From The Comics Journal 118, December 1987

Peter Cashwell on Rockola

Some time back, Journal columnist R. Fiore commented on Bloom County's debt to Doonesbury, a comparison made by many, but a less-than-completely-accurate one. While Berke Breathed's strip certainly mimicked Garry Trudeau's balloonless dialogue, pacing, and post-punchline stingers, Bloom County has always differed from Doonesbury by keeping at least one foot firmly in the whimsical, what with talking penguins, anxiety closets, and barfing cats. In addition, Trudeau's clean, sharp linework was not a great influence on Breathed, whose rougher, more exaggerated drawings are more reminiscent of former Tar Heel Jeff MacNelly, or perhaps a fairly hurried Walt Kelly, which is probably the highest praise I can give any cartoonist, so don't you forget it, Berke! Still, there's occasionally a bit of nagging doubt in my mind when I read Bloom County, a feeling that I may be encouraging unoriginality, the feeling many people must get reading Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But now there's something worse! Yes, now you can get the feeling of reading any of the parodies of TMNT (Adolescent Radioactive Black-Belt Hamsters, Pimply-Faced Glowing Overly-Hostile Sea Anemones, etc.) right in the pages of your hometown newspaper!

But only if you live in Cleveland. Thank God.

The comic-strip cousin of ARBBH and its ilk, which appears in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, is entitled Rockola, and until recently, it was confined to Ohio. Alas, the strips have now been collected into a comic book, Rockola: The Greatest Hits Collection, forty-odd strips dealing with various topics in the world of rock music, and have been published by--irony of ironies!--Mirage Studios, home of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

Why so ironic? Because to put it bluntly, Rockola cartoonist Ryan Brown has ripped off Bloom County so blatantly as to make Breathed's mimicry pale into insignificance. Brown's characters all look like they could have been drawn by Breathed, and at least one, the director of Tess Turbo's "scuzzbucket from Nantucket" video in Bloom County, turns up essentially unchanged on the set of AC/DC's new video in Rockola. But while the characters may pose like Breathed's, rant like Breathed's, or even sing like Breathed's, they aren't funny like Breathed's. The puns are weak, the jokes forced, and the rhythms badly off; the post-gag tag lines are far too long, so that they bury the humor rather than sharpen it.

But so what? Isn't this poetic justice, the robber robbed and the karmic balance restored? No, it's not even close. First off, what Breathed does, he does well, whether he does it like Trudeau or not. Brown seems unable to make his jokes click even when they aren't his jokes. But second and most annoying is that Rockola lifts gags from Bloom County wholesale, as if no one would ever notice. At one point, in what is probably supposed to be a tribute to Howard the Duck's film debut, Brown inserts a guitar-playing platypus from outer space into the strip because of the following "memo" from his editor:

"It recently caught my attention the absence of anything even vaguely resembling 'cute, i.e. fat orange cats, drooling dogs, etc. portrayed anywhere within the panels of 'Rockola' thus preventing any opportunity of major merchandising bucks here... stick in a penguin or something."

I'll try to ignore the grammar above, difficult as that may be, and point out that it's a direct steal from Breathed's introduction of Bill the Cat. Remember that strip? "Never ones to pass up a hot trend and a chance for some major bucks, we're introducing a new character to Bloom County'"? Ryan Brown apparently remembered it, though he obviously doesn't remember ninth-grade English.

Rockola is clearly an inbred bastard child of Bloom County, but that isn't the strip's only problem. For one thing, almost all Brown's women are portrayed as sex-crazed groupies, a portrayal sure to anger feminists and a few musicians as well. I've played in rock bands for nearly ten years, and the only scantily-clad female who ever jumped on the stage while I was around was our lead singer. Brown's topical commentary on the music scene is also limited at best, mainly due to his infatuation with one particular genre. In his case it's Heavy Metal, but it would hold true equally well if he were fixated on hardcore, rap, or reggae. I firmly believe a person can like any kind of music he wants-my own taste is eclectic enough-but if he's going to be a satirist, he'd better have a fairly broad perspective. Brown doesn't. I was consequently unamused by his faltering attempts to parody Deadheads (whom I consider so alien as to be beyond parody anyway) and Punks. I should point out, for Brown's information, that very few punks still wear "Sid Lives" t-shirts, since Sid Vicious was dead before most of them were old enough to operate a stereo.

But I quibble.

There is certainly room, especially in this era of over-specialized comics, for a strip about rock music; there's room for, though. Even if it were not full of swipes, even if I liked it, I think that doing an entire strip parodying one insular genre is artistically, if not commercially, like trying to do a parody of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; a satire of something with a limited appeal will itself almost certainly have an even more limited appeal, especially when it's not even funny. All that said, why pay a buck-fifty for a comic book you won't enjoy even if you understand the jokes? I recommend Rockola: The Greatest Hits Collection only if you're a Metal Head, barely literate, and unable to get Bloom County in your local papers. With all the bland, derivative hackwork I can hear on the radio, I can get along without it in my comic books.