Comic Strip of the Day.com

Educational Comix

Mr. Fitz is moving from a middle-school to K-12 setting over the summer, which will give real-world teacher David Finkle a wider range of topics. At the moment, Mr. Fitz has been assigned to help students with their college essays and sad hilarity ensues.

Finkle regularly rips bad teaching from the inside, while also offering teachers some books with positive advice about teaching writing. As for realism, as much as they change the jargon from moment to moment, I can still relate to the frustrations Mr. Fitz faces in his comic strip world, and it's been a decade since I was visiting classrooms regularly.

Today's made me chuckle in large part because one of my tasks in editing a kid-written weekly (today's issue includes Denver Comic Con coverage!) is in overcoming the mechanistic way in which they've been taught to write.

It's one thing to explain that a "book report" is to prove to the teacher that you read the whole thing while a "book review" should not describe action much past the first third. They do understand spoilers. 

But book reports also are to prove you got the message and it's harder to convince them that not everything you read has a message, because, boy, have they been taught to ferret those suckers out, and most of them have to do with following your dreams or believing in yourself.

As the lad in the final panel says, it's important that all message-packed reading assignments be dull.

 

Not all messages need be dull 

Heidi MacDonald reports that Dan Dare is back with new adventures, which sent me into a nostalgic tailspin.

Dan Dare was a feature of Eagle Magazine, a comics magazine of the 1950s and 60s, edited by Marcus Morris, an Anglican priest who wanted to give young boys a type of comic adventure that was age-appropriate, full of action and perhaps not-entirely-accidentally educational or that would at least inspire thought and curiosity.

Besides Dan Dare, Eagle famously featured detailed cutaways of various ships, planes and other mechanical stuff with explanations of how they worked. I remember it's how I learned the difference between water-cooled (in-line) and air-cooled (radial) fighter plane engines and about a new type of boat called a hovercraft.

Also about the life of Winston Churchill and about Montgomery at el Alamein.

There was a strong element of muscular Christianity in the Rev. Morris's vision, and that's not an entirely bad thing if kept in reasonable bounds -- that is, Thomas Hughes did it well, while G.A. Henty laid on the accompanying imperialism a bit too thick.

I came to this in the early 60s through my uncle, a student at St. Mike's at the University of Toronto, who gave us subscriptions, Eagle to my older brother, Girl to my sister, Swift to me and Robin to my little brother.

The first thing I remember learning from Swift was that Australian kids referred to each other as "cobber."  There was also an adventure series with an Indian who shouted "hokahey" whenever he was smiting bad guys.

Swift later carried a cartoon version of "Dixon of Dock Green," a detective story in which you had to guess how Dixon had solved the crime. I recall one adventure where he offered a suspect some of his fish-and-chips, whereby the fellow revealed himself to be the safecracker because his filed-down fingertips made him recoil from the vinegar, which is how I learned that British people put vinegar on french fries.

Meanwhile, perusing my sister's copies of Girl meant I'd heard of the Beatles before they started turning up on American radio, so that was educational, too.

The limitations of international mail meant that these weeklies arrived at odd intervals in somewhat random order, making the continuing adventures a little hard to follow, but that's an advantage of being ADD because I probably wouldn't have been able to follow them even if they had shown up every seven days like clockwork anyway.

And Morris was nothing if not sincere in his intentions. When I wrote an impassioned letter to the editor protesting the lack of spine in an American officer being rescued by a British commando, he wrote a kindly letter back reminding me that British readers felt the same watching Hollywood movies in which all the heroes were Yanks. About a year later, he wrote to me again out of the blue, suggesting a penpal, a young artist at a British vocational school whom he had heard from, and the two of us exchanged letters for several years.

All of which is why I wish DC and Marvel would do more to attract, entertain and encourage young readers, rather than trying to please a passionate-but-diminishing group of aging readers for whom they might, instead, create new products. 

Oh well.

A safecracker would have to be kind of a prat to pick up a hot, salty, vinegar-soaked chip with his bare hands in front of a cop.

 

Historic comics for older readers

Existential Comics drifts a bit away from cartoons where you have to have studied philosophy for this historic romp with Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir, which plays upon an odd claim of using cheese as part of the Resistance in WWII.

Yeah, you read that right.

The comic always has a link underneath, explaining things for those who miss a crucial element -- that is, readers who might know Ludwig Wittgenstein but not Charles Peirce -- but this time, like the cartoon, it's more about history, and specifically how everyone in France later turned out to have been in the Resistance. Every single one, except Klaus Barbie.

Which seems pretty funny now but once we get rid of Dear Leader, watch how many flock to claim credit.

Or, if we don't, watch them flock to embrace their role in having helped to Make America Great Again.

Flower Ladies have never been at any risk of growing rich.

 

 

Fake History

David Horsey leads today with a provocative cartoon, using "provocative" in its best sense: He accompanies it with a thoughtful essay on how we teach, and understand, our history that will, at worst, provoke you to think and, at best, provoke actual conversations on the topic.

And I particularly like that he echoes a peeve of my own:

When I was growing up, the history I learned was much the same as it had been taught in American schoolrooms for decades. The mostly uplifting, positive story was told East to West, from Plymouth Rock to Daniel Boone’s Kentucky to bold settlers and brave cavalrymen settling the Great Plains to the California Gold Rush. 

I worked for a publisher who was a transplanted Westerner and sponsored a small PRCA rodeo on the East Coast, which I found interesting because it's the only rodeo I've been to where the animals were favored in most events, given that most of the human competitors were hobbyists. If you simply stayed on the bull for eight seconds, you'd come in either first or second, regardless of form, and the suspense in some contests was wondering if anyone would qualify at all.

