CSotD: Several very short takes
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Mr. Fitz gave me a bit of a nostalgia jolt, plus (once more) the wish I'd had him for a teacher.
When I was in sixth grade, we were all entered in an essay contest for someone or other, for which I wrote a piece about Buddy, the first Seeing Eye Dog.
My teacher took me aside and praised the story, saying it was so good that she had to check to make sure it wasn't copied.
In those days, that meant a trip to the library and poring through the Readers Guide to track down sources. It was good enough to drive her to those lengths.
But not good enough to win. I got second place.
Two years later, I did win, with an essay so geared to push the buttons of contest judges that I'm embarrassed to have written it at all.
And so we learn.
I came to a spot in the forest,
A place where two paths crossed.
I took the road less traveled by
And got completely lost.
I actually was a blank-verse poet in college, for about a week. I read my pieces at the Coffeehouse and earned some praise but they were desperately sophomoric, and, even then, I thought of being a sophomore as a stage rather than a goal.
Juxtaposition of the Day, Part One
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(As reported here last week, Wiley Miller was on a panel I moderated at the AAEC Convention on political cartooning elsewhere than the editorial page. Here are two examples of weaving political messages into a comic strip.
Tank McNamara is normally sports coverage but at the moment falling NFL ratings are a political hotspot.
Rightwingers, including Papa John, blame the decline on the player protests, when it might rather be blamed on saturation, since the league now scatters games to beef up broadcast schedules, or, as noted here, on injuries to key players, which has reduced quality of competition.
Meanwhile, a lot of us were already boycotting Papa John because the guy is a total dick.
Which is politics, not sports.
Getting back to Non Sequitur, when I redesigned the comics for a daily where I worked, I moved Non Sequitur to the editorial page, which was already home to Doonesbury.
Running comic strips on the eddy page often provokes discussion — Trudeau is on record as being agin it — but Non Sequitur has always reminded me of Berry's World, which was nearly always a second panel on the eddy page, along with a more traditional political cartoon.
Prickly City, by contrast, is overtly, consistently, purposefully political.
And, Carmen, if you really do go Old School, you might get my vote. But I'm talking Ev Dirksen and George Romney and pre-Attica Nelson Rockefeller and that crew.
You know — The Party of Lincoln.
Juxtaposition of the Day, Part II
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(Bill Whitehead gives a shoutout to wives who work the "Second Shift," a phenomenon that seems a bit on the wane but keeps being authenticated by statistics showing it's not.
Or at least, it's apparently not waned enough. But the fact that we're talking about it means we're in the process of addressing it, if not resolving it.
Bottom line is that, while the number of women who feel confident dealing with auto mechanics or even fixing the thing themselves, is way up, there are still way too many guys who just aren't sure how laundry machines work.
It's changing, and guys are helping out, but there's a fair amount of heel marks on the carpet involved.
And then Reality Check reminds us that, in this great social revolution, the distaff side has its hold-outs, too. She hasn't disappeared either, despite decades of assertiveness training and Gal Gadot.
The fact is that there are not only men and women who want to be coddled, but plenty of men and women who gain a sense of power by being coddlers.
And we dwell in a soup of messages reinforcing old stereotypes: Jared's has a new commercial with this really cute girl smiling and dancing and transported with joy, while a voiceover tells the guys watching football that no woman ever celebrated that way because of getting a sweater.
No wonder we're all so freaking clueless.
So some of us do a lot of vacuuming, some of us go heavily into debt, all of us pretty much get what we deserve.
On a brighter note
R. Sikoryak's latest venture, The Unquotable Trump, puts Trump quotes on mock comicbook covers. He's not the only person to have fun placing actual quotes in ludicrous places, but he does it awfully well.
What the hell, if we're all in the Handcart to Hell, we might as well enjoy the ride, and I think there's a value in this sort of mockery, much in the spirit of that old thing about how, if someone had snuck up and pulled down Hitler's pants at an early rally, World War II would have been averted.
I don't believe that, but I do believe in keeping up morale, and this is some fun stuff. Plus, 25% of proceeds go to the ACLU.
It also comes coincidentally nearly two years to the day after I wrote about Sikoryak's extraordinarily bizarre and amusing graphic novelization of the iTunes Terms and Conditions, which also explored a variety of cartoon styles to illustrate some self-important nonsensical prose.
Now this:
Brian Fies continues to get praise and publicity for his cartoon memoir of the fires that destroyed homes in California, including his own. I've been in touch with others there, one of whom had been evacuated but had not lost her home, and who said that Brian's comic is being passed around by her friends and neighbors, who get great comfort from it, but that she can't look at it yet.
That's praise.
Now it's been animated by the local PBS station, which I'll leave you with as
Your moment of zen:
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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