VARIOUS STUFF

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Of Cul de Sac, Joshua Trees, Tubeworms & Ten Other Things

Shaenon K. Garrity made me choke up twice this week. Once at Comixology and again at The Comics Jourmal.

7 comments:

  1. I loved the TCJ review. Very spot-on.

    Golden Treasury was in my carry-on bag during a loooooooong flight that I took recently, and I'm really glad that I had it with me.

    Shaenon took it away from me as soon as I got back and knocked out that review so quickly and effortlessly that I question why I ever even try to write about comics.

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  2. Mr. Thompson, I'm glad that Shaenon Garrity has the perspicacity to enjoy your strip. I'm sorry that her review has so much self-indulgent writing and so little examination of your work. I wish that she weren't writing just to see herself write.

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  3. "Making oddball characters work in a daily strip is hard; that’s why most comic-strip characters are flat and predictable stereotypes."

    I couldn't agree more. Syndicated strips are in that period TV sitcoms were in, when they tried to assemble a formulaic group of zanies but could never replicate the ensemble comedy of the Mary Tyler Moore show.

    I try to be supportive of the new stuff, but how many misanthropic talking animals and old people do we really need?

    And I agree with her, too, that your group of zanies works very well indeed. Probably because it wasn't assembled by matching numbered tabs with slots on a template.

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  4. Thanks for sharing your book with Shaenon, Andrew! Glad it got you through a long flight.

    MJB, I gotta say I always enjoy Shaenon Garrity's work, like her work, even when she's not saying nice things about CdS. Go here and poke around, it's all good.
    http://www.comixology.com/columns/all_the_comics_in_the_world/
    or
    http://www.gocomics.com/skinhorse

    Thanks, Mike. I always thought writing decent characters was the hardest yet noblest calling, comic strip-wise. (hey, isn't that Timese?)

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  5. We have the character named Dill and that sequence where Petey goes dressed up for Trick or Treat as Boo Radley. Any chance you're a TKAM fan?

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  6. Stay tuned for the extended storyline where Dill and Alice go out to Kansas so he can write a book about a murder.

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  7. Oh yeah, I like TKAM a lot, it's one of those books that I read enough to go through multiple copies, and now my daughters have done the same. When I reread it in sometime in the mid eighties, it struck me that it was almost a children's book for adults. I think it was the part where Dill's in the courthouse square with Scout and he gets a drink from a character thought to be kinda dicey and it turns out it's just Coke in the paper bag, not whiskey. Somebody recently pointed out how impossibly upright Atticus is - his only failing is thinking he's a lousy parent - and how the book's characters, lovable and solid as they are, tend to fall to extremes that wouldn't work if the writing wasn't so compelling. Whatever, when I read it last, out loud a few years ago when my older daughter was 12, I choked up at the end like always, even though I could recite it from memory.

    And Mike, Ha! That'd be a great plot twist and an interesting direction in a newspaper strip.

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