I was tasked with writing a curriculum to go with this annual event and came up with one that traced the sport's history, starting before the arrival of the horse and going up through the glorification of the cowboy as an American icon, such that I ended up not just writing about Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show but interviewing tribal historians from the Comanche and Lakota, as well as writing about the vaqueros and the slave culture of the missions in the Southwest.

So it was wonderfully inclusive as well as fun and exciting, but what I heard back from teachers was that they couldn't use it in the fall because they taught American History chronologically, which means they didn't get to the West until second semester. My suggestion that pre-Columbian Sioux culture and the coming of the conquistadors were, perhaps, chronologically a bit ahead of the American Revolution and the Civil War fell on deaf ears.

I cynically began to refer to American History as "the virus that spread from Plymouth Rock," and I could go on, but Horsey covers it well. Read his essay.

Then weep at the futility of trying to get anyone to teach a history that isn't one of the two extreme, ahistorical options in his cartoon.

We need to embrace the complexity. American history is not just a glorious panorama of heroic quests and grand achievements, nor is it just a dismal sequence of exploitation and racial strife. It is both of those, and much, much more.

 

Similarly ...

And La Cucaracha hits on a related irritant, those DNA ads in which a woman happily chirps that she just discovered she's one-quarter Native American and can't wait to learn about her culture.

Granted, knowing your background can help explain family culture: Hanging out with Irish ex-pats in my 30s greatly expanded my understanding of my mother, despite her never making soda bread or hauling us off to step-dancing classes. It goes way beyond those externals. She always acknowledged her Irish roots, but the nearest immigrant was in her grandparents' generation, so the influence was more subtle; you had to know what to look for.

I suspect that if your heritage is so far back and forgotten that you didn't even know about it, that sort of influence is pretty diluted.

And I'd add, referencing today's La Cucaracha, that if you don't know if your Hispanic heritage is from Peru or Puerto Rico, or whether your native heritage is Seneca or Navajo, it's a bit like being European but not knowing if you're Swedish or Greek.

They only "all look alike" from the outside.

I'm a little pissed at Alcaraz for using the Sam Cook punchline, because I'd have cheerfully snagged it.

 

More History

Francesco Marciuliano is marking his 20th year writing "Sally Forth," which came as a bit of a shock to me mostly because it meant it's been 20 years since I re-did the comics page at the Post-Star in Glens Falls. 

There's a link in the right gutter here about how to re-do a comics page without bringing the wrath of readers down on your head, but the bottom line was that reader feedback did not champion Sally and she got dropped. Afterwards, I did hear from one or two people who wrote "I'll miss it, but I'll give these new strips a try," but that isn't exactly passion and the strip, well, it lacked passion. 

And then Ces took it over and I soon found myself really wishing he'd started the transformation a few months earlier.

Hey, timing is everything.

 

And now this

Here's an ending that perhaps signals a moment in history we'll mark later: Mile High Comics has announced that they won't be back at the San Diego Comic Con next year.

Too much expense, too few sales, too much of a shift away from comics towards movies and games and cosplay and other ephemera. Who can blame them?

Derf Backderf has a most excellent rant on the topic, which not only echoes yesterday's wise-ass comment here about pegging the value of the bitcoin to vintage comics, but takes me back to the 1980s when I tried to explain to my boys the folly of buying "collectible" comics as they were being published.

I had #1s of Spiderman, Fantastic Four, Thor and Hulk at summer camp. We read them, we traded them, we tore, creased and mutilated them, and those who kept them came home from college to find them either mildewed in the basement or tossed out by unthinking parents.

That's what made the mint-condition survivors valuable.

It's called "supply and demand" and I guess if we ever figure out how to teach history, maybe we can start doing a better job of teaching that, too.

 

Now here's your moment of historic zen:

Ways of Knowing

(Pajama Diaries)

(Pros and Cons)

One of the courses I took in college was called "Ways of Knowing," thinly disguised metaphysics I filed in the "I say it's spinach and I say to hell with it" category, but all our courses within the major were required, so my opinion didn't matter.

However, about second semester senior year, the impact of all those required courses came together in a flood of "Now I get it!" that was quite impressive, and it takes a lot to impress 21-year-olds on the verge of being proclaimed officially smart.

Which brings us to this Juxtaposition because, thanks to connectivity, we're all smart today, without having had to wade through a bunch of required courses to learn how to collect and evaluate information. 

So here we are, such that Jill's friends -- who may only be "friends" she lived next to several years and several houses ago -- have no sense of propriety, of what is appropriate to share and what is "Not Of General Interest."

I capitalize that phrase because, in "Cheaper By the Dozen," (book or movie) it is what pater familias Frank Gilbreth would declare at meal times, in shutting down topics that he did not want discussed at the table.

Or at all, as in the case of the children asking about getting a dog.

But if cutting off the subject of a family dog was misuse of authority, there is some value in learning discretion and appropriate social behavior.

Much of the sequel -- "Belles on Their Toes" -- was about the emergence of women in the 1920s from the false shelter of too much "discretion," and Lillian Gilbreth's blossoming as an expert and genius in her own right.

But a lot of that first book is about Lillian trying to get Frank to ease up on his daughters and trust that the family lessons on good manners would get them through issues of bobbed hair, short skirts and scandalous dancing.

 

But, unlike the Gilbreth children, not everyone has been taught how to think and what to share, skills that not only help prevent them from falling for ridiculous nonsense (as seen in today's Retail), but let them develop boundaries enough to know what other people care about, even if they haven't learned how to navigate that old thing of keeping quiet and having people think you're a fool rather than opening your mouth and removing all doubt. 

Which brings us to Pros & Cons, and the odd idea that perhaps Stan, generally the least thoughtful person of the trio, is the only one who still knows how to think at all.

As I've said before, my grandfather spoke of how much more developed their audial memories were at the turn of the 20th century, of how, when a vaudeville show came to the Upper Peninsula, they would attend it and would walk out of the theater knowing the songs.

