CSotD: Spun Out

Cartooning doesn’t have a lot of rules, but “If you thought of it fast, so did everyone else” is pretty reliable.

Be glad I didn’t do this with all the corgi cartoons that followed QEII’s death.

 

And that, over at Drawing Fire, Clay Jones compressed the gas-pump-snake cartoons into a single piece.

 

Can’t we talk about something a little more pleasant?

I had no idea who Izabela Kowalska-Wieczorek was, but last month she was named a winner in a cartooning contest in Syria with this brilliant, touching, infuriating piece.

I feel sorry for the dog, but I’m not sure what to do about the parents.

I suppose we can take comfort in knowing that there are indulgent folks like that in Poland, too, and, given the international award, all around the world.

Here’s some more of her work, and be sure to click here, too, because that competition gave a number of prizes and those two sites should make up for my shower of revolving door gags.

 

And I’m handing out a personal award to The Buckets (AMS) because, while there are plenty of Halloween candy gags going around, I hadn’t thought of those pieces of peanut butter/molasses taffy in a very, very long time.

I don’t think they had a name, because I suspect they were sold in mixed bags of cheap candy, along with those Saf-T-Pops with the string loops instead of sticks and, yes, rolls of Smarties equivalents, since I don’t think Smarties themselves had penetrated the American market yet.

Of course I’d reach for the Hershey miniatures first, but the peanut butter/molasses whatevers were good once you’d eliminated the really good candy, and softer than Mary Janes, which were roughly the same flavor.

I see bags of candy corn, which takes a lot of abuse as well it might, in the stores now. The problem with selling it by the bag is that you can’t hand out unwrapped candy anymore, and that, while it’s nice to have a few pieces for the nostalgia rush, nobody needs a whole bag of it.

If they’d put it in “fun size” packets, I’d take one and it would scratch the itch for the next 11 months.

Meanwhile, this year’s scary version of razor blades in apples and Mickey Mouse blotter acid is colored fentanyl, which uncritical police departments are warning parents about.

It is, of course, bullshit, because what drug dealer would give away his supply to little kids? What’s the benefit? Where’s the return business?

There was reportedly a brief moment when emergency rooms would x-ray Halloween candy as a public service to panicked parents, but, assuming it was really happening at all, it passed quickly.

When my son was working the ER, his advice was to just throw it out. It’s five bucks worth of candy, ferchrissake. If you’re that frightened, go to the store and buy your kids replacements.

Something better than candy corn and peanut butter/molasses taffy.

 

Different sort of nostalgia rush from this Pardon My Planet (KFS), coming from a later point in my life.

As I’ve mentioned before, when I was in talk radio in the early 80s, the view from the studio window was of Cheyenne Mountain, which made our EBS tests feel futile, given that we’d all be glowing jelly within about five minutes of a real attack.

I did get someone from the Defense Department on the air to admit that throwing dirt on a door and hiding under it was pointless and that the only real solution would be to recognize the threat of nuclear war a week or so in advance, before the highways were clogged with fleeing civilians.

And, yeah, while you could still find toilet paper. He didn’t say that, but Vic Lee is right.

 

There are more immediate threats out there, particularly if you’re a not-quite-marginally-competent attorney like Samuel Rhodes in Pros & Cons (KFS), whose legal shortcomings are a constant burr under the saddle of the district attorney.

I’m assuming Ms. Jaggers’ name is an homage to the highly successful, highly aggressive solicitor in Great Expectations whose housekeeper was an exonerated, if perhaps not innocent, murderer, and whose presence in the courtroom was intimidating all around.

The magistrates shivered under a single bite of his finger. Thieves and thief-takers hung in dread rapture on his words, and shrank when a hair of his eyebrows turned in their direction. Which side he was on I couldn’t make out, for he seemed to me to be grinding the whole place in a mill.

Tread lightly, Samuel.

 

When Lemont holds forth in Candorville (WPWG), I’m as likely to agree with his opponent in the conversation as I am with him.

As it happens, I had a discussion recently with a professional about maintaining the integrity of your work as it is being adapted.

I proposed a theory of mine which is that, the more successful the Harry Potter books became, the less editing JK Rowling had to endure, with the result that the books got longer and the text became more flabby, while we had to sit through far too much description of magical candies that had nothing to do with advancing the storyline.

He offered another example, saying that George Lucas made the first Star Wars with a limited budget and very little support from a skeptical studio, such that, while the special effects were sometimes less than spectacular, the movie itself was tighter and better than what followed once he was no longer struggling.

The relevance here being that, if you are a space-opera junkie, you might want to watch them, as Lemont prescribes, in chronological order by plot.

However, as a writer, I prefer watching them by release date, and then only up to the point where I can feel the magical candy of special effects has taken the place of tight, disciplined writing.

Also, Han shot first or there’s no surprise in his heroic return at the climax.

Just as there would be no surprise in Great Expectations if Abel Magwitch had been portrayed as ethical and decent from the start.

(Great Expectations should also be read as originally written, not with the softer tacked-on ending.)