CSotD: Sunday Morning Potpourri
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This is going to be a very random day, and I’m starting by acknowledging Paul Berge’s commentary on a TV station that fired its meteorologist over an anti-Musk posting she had on her personal Instagram page. Firing her was an overreaction, but we’re likely to see a lot of similar overreactions over the next four years or until the nation regains its bearings.
Still, I’m also uncomfortable with the argument that when you clock out, your opinions are your own. For most people, that’s absolutely true. But when your face is part of your job, you have to play it cool.
I’m reminded of Hal Kennedy, longtime anchor at KKTV in Colorado Springs, who told me that once he was fixing his hot water heater and needed a part, but had to wash up and change before going to the hardware store, because he was so well-known that if he went there covered in grease and dressed accordingly, someone would say, “I saw Hal Kennedy the other day. I think he’d been drinking.”
I told that story to a new GF once as I changed to go to the grocery store and she laughed it off, because I was only a print reporter. A week later, after she’d told a few people we were going out, she apologizing, saying, “Boy, you weren’t kidding. Everybody knows who you are.”
If you’d rather be a private citizen, Walmart is always hiring.
Still, a good lecture would have done the job, perhaps a short suspension w/o pay. Firing her was both asinine and a chilling look at where we’re at.
Fortunately, I’ve cultivated the kind of public personna in which it is fully expected that I’d say this Mana Neyestani piece cracked me up. Other cartoonists have made gags about the hat, and about Trump’s failed kiss, but Neyestani used it to make a point. Well played!
I also feel free to warn you that, according to Dick Wright (Counterpoint), there is a second Trump running around, because the one most of us are familiar with is not only obviously for sale but can’t get through a simple sentence without descending into gibberish.
Geez Louise, Wright might as well have said Trump plays quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens or invented the electric light bulb.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Mike Baldwin obviously had too much lead time for this to be anything but a coincidence, but it’s lovely when fate works out in your favor, particularly if it puts a comic strip with no political intent on the same level as Mike Luckovich’s sharp and very intentional commentary.
And speaking of serendipitous timing amongst the comic strips, Big Nate (AMS)‘s story arc this past week managed to namecheck one of the four out of 32 NFL teams still active in the post-season. Granted, selecting Kansas City wasn’t exactly like pulling a name out of the helmet at random, but Buffalo fans are hoping that, if the arc continues tomorrow, it will seem out of synch.
Replacing Candorville
Darrin Bell has, like Paul “Pee Wee Herman” Rubens, been consigned to at least a period of invisibility. I say that with no hard feelings for either man, though it goes back to the visibility factor with which today’s blog started: If you are going to be well-known, you’re also going to be harshly, perhaps unfairly, judged.
The decision editors — or the schmucks at Corporate who override editors — have to make is what to slot in as a replacement for the now-canceled Candorville.
In a perfect world in which newspapers were run on a logical, intelligent basis, the question would be how to find a strip that addressed the same target audience as Candorville.
It would, ideally, be funny, hip and politically left of center, and would address a minority community, and if you’d been looking around back in 2008, you’d have a handful of strips to consider. But we’re not in an ideal world, and newspapers are not run on a logical, intelligent basis.
In February of that year, a group of minority cartoonists staged a one-day Sunday protest by running the same gag to emphasize how they were being ignored or stereotyped.
Herb & Jamaal — Stephen Bentley
Tim Jackson (political cartoonist)
There were a few other strips involved which I couldn’t include, in part because (like some of these) they no longer exist, but mostly because editors weren’t running them, which is a bit circular.
Also, as noted in the above linked Daily Cartoonist article, the small number of papers that ran one cartoon starring minority characters didn’t often run two, and I’m not sure any readers got to see the protest cartoons next to each other.
I go back to my frequent observation that while newspapers fret aloud over not being read by young people, editors didn’t pick up on Retail, which was targeted precisely at the 18-24 audience they sought. The 20-somethings in my office were screaming with laughter at the cartoons in the sample package, but the 40-somethings making decisions let it whoosh right past them.
Which emphasizes the distinction between being a racist and being a dumbass. Racist is a subset of Dumbass.
In any case, if I were an editor looking to replace Candorville, I’d find it insulting to simply go for melanin if it didn’t duplicate the hip attitude, and the industry has already killed off, through indifference and neglect, most of the strips that offered both.
Nor would I replace a strip appealing to that 18-24 group with something that skewed towards kiddies or grandparents.
Mind you, my perfect paper would already be carrying the two or three contenders I have in mind, but it’s hard to assemble a complete package in the real world when Corporate won’t let you purchase more than a dozen strips.
Meanwhile, if you go back to that Daily Cartoonist article, you’ll see that the comments, even among aficionados, included an awful lot of “Well, yes, but …” as in “Well, yes, there aren’t minority artists in North Dakota papers, but there aren’t a lot of Black people there, either.”
Which brings us to unintended (?) consequences and self-fulfilling prophecies, and even back to Elon Musk, as anticipated by Christopher Titus:
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