Once songs became available on records, he contended, our brains lost the need and therefore the capacity to remember entire verses and choruses so adroitly.

Stan's question might have, a generation ago, set the three friends to reminiscing and connecting and pondering, but now they simply whip out their portable brains and there's no need to boot up their own more bulky intellectual mainframes.

And without the capacity for conscious thought, a declaration that "Moss has no roots" does not even get "Are you sure?" much less "I wonder if I can get my money back?" but rather "You're so cynical!"

I'd like to think that, if someone asked "Who played the father in 'Cheaper By The Dozen'?" and someone looked it up and said, "Steve Martin," the response would be, "No, no -- the real one."

But then, I'm pretty cynical.

Still, it's one thing to argue the relative merits of Hollywood films, in which cynicism plays a role -- not unlike opining that Rembrandt's use of light is "better" than that of Thomas Kinkade -- and another to point out that moss doesn't have roots (though it does have rhizomes).

Or believing that retracting a story because the reporters didn't follow procedure and so cannot properly document its assertions is proof that the story was wrong and that, therefore, every news story produced by that organization is wrong.

And that organizations which never retract their stories are therefore "right."

Dammit, it is not cynical to wish people would think before they speak or that they would learn to evaluate information before swallowing it whole.

As Ann Telnaes suggests, if Dear Leader has a cunning plan (and it would be cynical to assume otherwise), discouraging people from thinking and evaluating is pretty high among his priorities.

Between cutting off access for all but favored media, and his continual cheapshots at outlets that do not unquestioningly go along with his agenda, Trump encourages the response of "Oh, you're so cynical" from those who would rather believe in moss root than research rhizomes.

And who will respond to "cynics" with links to websites that confirm the value of moss roots, while also featuring stories about Martian slave colonies and asserting that you will not believe how some 1970s starlet looks now.

A Facebook friend in South Africa asks "My goodness America, how are you going to fix your country once this man-child bull-in-a-china-shop ignoramus leaves his post?"

I don't know, but it's nice she assumes that day will come.

This extended piece at the Nib, "My Life With A Pre-Existing Condition," by Nomi Kane provides a more chilling point to ponder: Not how and if we will rebuild, but who will be here to do it.

Much of what the One Percenters are destroying under Trump can be fixed, and will only have set us back a decade or so compared to where we'd have been under sane, responsible government.

But people like Kane may not make it that far, and no amount of moss root will help prevent the immediate threat to them of unbridled, selfish, ignorant policies.

 

Everybody always be's mean to broflakes

I was thinking yesterday that perhaps it's too late for editorial cartoons, that there's no point in debate because nobody's listening, here under the snowflake flag in which everyone is constantly offended and nobody is happy and, in the words of my elder sister possibly just before I became her little brother, "Everybody always be's mean to me."

Tearful toddler words which my parents quoted back at her, laughing, for years, not realizing the sentiment would one day replace "In God We Trust" and "E Pluribus Unum" as our national motto.

So now Budweiser has created this commercial for the Fourth of July, in which a young woman is told that, as the daughter of a disabled vet, she's getting a "Folds of Honor" scholarship to finish her nursing degree. 

The foundation is well-rated, the scholarship and additional aid for this kid is a good thing and, as the father of a vet who was similarly knocked out of the service by a non-combat injury and who has a daughter in nursing, I'm cool with it.

Good on them all and we can discuss why our kids need scholarships another day.

What's upsetting to me is that it's all over Facebook, not linked, as above, to Budweiser's own site, but to various rightwing crybaby broflake sites that take this thoughtful, positive video and surround it with divisive whining about how it is a message to those liberals in Hollywood -- you know, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwartzenegger, Mel Gibson -- and is a real breakthrough since no other ads ever honor our vets, except for the ones that do.

Though of course,  Bud has never done anything to honor vets in the past, so there's that.

Sarcasm aside, it's discouraging that every nice gesture has to be perverted into yet another excuse to divide our country and ratchet up the hostility we've bred.

And so I was sure that, in this time of crisis and division, a standard flags-and-fireworks Fourth of July cartoon would be dereliction of duty.

So as if to show me up, here's Bill Day's piece, which quietly salutes the day and salutes the nation and steadfastly makes a point.

And the best thing about it is that I don't think the haters can find a way to pervert his message.

And the worst thing about it is that, in any other setting, any other year, any other America, it would simply be a bland statement and not a challenge.

Yesterday, Robert Reich posted a link to a 2014 essay he wrote, in which he suggested that nations are outdated, that we have given up that 200 year experiment and reverted to tribes.

I hope not. But it often feels that way.

Both Reich's and Day's pieces dovetail nicely with today's Candorville.

A lot of alternative history is simply off-the-wall, but his starting point is solid, since, when Benedict Arnold attempted to aid the British, he was not wishing to return the colonies to status quo ante.

The dominant loyalist position in those latter years of the war was to accept Britain's offer to concede to most of the demands the patriots had made in the course of pursuing independence.

Had the loyalists brokered a peace, it would not have meant a return to taxes on tea and lack of representation in Parliament.

I'm not sure about the Manifest Destiny part, since Britain's agreements over native rights might not have survived a resumption of colonial growth, but, if nothing else, a collection of colonies would have had weaker leverage in their efforts to seize land, while, if Lemont is correct and France would not have seen Napoleon, the Louisiana Purchase would have been out, that territory remaining Spanish.

As for emancipation, even half a century before Britain outlawed slavery, Samuel Johnson had wondered "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"

That same Samuel Johnson who wrote: "Our supple tribes repress their patriot throats, And ask no questions but the price of votes."

Which returns us to the present.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day:

(Gary Varvel)

(Jeff Stahler)

There may be no point in trying to argue with people who believe in Bigfoot and in pizza parlor perverts and, at latest report, slave colonies on Mars, but I do think it's worth pointing out that the Nation's Biggest Eight-Year-Old is an embarrassing broflake and needs, in the terms of his followers, to man up.

