CSotD Part MMMXC — A New Beginning

 

One of the bulwarks of Comic Strip of the Day has always been the personal take and today the Buckets provides a bit of serendipity with a clueless old gaffer stumbling over the concept of social media, just at the moment CSotD shifts to the Daily Cartoonist.

CSotD has been around for about eight and a half years, with a small but select readership, many of whom likely visit the Daily Cartoonist regularly as well. In fact, DD Degg and I go back to the usenet days when rec.arts.comics.strips was one of the few meeting places for fans and cartoonists.

I got tired of the snark emerging not just there but on other depressingly popular websites and started CSotD as a place to celebrate the form.

But, rather than turn this into a documentary on that, I’ll provide a link and you can go poke around and see how it’s been working. The basic premise is that good comics often make you laugh but always make you think, either great thoughts or strange little ones.

For example, today’s Buckets takes me back to the days when I was writing for a newspaper that (finally) decided it needed a website. We formed a committee, but, this being the early 90s, only three of the people on the eight-person committee had actually been on the Intertubes. One of them was a gamer working as a tech who had no deep understanding of newspapers, the second was the editor who was too busy to play around with it much and I was the third.

There was only one Internet-ready computer in the building, so I created a short list of interesting newspaper websites and the concept was that committee members would look at those, perhaps add some that they had found, and we’d discuss it at the next meeting.

I suspect it takes very little business exposure to know that the result was a lot of meetings with people who had Really Good Ideas but had yet to actually go on the computer and find out what I or the editor or the tech guy or, certainly, they, were talking about.

That was over a quarter century ago, but there are still people with big desks who have their email printed out by assistants. I assume Greg Cravens has run into one or two, and I hope this is kicking off a story arc.

 

I’ll also be disappointed if today’s Pajama Diaries isn’t the start of an arc, but, in any case, it’s part of the ongoing start of Amy’s college career, and should spark a combination of nostalgia and PTSD in both parents of college grads and the grads themselves.

I had no idea who my roommate would be until I got to campus. He was a nice guy, but a bit OCD while I’m more from the school of “A place for everything and everything all over the place.” We didn’t fight, but we weren’t in touch much after freshman year, either.

He ended up as chief surgeon at a major medical center, mostly because of the amount of time he spent hitting the books but also because of the amount of time he spent washing his hands.  We stayed as much out of each other’s way as you could in a seven-by-twelve foot room, but, if there are horror stories about that year, he’d be the guy telling them. A neatnik who doesn’t nag incessantly is pretty easy to live with.

And if he does nag incessantly, you call it “The Odd Couple” and retire on the residuals.

By the time my kids were headed for college, the practice of putting roommates in touch with each other over the summer had begun, but I’m not sure how much it solved.

Actually, it seems like a divorce in a reverse time warp: First you agree on who gets the stereo and who gets the TV, then you move in together and start quarreling and hating each other.

In any case, I plan to enjoy this story arc, assuming it is one, as I’ve been enjoying Amy’s shift to college, but I’m particularly interested in how Terri Libenson handles the whole thing long-term.

In “Between Friends,” the kids pretty much disappeared when they went to college, though Kim’s son reappears for vacations, while, when the Patterson kids left the nest in “For Better or For Worse,” we followed them in such intricate detail that Lynn Johnston ended up penning about three strips and it got kind of convoluted.

Goin’ for the Goldilocks on this one.

BTW, my college days were admittedly awhile ago.

But I’m sure nothing’s changed.