CSotD: Modest Expectations
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Ben Bolt hit me squarely this morning.
To bring you up to speed, in this 1956 story arc (which I noted earlier came out at roughly the same time as "Rebel Without a Cause"), Ben has befriended a young hood who lost a leg in a game of vehicular chicken, and found him a job as a copy boy at the paper where Ben works.
According to this interesting insiderish interview by Jim Keefe – who penned Flash Gordon for several years and now draws Sally Forth — John Cullen Murphy worked for the Chicago Tribune, but, additional Googling confirms, never worked at the paper, so his insights about the business are, on the one hand, slightly secondhand but, on the other, untainted by being too close. And, as I noted before, refreshingly accurate.
I also commented with a bit of cynicism about his portrayal of a reporter with a novel in his desk drawer, back when Ben first joined the paper, but the cynicism was about the type, not that Murphy got it wrong. Murphy nailed it.
My dismay is that so few people who have been in the front of the building have deigned to visit the back.
Editors and reporters like to refer to themselves as "ink-stained wretches," but that fact is that, since they switched from quill pens to typewriters, they don't get much ink on themselves anymore, because they never get near the place where the ink flows.
This is a source of the legendary friction between the people who write the stories and the people who turn them into print.
However, you don't become a great artist and illustrator if you don't know how it works from start to finish, so it's not all that surprising after all that Murphy would have spent some time with the backshop or that he would have respect for the people who make it happen.
I'm not an artist, but my father was a mining engineer who understood that the rocks don't leap out of the ground by themselves, and his respect for all facets kind of rubbed off.
(Quick story: When my dad left the steel industry and became a labor negotiatior for a school board, he went down to the bus garage to meet the people there and get a look around. Since they had a union he'd be dealing with, it seemed natural to him, but the head of the shop told him he was the first person from the central office who had ever been in the building. I find that astonishing, but, then again, I've seen it so often that I shouldn't.)
Anyway, I always had good relations with the backshop and part of that meant that, when I was touring kids through, they'd sometimes stop what they were doing and explain something, or, if they heard me get something slightly wrong, they'd draw me aside later and fill me in on the finer points.
Those school tours invariably began with the teacher telling the kids all about reporting and editing and expecting the tour to focus on the newsroom, but I gave them the full picture of how a newspaper was created, including the production details, and I enjoyed watching the kids who found the newsroom part boring focus in when we began to get into the literal nuts-and-bolts.
In particular, I remember a pair of 14-year-olds who were not exactly cutting up but staying in the back, talking to each other and ignoring me, until we got into the press room, at which point one of them made a quiet wisecrack to the other, who gave him an elbow and said, "Shut up. I want to hear this."
When I speak of my disinterest in plaques and trophies, that moment, rather, is the kind of reward I prize, and so today's Ben Bolt made me smile.
And when I speak of stupid, bonehead decisions coming out of the front office, I'm talking about the suits who never bother to spend time in the press room, or in the bus garage, or in the pit, but sit up in their offices making policy about people they've never met and places they've never been.
No wonder Murphy's work was so excellent.
Futility
Speaking of not being able to get people to step off their own pathways, the current Candorville/Rudy Park mashup-crossover seems to reveal a little impatience with the gap between the promise of social media and the delivery.
I can relate. Like Lemont, I regularly post links to my work on Facebook. What I've found is that I can get an awful lot of "likes" without budging the needle on the number of hits here.
I don't take it personally, because it's also obvious that people don't read articles posted there before commenting on them, and that they don't read the comments prior to their own.
There are also some cartoonists who use bots to autopost at Facebook: Their comic and link appears, but — like those aforementioned executives — they never do.
I suppose it's simply an extension of real life: No matter how many friends you seem to have, if you're honest about it, having a handful who actually give a damn about you is an accomplishment.
Vlacek Spiegelman was perhaps a bit extreme on the topic, but that doesn't mean he got it wrong.
Abbie Hoffman said, "A brother is someone who loves you so much he doesn't give a shit what you do," and I remember a conversation back then in which we refined it to a brother is someone who, if he called you in the middle of the night and said, "I need three grand and your car," you'd say "okay" before you said, "What for?"
But then we got older and lowered our expectations.
Someone who clicks through on your Facebook links.
That'll do.
Juxtaposition Storyboard
(The Barn)
… which logically leads to this moment of zen …
Or, perhaps, here …
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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