The deplorables in the unreachable half of that loyal basket are fond of posting things about how good it was back in the days when parents raised their kids right. Stahler and Varvel may be offering an argument here that can get through even to people who believe Obama was born in Kenya and that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.

And even Glenn McCoy -- hardly a cartoonist noted for liberal bias -- is calling for the President to stop embarrassing the office, and the country.

It's enough to make one hope for better days.

 

Looking Back:

We could also wish for better days for Hong Kong on the 20th anniversary of its return from British colony to Chinese territory, and Ann Telnaes tweeted this cartoon that she did back in those days.

I heard a report on NPR yesterday, saying that, while Hong Kong activists had protested in past years, it was quiet there on the anniversary, and also that a lot of upperclass Chinese from the mainland, enriched by the nation's new semi-capitalism, had moved to Hong Kong and were having an impact on its society and local economy that many long-time residents resented.

 

It reminded me, and then Ann's cartoon reminded me again, of the late, lamented comic strip "Lily Wong" that had once prospered in British Hong Kong, and which I wrote about at more length on the 15th Anniversary of the repatriation.

 

And which suggests this earworm:

(Improve America: Share pictures of Lily with your favorite broflake!)

No time for logic

(Kevin Kallaugher)

(Adam Zyglis)

A critical juxtaposition today, with two good cartoonists getting it right from slightly different perspectives. 

I give Zyglis an edge in term of persuasion, but that comes with a lot of footnotes.

Kal is correct in that the net effect of the Republican reforms is to drain resources from the poor (and middleclass) in order to provide a windfall to the wealthy.

For those with a progressive sense of Social Contract, that's extremely persuasive. And it ought to inspire not just those who have read Locke and Rousseau and the other Enlightenment writers who inspired our founders, but also Christians who focus on the clear, main message of the synoptic gospels rather than cherrypicking judgmental passages from the Old Testament and the Epistles. 

However, let us not forget the quip attributed to Adlai Stevenson, who, when a woman assured him he had the vote of every thinking American, responded "That's not enough, madam. We need a majority."

The quote appears to be a legend; the fact that he lost is very real.

Kal's cartoon does a terrific job of reassuring thoughtful readers that they are correct in their thinking, but it won't reach those who believe in a harsh, paternalist system wherein the rich deserve their wealth and the poor are victims of their own failures.

Zyglis has the advantage of dwelling more on the impact than the intent of the legislation: People will die.

The hardcore rightwing believes that the poor have only themselves to blame and, while they chip in to support charities, they honestly see the overall misery as the inevitable order of things.

A friend steered me to this depressing but clear-headed page, in which a linguist argues that Trump & Co. are marketers, not philosophers, and that people respond to marketing far more than to philosophy.

He suggests that progressives talk not about "regulations" but about "protections," and not about "taxes" but about "investments in public resources," to frame things not in terms of what they restrict or what they cost but in terms that emphasize the promises they offer.

Mostly, however, he outlines the difference in worldview that makes it impossible to persuade conservatives by appealing to altruism:

Conservatives believe in what Lakoff calls the “strict father family,” while progressives believe in a “nurturant parent family.” In the strict father family, father knows best and he has the moral authority. The children and spouse have to defer to him, and when they disobey, he has the right to punish them so they will learn to do the right thing.

“The basic idea is that authority is justified by morality, and that, in a well-ordered world, there should be a moral hierarchy in which those who have traditionally dominated should dominate,” Lakoff said.

You can rail all you want against the Protestant ethic, but it's hardwired into our system, and, moreover, it's not ours alone. The world is full of people who do not simply accept but actively embrace authoritarian figures.

Some are religious, some are atheists, but all are accepting of the notion that those in power deserve to be in power and those in the gutter have moral failings that put them there.

You can't argue them out of such a fundamental belief.

Ebenezer Scrooge, after all, had no problem rejecting the logical, decent arguments of his nephew Fred and of the charitable men who dropped by his office.

It was only when forcibly dragged from his bed and shown his own personal losses and the impact on others of his lack of compassion that Scrooge changed.

So set-and-match to Zyglis, and a suggestion that we keep the stories coming and the lectures to a minimum.

 

But first ...

Dan Piraro does a weekly wrap-up of Bizarro, and his rant over last Wednesday's panel is worth a read, even though it is an exercise in logic.

Piraro asks why we don't question the idea that firefighters put out anyone's burning home and that police do not demand proof of insurance before responding to a break-in at your home, but illness or injury are treated only if you have paid up front for the privilege of medical care?

Meanwhile, Heidi MacDonald picks up on Derf Backderf's prediction of disaster for cartoonists if the Affordable Care Act is replaced, and he gets a bit more into those persuasive stories of disaster, so the two pieces together make a good juxtaposition of their own.

I echo both:

When my last paper shut down and my COBRA ran out, I shopped around for disaster coverage in the private market.

Not preventive coverage, but simply coverage that would kick in if, for instance, I came down with cancer.

That level of coverage would have cost more than my freelance income, before taxes, before rent, before groceries.

"Give it all to us," the least expensive provider said, "and borrow some more and give us that, too, and then, after you come up with a $5,000 deductible, we'll talk about what percentage of your medical expenses we'll cover, if any."

So I went uninsured until the ACA, and, while I wasn't diagnosed with cancer until after I was on Medicare, I credit the casual relationship I developed with my primary care physician under ACA for the fact that I mentioned the odd, passing symptom that led to that diagnosis.

Meanwhile, when I did have coverage through my job, it also had a four-digit deductible, and, while it would cover you once you had advanced cancer or an actual heart attack, it would not pay to test for those things before they became crises.

Then, when someone in your small company had a health crisis, the insurer would simply charge back the costs to your employer through increased premiums.

