights to the various muscular Spandex characters whom I would call "superheroes" except that the term "superhero" is trademarked and, no, I'm not joking.

Still, the fact that they can assign artists to draw their characters doesn't mean you can draw and sell them yourself.

Their comic books are ongoing publishing ventures, no different than the Harry Potter series, and, while JK Rowling has been very generous and openhanded in allow fan-fiction using the characters and settings of her books, she wouldn't have to be. 

But I also think she's bright enough to see that amateur fan-fic is a way to build audience and loyalty. Try publishing your story of Harry, Hermione and Ron as a freestanding for-sale book and I suspect there'd be a cease-and-desist in your mailbox by Monday.

And, similarly, there was the Dysfunctional Family Circus, a website in which real Family Circus cartoons had new, mostly vulgar, captions swapped in.

Bil Keane apparently thought it was funny as long as it was an odd little corner of the web, but, once it became viral, he and his syndicate asked that it be shut down.

But, again, that was their choice. They could have shut it down from the get-go, because it was entirely based on a single source of copyrighted material.

By contrast, I think the parody/satire defense will almost always win out in the case of occasional pieces.

For instance, Ruben Bolling's current "Tom the Dancing Bug" cartoon is a parody of "Where the Wild Things Are," but it's not a book or even a poster, but, rather a single installment of his ongoing, well-established cartoon.

He also has not made a serious attempt to copy Maurice Sendak's artistic style, and, content aside, it can't be argued that he's trying to fool anyone into thinking Sendak drew this, particularly since he includes a disclaimer.

Similarly, while Adam Zyglis somewhat -- but not slavishly -- copies Schulz's style for his current piece, again, it's one entry in his regular series of cartoons.

And, no, I'm not a lawyer. But I am a writer, and, speaking artistically, I would suggest that the creative success of both Bolling's and Zyglis's pieces lies chiefly in the fact that they are one-offs, such that part of their impact is the surprise.

That POW-BAM-GONE impact is key to good parody.

Timing is also critical.

Shortly after I graduated from college, I wrote a parody of the extremely popular and extremely sappy "Jonathan Livingstone Seagull," which, rather than being about a seagull who wanted to be a great flyer, was about Jonathan Livingston Beagle, a dog whose ambition was to lift his leg better and farther than any dog had.

I sent it off to Harper's and got a nice note back from Lewis Lapham saying that he thought it was very clever but that it didn't sustain for however long it was -- I think maybe four pages or so.

At 500 words, it would have been funny, and, for the first 500 words, it was.

And then it became tedious.

It's hard to pull off a full-length parody, and even "Bored of the Rings" is considerably shorter than its source material.

Which is why those great Jack Davis parodies in classic Mad Magazine were short: Get in, get the laff, get the hell out.

This thing looks long and I wonder if even Trekkie obsession is enough to sustain it?

That is a factor that shouldn't come into the legal discussion of this piece except to the extent of asking "Why are we continuing to shovel money out the door to lawyers?"

They may have raised $30K on Kickstarter, but how much are they spending on it now, before the presses even run? I suppose a victory would create curiosity, but I suspect the principle will have to be more important than the profit.

Still, freedom of expression should be defended, and, who knows?

Anti-Monopoly eventually won and Air Pirates lost and if you think it's worth doing in the first place, you should probably ride that sucker until it either soars into orbit or corkscrews into the ground.

But bear in mind that Larry Flynt was going for a quick laugh and a political point.

He wasn't trying to sell an apéritif.