R. Fiore on early 90s newspaper strips
Baby Blues by Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott. The single subject is the joy and inconvenience of a rearing a newborn child, and the characterization is schematic aside from the generational identification. which manifests itself in endless whining over every concession to family life, from buying a station wagon to having baby pictures taken at a department store. It reminds you that one of the saving graces of traditional adulthood sense of constructive stoicism, particularly regarding things that don't really hurt.
It's not that Babv Blues is a bad strip; the drawing is attractive and the humor is sometimes clever. It just has no potential to become a very good strip, much less a distinguished one. The material has been mined by every comedian who ever had a child, the child in the strip must be suspended from infancy, and the characters are too, too thin to engage the reader.
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THE UNFUNNIES
Crankshaft
Crock
Hagar the Horrible
Heathcliff
Jump Start
Marvin
Mother Goose and Grimm
Phoebe's Place
Sally Forth
The Stanley Family
Suburban Cowgirls
When I call these strips "unfunny," I don't I mean they're not funny in the sense that, say, an end table isn't funny. No, the unfunniest of these strips has almost a mystical quality. They emanate a nimbus of not-funny that hangs around them like an odor. Their punchlines are like a humor vacuum, a singularity that sucks all amusement out of the atmosphere. Note the preponderance of strips launched in the '80s.
CRANKSHAFT (Tom Batiuk and Chuck Ayers) boasts what has to be the least promising premise for a comic strip: the adventures of a crabby school bus driver. There are two -- count 'em -- two "funny" things this Crankshaft does: he runs over mailboxes and he deliberately leaves children behind. The strip gained some notoriety for promoting adult literacy classes, but I'd think the illiterate who'd learned to read this strip would figure he'd had enough.
I became familiar with the drawing style of THE STANLEY FAMILY (Jim and Barbara Dale) back when I was tending the slushpile at Fantagraphics Books. It is the style of people who cannot draw and will never be able to draw. There are cartoonists like Kevin Fagan and Cathy Guisewite who can't draw but nevertheless manage to produce a reasonable semblance of a cartoon style. The Dales don't even go that far; the best they can manage is practiced incompetence. Their characters can choose from two expressions, an open-mouthed wail or a nauseating simper. The "humor" is the most egregious boomer whining on the page. A true insult to the eye and the mind.
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After years of concerted effort, it is about time that CROCK (Don Rechin and Bill Wilder) received serious consideration for the title of worst comic strip of all time. The complete absence of any trace of wit from first day to last, the slavish devotion to one of the most hack- neyed styles on the comic page, the lack of any human quality in characterization, all combine to make Crock the most aptly named comic strip in history.
HAGAR THE HORRIBLE (Dik Browne) might be better be called Hagar the Slack. Dik Browne, Chris Browne, Chance Browne: Mort Walker, Brian Walker, Greg Walker; whatever you think of the Browne/Walker menage, you must admit they've got a knack for getting their names in the paper. Dead or alive.
HEATHCLIFF (George Gately) is what editors get if they can't get Garfield.
MARVIN (Tom Armstrong) is Garfield-as-a-baby, and shows that you can't get very far with a character who's practically immobile.
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THE FORMERLY FUNNIES
Andy Capp
B.C.
Beetle Bailey
Blondie
Broom Hilda
Dennis the Menace
The Family Circus
Marmaduke
Peanuts
The Wizard of Id
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About the only interesting thing about PEANUTS (Charles Schulz) these days is checking out which parts are still drawn by Schulz and which by his assistants, who either don't have the guile or the inclination to duplicate the Schulz tremor. Schulz seems to look on his characters as celebrities, and the strip a newspaper a of events in their lives that the readers are expected to have a natural interest in: Snoopy injures himself playing hockey, Charlie Brown finds a girlfriend (a smarmy episode, that).
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THE FAIRLY FUNNIES
Baby Blues
Drabble
Hi and Lois
Momma
Shoe
Tank McNamara
Ziggy
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MOMMA (Mell Lazarus) and HI AND LOIS (Brian and Greg Nepotism) are examples of what happens when you work with a dull cookie cutter.
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THE FREQUENTLY FUNNIES
Big Baby
Cathy
Ernie
The Far Side
For Better or Worse
Garfield (!)
Herman
Life in Hell
Outland
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And speaking of hitting the wall, have you noticed that these year-long sabbaticals cartoonists take don't seem to help much? You'd be hard pressed to differentiate between the Doonsebury strips drawn the year before and the year after Garry Trudeau took his vacation. Then there's Gary Larson, whose post-sabbatical FAR SIDE cartoons were so tired you'd have thought he'd spent the time mining coal. Where his best cartoons mixed human and animal behavior, the first post-return panels simply plunked animals into human gags. He's bounced back quite a bit since he took another month off, however, and has made a decent return to form. The prognosis is basically good; The Far Side will probably settle into being steady if not spectacular performer...
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Yes, yes, I know GARFIELD (Jim Davis) is a product, but it's a product that works. I have I never understood the intensity of vitriol that right-thinking people have leveled at this strip. Perhaps it's because it's what the mass audience thinks of when it thinks of comic strips. More than one cartoonist has said that the first thing anyone asks them when they identify their occupation is "Can you draw Garfield?", and I suppose it gets pretty irritating. Yes, it would be better if something with more substance could achieve this level of success, but by the same token its modesty and frank lack of pretension make it an inappropriate target for vilification.
Indeed, some people seem to go out of their way to impute some great evil to it. I remember someone saying that Garfield represents the worst of Reaganism, which makes no sense at all. Garfield's greed is greed for simple things like food and sleep, not wealth, and being fat and lazy are not Reaganite "virtues." The stereotype yuppie is lean as a shark.
[If not for this Garfield review, I probably would have just let this one go and not put it up, as I usually don't care to put reviews of things in the notes. I'm more interested in historical information than how good somebody thinks a particular strip is. But, given the Lynda Barry quote about Garfield and Jim Davis, I thought it was appropriate to place this here. It's a preposterous notion that Garfield was ever as good as The Far Side, For Better Or For Worse (which he mis-titles), or Cathy in its prime. "It's not good, but it's good enough" means nothing to me. Plus, he seems to completely miss the point of what Barry and others were saying about Garfield being Reaganite. It's not that he's an ideal that they're striving towards, it's that he represents what they actually are. Seriously, Mr. Fiore, what happened to you in 1991?]