I'm not theorizing: I sat in the board meetings where these outrageous increases in healthcare premiums were explained by our accountant.

So the fact that only X-percent seek insurance through private policies does not tell the whole story; many others are given crappy, expensive coverage through their employers, and not because the employers are cruel but because the insurance companies offer no better deals.

But that's a Kal explanation.

Only an Adam Zyglis appeal to sentiment will persuade the True Believers.

And the GOP has cleverly set up timelines in their legislation to make sure people don't start dying until after the 2020 elections.

 

Preach it, Rev ...

 

Teachable momentum

Saw this yesterday morning when I took the dog for a walk in the park and there's a bad pun in there about setting the mood for the day, but I'll let you make it. 

Here's the next picture I took, which is of Mark Parisi signing copies of Marty Pants #1 for some fans at a kid con in Nashua.

I also got to touch base with Norm Feuti and Dan Thompson, who were sharing a booth and selling their respective kids' books, the King of Kazoo and L'il Rip Haywire respectively.

I note "kids' books" because Norm could have brought copies of Pretending You Care and Dan could have brought a Rip Haywire collection, but they told me the organizers had emphasized keeping things very kid-friendly, and it was a little rugrat convention with nobody much over 12 there except parents.

I think the older Rip books would have been okay, but "Pretending You Care" is too much depressing information for little kids who may have to spend some time working at the mall before they figure out what they want to do with their lives.

While illustrated with "Retail" strips, it's actually a guide to working in retail which is honest enough to be really, really depressing. Also funny in places, but it does confirm my theory that there's a lot of fury behind really funny stuff like Norm's strip.

And, unbeknownst to the innocent kiddies, there was a copy in the building because Charles Brubaker, who was also exhibiting there with his Ask A Cat book and Fuzzy Princess comics, had brought his copy of Pretending You Care for Norm to sign.

This was genuinely an "at last we meet" moment, because Brubaker and I were on rec.arts.comic.strips back when he was still a high school kid, which puts it back sometime in the last century.

We were talking about Norm's (grownup) book, and the fact that he had put more than a decade into the retail business before he launched his strip, and I suggested that it's easier to make that uncertain plunge into cartooning when you know how much you hate other work, to which Brubaker noted that Stephan Pastis had been eager to get out of lawyering, and he had certainly hated the low-level warehousing job he'd had after college.

So there you have it, folks: If you want to be a cartoonist, the first step is to find a job you really, really hate, in order to impress upon yourself that starving is not the worst of things.

I suspect Thompson and Feuti did not bring that up in the panel session they did later on how to get published, but a lot of people won't jump off the high-diving board unless the ladder is blocked or on fire. 

On the other hand, Don Matthias was also there and he's a middle school teacher, his Peanizles cartoon has never been syndicated and he's got a kids book coming out, so I guess you don't actually have to give up eating regularly in order to break through.

Still, I remember when having 100 papers meant you could quit your day job, and not only is that a harder mark to hit than it used to be, but rates are not such that, at that point, you can go full time. (This fits in with my opinion that anybody who can be discouraged from banging their head on a wall should be.)

Don's book is not out yet but he showed me a few pages on his phone, which reminds me that Steve Sack announced on Facebook that he's got a collection of his editorial cartoons coming out at some indefinite future date, which is good to know.

The kid-con was a pleasant gathering, perhaps more about "stuff" and fan art and teeny-tiny cosplayers than about actual cartooning, but I think that's pretty much how grown-up cons run these days and, besides, the first step is to get them into the tent.

 Fun stuff on a fun day, and I suspect the organizers made a little coin. More folks should do this kind of thing!

 

 

Current Events

Here's a case at the Nib that illustrates a danger in long-form cartoons: Mattie Parrigon has done an extensive explainer about the economic catastrophe in Kansas, in which a dogmatic trickle-down budget has wreaked utter havoc, only to have her piece overtaken by the legislature overriding Governor Brownback's veto of their corrective budget.

A one-panel can be trashed or re-written.

It's hard to fix something this extensive -- the editor's intro updating things is futile -- and it's doubly frustrating, since it's such a good rundown of where they were at, before things changed.

You'd hate to spike something so well done, but that option had to be on the table. A rewrite of the final panel might have helped, but it wouldn't have cured the problem, while it's such a good final panel that you'd hate to ask/beg/order her to mess with it.

This makes my teeth ache, both as an editor and as a writer.

I know the risks. I filed a kids' feature explaining unrest in Cote d'Ivoire only to have the copy desk call me to say I'd better start rewriting because government troops had just opened fire on the demonstrators, and I had a humor piece in a monthly magazine based entirely on Ted Kennedy's reluctance to commit to running for president, then had to hold my breath hoping he wouldn't suddenly make a decision while it was still on the racks.

In the first case, I barely squeezed under the deadline. In the second, I simply lucked out.

Parrigon did neither, and the Kansas City Star did an excellent takedown that, while it doesn't negate anything she says, shows the advantages of working on a shorter deadline in a more mobile medium.

Ah well.

Shake it off and pitch to the next batter.

 

 

Modest Expectations

Ben Bolt hit me squarely this morning.

To bring you up to speed, in this 1956 story arc (which I noted earlier came out at roughly the same time as "Rebel Without a Cause"), Ben has befriended a young hood who lost a leg in a game of vehicular chicken, and found him a job as a copy boy at the paper where Ben works.

According to this interesting insiderish interview by Jim Keefe -- who penned Flash Gordon for several years and now draws Sally Forth -- John Cullen Murphy worked for the Chicago Tribune, but, additional Googling confirms, never worked at the paper, so his insights about the business are, on the one hand, slightly secondhand but, on the other, untainted by being too close. And, as I noted before, refreshingly accurate.

