CSotD: Tuesday Tittilations

Starting out with this morning’s Cornered (AMS), though at first I had nothing to say about it except that it cracked me up.

However, Fair Use demands I make some sort of critique, so I probed deeper. First of all, it’s a great spin on the real stories of Dad running over Junior’s bike which I’ve told him over and over not to leave in the driveway.

Second, Mike Baldwin’s style generally involves expressionless characters, and, in this case, it adds to the idea that, given what he drives, Dad isn’t even aware that he ran over the bike, and that Junior is just standing there thinking, “Damn.”

The gag wouldn’t work half so well in anyone else’s hands.

Dan Piraro works at the opposite end of the stylistic scale, which allows him to draw a somber roomful of serious, somber military men gaming out an exercise while a four-star general makes a totally preposterous proposal in serious, somber tones.

This Bizarro (KFS) will be seen in the upcoming action movie “War College Hijinx,” starring Nicole Kidman as the 50-Foot Woman.

Juxtaposition of the Day

Big Nate — AMS

The Barn — Creators

Two very different approaches to a very similar gag. Big Nate is a character-driven strip where much of the humor, while approachable for anyone familiar with middle school, largely assumes that you know Nate and his various foibles, making it something of a graphic sitcom.

By contrast, Rory the Sheep is an annoying comic figure, but you don’t even need to know that to enjoy a random episode of the Barn, because he’s annoying, the bull is rarely amused and the frog is a Greek chorus.

With so little backstory, the strip essentially starts from scratch each day, here with a particularly notable piece in that the entire gag is based on Rory’s eyes, which are small enough that if you don’t pay attention, you won’t get half the humor.

Given how little time readers spend on each strip in the morning, it’s a risky concept but it pays off. It’s also, BTW, a good use of Sunday’s larger canvas.

Here’s another good use of that larger canvas, by Dark Side of the Horse (AMS). I got into an informal discussion about strips at the AAEC Convention in Montreal, and someone remarked that there are too many cartoonists who waste the real estate in a Sunday by simply drawing a larger version of a daily gag.

In Bizarro, Piraro takes over from Wayno, who does the dailies, and exploits the bigger size for his more elaborate artistic style. In this case, as with the Barn, the Sunday format allows a sequence you couldn’t build in a daily. Two good approaches to Sundays.

I’d also note that Samuli Lintula — “Samson” — draws actual toppers for his Sunday strips, and, this past Sunday, offered two separate one-panel gags there. A century or so ago, toppers were fully separate strips, then they morphed into introductory, but largely unnecessary, material that went with the main piece.

Dark Horse takes the former approach, and while I wonder how many readers get to see the topper in print editions, it’s nice to have it online.

Other Sundays have a title panel, and in many cases it’s an unchanging billboard that might as well be cut, since it does nothing but widen the layout, and both print and online versions often crop it. I find it odd that some of the unchanging billboards remain intact while the work of artists who do something special there — Patrick McDonnell of Mutts and Jef Mallett of Frazz, for example — so often ends up on the cuttingroom floor.

There’s a certain amount of Tetris that goes into laying out a Sunday comics section, but once you’ve established it, everything ought to fall into place. When I was the comics guy at a paper where I redesigned the funnies, I made sure Prince Valiant ran intact, though that threw things off, but I was the client and the printer found a way.

Once we’d established that, the only time they had to call me was when a particular cartoonist known for blowing deadlines had blown his deadline again and we had to rejigger things. That extra space was hardly the worst of problems.

Juxtaposition of the Day #2

Mr. Boffo

Andertoons — AMS

To repeat something I’ve said before, I never lost a job I still wanted. On the other hand, I waited to be fired a couple of times because, unlike the mythical couple in Joe Martin’s cartoon, I did need to pay rent and eat, even though I sure wasn’t gonna miss working there.

Unlike Mark Anderson’s foolish schlub, I didn’t have to wait for a message from God to let me know it was time to bail out. The two times I was fired, I just hadn’t yet found an alternative to life in the mushroom factory. Given that those Unfortunate Events were 30 years apart, I think I did a pretty good job of pulling the rip cord before some other crashes.

I did have one case where they were trying to get me to quit so they could hire a part-timer to replace me without having to pay my unemployment. I underwent about six months of being ground down before I found a much better job at a much better place.

Meanwhile, people stopped by my desk to say, “I can’t believe they’re making you do this,” and I’d smile and say, “Actually, it’s kind of fun.”

Yes, doing mindless layout tasks at 50 which your ex-wife had done as a college intern was a blast.

But never let’em see you sweat.

When I gave my two-weeks notice, I told my co-workers I didn’t want a damn cake, but I’d been there 13 years so they made me one anyway. The editor asked me to come be a good sport, but I said I wasn’t going to have our new staff-slashing publisher shake my hand and tell me how much they were going to miss me.

He said the guy was out of town, so I went back and had a piece of cake.

Anyway, if you’re not happy, don’t wait for a pink slip or a hint from God.

Parachutes are easier to find before the plane’s engines explode.