I also commented with a bit of cynicism about his portrayal of a reporter with a novel in his desk drawer, back when Ben first joined the paper, but the cynicism was about the type, not that Murphy got it wrong. Murphy nailed it.

My dismay is that so few people who have been in the front of the building have deigned to visit the back.

Editors and reporters like to refer to themselves as "ink-stained wretches," but that fact is that, since they switched from quill pens to typewriters, they don't get much ink on themselves anymore, because they never get near the place where the ink flows.

This is a source of the legendary friction between the people who write the stories and the people who turn them into print.

However, you don't become a great artist and illustrator if you don't know how it works from start to finish, so it's not all that surprising after all that Murphy would have spent some time with the backshop or that he would have respect for the people who make it happen.

I'm not an artist, but my father was a mining engineer who understood that the rocks don't leap out of the ground by themselves, and his respect for all facets kind of rubbed off.

(Quick story: When my dad left the steel industry and became a labor negotiatior for a school board, he went down to the bus garage to meet the people there and get a look around. Since they had a union he'd be dealing with, it seemed natural to him, but the head of the shop told him he was the first person from the central office who had ever been in the building. I find that astonishing, but, then again, I've seen it so often that I shouldn't.)

Anyway, I always had good relations with the backshop and part of that meant that, when I was touring kids through, they'd sometimes stop what they were doing and explain something, or, if they heard me get something slightly wrong, they'd draw me aside later and fill me in on the finer points.

Those school tours invariably began with the teacher telling the kids all about reporting and editing and expecting the tour to focus on the newsroom, but I gave them the full picture of how a newspaper was created, including the production details, and I enjoyed watching the kids who found the newsroom part boring focus in when we began to get into the literal nuts-and-bolts.

In particular, I remember a pair of 14-year-olds who were not exactly cutting up but staying in the back, talking to each other and ignoring me, until we got into the press room, at which point one of them made a quiet wisecrack to the other, who gave him an elbow and said, "Shut up. I want to hear this."

When I speak of my disinterest in plaques and trophies, that moment, rather, is the kind of reward I prize, and so today's Ben Bolt made me smile.

And when I speak of stupid, bonehead decisions coming out of the front office, I'm talking about the suits who never bother to spend time in the press room, or in the bus garage, or in the pit, but sit up in their offices making policy about people they've never met and places they've never been.

No wonder Murphy's work was so excellent.

 

Futility

Speaking of not being able to get people to step off their own pathways, the current Candorville/Rudy Park mashup-crossover seems to reveal a little impatience with the gap between the promise of social media and the delivery.

I can relate. Like Lemont, I regularly post links to my work on Facebook. What I've found is that I can get an awful lot of "likes" without budging the needle on the number of hits here.

I don't take it personally, because it's also obvious that people don't read articles posted there before commenting on them, and that they don't read the comments prior to their own.

There are also some cartoonists who use bots to autopost at Facebook: Their comic and link appears, but -- like those aforementioned executives -- they never do. 

I suppose it's simply an extension of real life: No matter how many friends you seem to have, if you're honest about it, having a handful who actually give a damn about you is an accomplishment.

Vlacek Spiegelman was perhaps a bit extreme on the topic, but that doesn't mean he got it wrong.

Abbie Hoffman said, "A brother is someone who loves you so much he doesn't give a shit what you do," and I remember a conversation back then in which we refined it to a brother is someone who, if he called you in the middle of the night and said, "I need three grand and your car," you'd say "okay" before you said, "What for?"

But then we got older and lowered our expectations.

Someone who clicks through on your Facebook links.

That'll do.

 

Juxtaposition Storyboard

(Carpe Diem)

(The Barn)

(Robert Ariail)

 

... which logically leads to this moment of zen ...

Or, perhaps, here ...

 

Family Fun

(June 8)

(June 9)

Yesterday, I said to a friend that I keep wanting to just blog about funny cartoons but the politics of the moment are so compelling that I can't avoid them.

Today is that avoidance, in part because what happened yesterday was so obvious that the cartoons about it add little insight.

The other reason is that Baby Blues has delighted me this week because the family is on a trip to Yellowstone.

There's nothing particularly breakthrough going on: It's still the basic kids-and-chaos humor that is the hallmark of the strip (as Rick Kirkman explained to me once upon a time).

But it is sadly innovative in that families in comics traditionally only go out into nature to complain: Camping is uncomfortable, there's no Internet, there are bugs and why would anyone want to leave the friendly confines of suburbia?

People who champion national parks sometimes fret over the low traffic at places like Yellowstone, but it's remoteness is part of what makes it special. The traffic jams of more accessible parks aside, there's something special in the mix of folks you get when they have to make an effort to be someplace.

Even so, when I was there with some buddies in 1970, we snuck off to an illegal campsite to get away from the RVs and their portable TVs.

But today's point is, I went back in 1985 with my boys and got as much fun out of watching them see the place as I got out of being there myself.

No surprise. They'd been raised on zoos and museums and parks.

And snakes.

So here's two reasons we can't have nice things:

The first is the insistence that amusement parks are wonderful fun and that museums and national parks are boring, which is not only a recurring theme in comic strips but was actually a commercial for the Great Escape in the late 80s, in which kids moaned because their parents were going to force them to go to museums when they wanted rides and candy and fun.

The other is that Disney and Universal Studios have done for theme parks what Rite Aid and CVS have done for the corner drugstore, and I say that as someone whose boys could pop down the street to Jerry and Lillian's little pharmacy for an ice cream soda.

There was a time, O Best Beloved, when amusement parks were little places nestled among other regional attractions, and a family vacation might include a visit to Ausable Chasm and Whiteface Mountain as well as to Santa's Workshop and The Land of Make Believe.

And I say that as someone who visited the Land of Make Believe as a kid, and then with a college girlfriend, and then with my own kids, and then, sadly with visionary artist and park-creator Arto Monaco after the place was flooded in 1992 for a final time.

But Arto also designed Santa's Workshop, which is still open on the slopes of Whiteface, with a variation on the slopes of Pike's Peak and he set the standard for small, fun places to be a kid, back when regional attractions were fun.

It's been many years since Niagara Falls was the traditional honeymoon spot for newlyweds, and you can't blame Disney or Universal Studios so much for that, because the same travel improvements that made it possible for a family to pop off to Orlando made it practical for newlyweds to head for Hawaii.

Nor is it entirely Disney or Universal's fault that parents don't visit museums on weekends or drive off to a nearby national monument with their kids to see what's there.

I mean, the Coca-Cola company makes the beverage, but they don't force anyone to put it in a baby bottle and hand it to an infant. 

And the fact that TVs are inexpensive doesn't mean you're required to set your kids down in front of one and go into another room so you don't have to keep track of the crap they're watching.

Curiosity only grows if you plant it.

Theodore Roosevelt and naturalist John Burroughs went out to Yellowstone in 1903 for a look around that hardened the president's intentions of keeping some wild places wild.

And before he was president, he used to hand out copies of Burroughs' books to street kids in New York City, in hopes that it would inspire them to get out of there and see something of the natural world.

Well, we all have dreams.

I'm just happy to see Baby Blues provide a little reminder of that.

 

And as long as I'm ranting

The Buckets raises an age-old question, and Wikipedia traces back a bunch of theories, while this merry band of overthinkers does much the same. 

If it indeed began as a riddle, it's from an age in which riddles involved as much mind-reading as solving, since there are any number of fragile things that, once broken, could not be reassembled. 

Old-school riddles were more obscure than in modern times, but generally contained enough internal clues to make sense once you knew the answer:

"What can run but never walks, has a mouth but never talks, has a head but never weeps, has a bed but never sleeps?" for instance.

And Laura Ingalls Wilder tells of an entertainment in DeSmet in which her father walked up and down the aisle of the church with two potatoes balanced on an ax and people had to guess.

The first is a river.

Charles Ingalls was pantomiming "Commentators on the Acts."

Humpty Dumpty is considerably more obscure, however, and I'm going to call it tradition, and not simply Lewis Carroll but also W.C. Fields, and I dearly wish I could find his particular segment but here's the trailer for that completely bizarre and wonderful movie:

>

Watch it with your kids, and remember the golden rule of parenting:

Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.

 

Among my souvenirs

Today's BC brings up the least important connection of the day, but brace yourself because today is going to be a festival of personal but irrelevant commentary.

Yesterday, as we walked our dogs by the Connecticut River, fishing came up and I mentioned night fishing for bullheads, and that it involved worms, a fire, cigars and several hours of dirty jokes. Had to double back and explain that the cigars were to repel mosquitos.

Sitting in the smoke from the fire would do that, of course, but only one of you would have that privilege since smoke doesn't actually behave in real life as it does in today's cartoon.

 

 

Also on the topic of following beauty, Pickles reminds me of a time I was in the grocery store and saw an attractive young woman also shopping. She looked very familiar, but I couldn't place her and it made me curious, and I had several opportunities to ponder it, because we kept passing each other in each successive aisle.

Where on earth had I met her and why on earth couldn't I remember such a memorably pretty girl?

About four aisles along, it occurred to me who she was: I'd had a hernia repaired a few months before. She was a nurse in the recovery room.

And I suddenly, though vaguely, remembered having thought that she was pretty attractive then, too, at a moment when my ego was still under anesthesia but my id was not.

Gack!

I skipped the next aisle so we'd quit passing by each other, though PACU nurses assure me that (A) they don't pay attention to the things patients say as they're coming out of anesthesia and (B) most of it is indecipherable mumbling anyway. 

Comforting, though I suppose in my lifetime I've said equally stupid things to women who were paying attention. 

So here's a tip: The sooner you stop making a damned fool of yourself, the better the odds that you'll outlive most of the people who knew you then.

I'm currently hoping to live to be 115.

 

I have confessed before that I didn't graduate at the top of my class in college. As Shannon Sharpe put it, I graduated "magna cum thank you laudy."

So today's Sally Forth also touched that "coming out of the anesthesia" sensation because I actually lived the Student Dream.

Twice, in fact, though both times fell within the same "Why am I even here?" stage of my academic career.

In the first case, we had a visiting professor who was so uninvolved and boring that I quit going to his class.

Some weeks later, a couple of my classmates told me that our department head was wondering if I planned to show up for an exam on Optics the next day, to which I replied that I didn't have him for anything this semester.

They burst out in laughter and informed me that the boring, uninvolved professor had been sent packing long since, and that our head had taken over the course.

Interesting fact: While you can cram a lot of Newton in 24 hours, Christian Huygens didn't write with nearly so much clarity.

Fortunately, while I was filling my brain with optics, Richard Nixon was invading Cambodia and, by the time we were supposed to be disgorging our knowledge on paper, the campus had begun shutting down for the student strike.

T'is an ill wind, indeed, that blows no good and right on and vinceramos and thank you, laudy.

However, I was equally unmotivated the following autumn, when I went to the first meeting of my seminar group, skipped the second and then showed up for the third only to walk into an empty room.

They'd moved and I had no idea where the class met anymore, so I said to hell with it, dropped out and moved to Colorado. 

Now here's the thing: I've had the "Last Day of School Dream" where you can't find your locker to clean it out, and I've had "The Actor's Dream" where it's opening night, you have a major role and you have no idea what play you're supposed to be performing.

However, I have rarely actually had "The Student Dream," likely because I think, in order to trigger it, you would have to care about your grades.

I came back a year later and finished because it would be easier than spending the rest of my life explaining why I hadn't, I explained.

People say, "Since you got rich and famous, you’ve become insufferable." 
I say that’s not true: I’ve always been insufferable. 
                                              -- Shannon Sharpe

Speaking of which ...

Rob Rogers portrays our former FLOTUS, Senator and Secretary of State, who has re-entered the public sphere wondering aloud at the external factors that doomed her try at the Presidency.

I noted the other day that previous unsuccessful candidates seem to have been less public in the wake of their losses, but I also would suggest that previous post-mortems have turned the question a bit more inward, if not in actual self-doubt at least in wondering how a campaign might have otherwise been waged.

The Russia probe will certainly reveal some external factors that contributed to Trump's razor-thin victory, but let's go back to Shannon Sharpe for a moment, because, insufferable as he may be, he's got three Super Bowl rings.

Point being that, in the wake of a loss, you may grouse about the refs, you may wish the weather had been better, you may complain about a cheap shot from an opponent, but the way you eventually get those championship rings is by focusing your criticism upon yourself and taking responsibility for the outcome of the games in which you play.

“Can you do what you do better than they do what they do? 
If the Broncos can do that, they'll win.
If the Steelers do that, they'll win.”
                             -- Shannon Sharpe

 

Meanwhile, back in the Middle Ages ...

Wiley updates a legend. Read the rest here.

C'est le weekend

Yesterday pretty much wrapped up the Paris Accord/Trump Isolationism sequence in my mind. More cartoons are drifting in, but, as is so often the case, the first burst contained both the obvious ones and the truly inspired and from there out it's all chaff.

The other yawner at this stage is the Kathy Griffin thing. I saw that the GOP is fundraising around it. If everyone who had no idea who she was three days ago each gave a dollar, they'd make millions. 

Meanwhile, Scott Stantis has been dealing with the complexities of being a thoughtful conservative and having comic strip lead-times with Prickly City.

Given that he has to work with overall trends rather than specific events, I'd say he did damn well today and a whole lot better than a lot of people who aren't working under those constraints.

It's kind of a throwback concept. A half century ago, there were people like Barry Goldwater where you might disagree vehemently with their statements and policies, but it was clear they were working from a moral compass rather than simply for pragmatic, partisan power.

I'd say "I guess you had to be there" but Stantis is too young to remember those days.

Anyway, c'est le weekend and I'm going to let someone else do the heavy mental lifting today.

 

For instance, I'm confident that xkcd's Randall Munroe, the master of interactive maps and charts, has standing to call bullshit on those foolish clickbait maps that appear on Facebook and I suppose elsewhere.

One advantage of living off in a little state in the corner is that, when one of these bogus things announces each state's favorite whatever, they don't have an obvious, accepted cliche to hang on us the way they do for New York, California and the other Big Important Places.

Beyond "droll Yankee," that is, which they'd have to apply to all six New England states.

So it's quickly obvious that they have no idea who we are or what we do, beyond the early voting thing.

We also click on stupid stuff, but you'd have to apply that to all 50 states and some federal districts and possessions and whatnot.

Still, I can only vent, while Monroe can refute.

 

OTOH, I do know about squeaky toys, despite having had ridgebacks for the past 30 years or so. Very few ridgebacks have any interest in toys, but today's Speed Bump echoes my experience with my dogs' buddies.

We went to a dog event where they were handing out squeaky toys and, my boy having no interest, I brought it down to the park and gave it to one of his friends.

She squeaked it a few times, put a foot on it, got a better grip with her mouth and tore it open. Then she began pulling out the stuffing until she found the little squeaker, which she quickly, completely crushed.

Total time was less than 90 seconds, after which she kind of nosed through the stuffing to make sure there was only one squeaker and then wandered off to find something more interesting.

Next time, I'll give it to the horse.

(Yeah, I've seen this a million times, too. It still cracks me up.)

 

Speaking of life in the Granite State, here's an event coming up in Nashua next Sunday that I realize may be out of range for most of my readers but is worth mentioning anyhow:

The idea of a kid-oriented comic con is very appealing because I have this silly idea that you should refresh the supply of customers from time to time. It's not a prejudice shared by comic book publishers and stores.

It's okay, of course, for the major comic cons to be geared to the faithful, but setting one up that's more welcoming to newcomers seems sensible.

This isn't an entirely new concept, and, in fact, Denver's Comic Con, which comes up at the end of the month, is run by a group that, the rest of the year, works with schools to use comics and comic creation in the curriculum.

But that con is still a mob scene and, while there's no reason a six-year-old couldn't go there -- they even have a corner just for kids -- the potential for being lost in the overall chaos is pretty strong.

Anyway, I know some people who will be exhibiting in Nashua, so I'll chat them up and pick up some things for the grandkids, even if I don't get my face painted.

Again, it's just a little regional show, so the specifics may be of limited interest here, but the concept should not be. We need more of these events, and, given that cartoonists don't all live in major cities, it shouldn't be that hard to put small, newbie-friendly events together. 

When you add up things like last month's "Quick Draw" fun event that brought Hilary Price, Maria Scrivan, Mo Williams and Mike Lynch to Brattleboro, Vt., as well as larger events like Kenosha, there may be a growing trend towards fun, public-friendly promotion of the art form.

I hope so.

 

Meanwhile, you can read this interview at GoComics with Friend-of-the-Blog Brian Fies.

 

Or, if you prefer downbeat stuff, there's this fare-thee-well from longtime Phantom writer Tony Depaul, who has resigned from the strip rather than let his creative rights be gobbled up under a claim of "work for hire."

I'm sympathetic because I had an informal agreement with a paper I worked for that my kids' serials were my own, but we hastened to get that formalized when the paper changed ownership, since, as they say, a verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on.

I'm pretty sure I knew the hazards of "work for hire" and copyright by reading about less cheerful outcomes.

Definitely better learned that way than through experience, though, however it happens, here's ...

 

... the only moment of zen you'll ever need:

wotthehell indeed