December 2004

Thoughts on the Comics: A Fist Fight Will Ensue

SCHLOMO
Before I begin, a personal note. I thoroughly enjoy daily comic strips. A prize gift was the two volume, back breaking complete Far side that sits on top of my tee-vee, I am always hunting for Krazy Kat comics, and I think Art Speigleman is a genius. Also, Boondocks, is, without a doubt, the best comic out there right now, but this article focuses on two other comics that do not have the publicity as Boondocks.

A couple of weeks ago Godzilla and I got into one of our many rambling debates over e-mail. This one consisted of which is the funnier comic (I hate the term funnies since most daily comics are not funny, at all, cf: Garfield): Get Fuzzy by Darby Conley or Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis. At the time, both comics were engaged in illustrating that post-modern humor continues to have a home in D (or Style) section of your local paper.

I grew up in the 1980's, the modern golden age of comics. Though the vast majority were inoffensive trite affairs to provide a modicum of amusement for the great washed suburban masses, there were three that required daily reading and paying 25 cents a day for the New York Daily News. In no particular order, they were The Far Side by Gary Larson (providing daily humor for the thinkers and sickos), Bloom County by Berke Breathed (post-modern humor with a more than a touch of Doonesbury), and perhaps the greatest daily comic strip ever, Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson (which no one, to date can come close to).

As each of these comics ended in the early 1990's, there were none to take their places. For several years I felt little need to read any daily paper but the New York Times, since there were no comics to read. Underground comics continue to grow and be funny, but when you are held up in a little town called Annapolis, without motorized transport, it is really hard to find them. In the past couple of years two comics have started to make reading papers with comic sections enjoyable again, Get Fuzzy and Pearls Before Swine or PBS.

Each of these comics have a different twist on the art form (yes...daily comics, when done right are an art form!), but are aiming at the same humor target. Their graphic designs represent the two divergent streams of contemporary comics. Get Fuzzy is more detailed, using the art work at times to place subtle visual gags that can only been seen when the anthologies are published. PBS, on the other hand is very consciously using Dilbertesque simplicity. The text are also different. Get Fuzzy, like its art work, is much more verbose, sometimes taking up a large percentage of the panels with words, while PBS, like its art work is using the simple is more approach.

The main characters of both comics are animals, though in Get Fuzzy there is a human owner. In PBS there is an arrogant, obnoxious Rat, a humble but slow Pig that probably loves Rat, a tree hugging Zebra, and a Apollonian Goat (who has the funniest name), with humans showing up as needed. Get Fuzzy has a dumb and naive dog, Satchel Pooch, a human, Rob Wilco, and the son of Bill D. Cat, Bucky Katt. It is another anti-Garfield that provides all of the nasty characteristics of cats. Though he is much more verbose than Bill the Cat and cannot play lead tongue, he does a good job of illustrating that a cat does not have to be cute to be funny.

About a month ago, both Get Fuzzy and PBS went post-modern. This was announced by Get Fuzzy saying that the artist has hurt his arm and that he should "not plug Patois." The next two weeks provided the best strips of 2004.

My favorite daily strip was the Get Fuzzy when Satchel and Bucky are looking for new comic jobs (more than a mild tribute to the final days of Bloom County). Satchel is dressed as Calvin and the Bucky is dressed as Hobbes, with orange and black paint nearby. Not a bad strip, but it is the punch line that adds the extra bit to make it memorable. Bucky reading a piece of paper asking "What is an injunction?" As long as one remembers that Bill Waterson has sued several universities, fraternities, and sororities who used the images of Calvin and Hobbes, especially if they are drinking, smoking, etc. The fact that this gag works on a few level illustrates that Get Fuzzy is worth a daily read, even if it goes through a month or so without much laughter

PBS was running a series of strips parallel to this one, where Rat goes and re-write other strips dialog. One of the best ones was when he went to Rose is Rose, a saccharine strip that makes my teeth ache. Pastis's take was great. The mother is dressed is an S&M costume and the Rat is falling in love. The mother's dress appears to be something the kid sees when the mother is angry. The best was yet to come, though it was not in any single strip, but the entire week's. The Rat goes to Scott Adams's house to take him to task for plagiarizing PBS. This was comic greatness. Self-deprecation is very rare in the comics world, and even rarer to see a weeks worth of it. But once PBS went back to its normal story line, most of the humor left it. It can become just another comic that provides some edginess around the edges. Like Get Fuzzy it requires constant reading through a month of so of mediocre strips to read laugh out loud funny ones.

Godzilla, does not read Get Fuzzy. He hates comics cats. Apparently he has forgotten that the best comics ever had cats, and it was only Garfield who destroyed this. His daily comic love is PBS, which I understand. But he is failing to appreciate the true fun that some comics are now providing. This is especially true since, to my knowledge, never before has one comic stripper requested, albeit in an underhanded way, his readers to read another strip.

May both live long and continue to provide daily humor, and may both artists know when it is time to quit and leave us with good comics instead of Blondie.

GODZILLA
Schlomo is a liar. I read Get Fuzzy every day. There are many things I like about, especially the artwork. I just wish that it was consistently funny. I find it too often to be boring, or maybe erring on the side of cutesy, in it's own special way. This can sometimes happen when characters are as well developed as they are in Get Fuzzy. Sometimes the gag takes second fiddle to character development, or whatever. That's all fine and well, but I would also like to laugh. Or have characters as strong as in, say, For Better or Worse, which I am just as interested in for the stories as the gags, probably more so. And it bears mentioning that For Better or For Worse is revolutionary for a comic in that the characters actually age.

As a Washington Post reader, I am spoiled by the fact that I can read 3 full pages of comics every day. And they aren't shitty comics like "Mallard Fillmore", which is terrible beyond belief- the writer a subscriber to the white male republican theory that smug and indignant condescension is, in fact, actual humor.

But back to Get Fuzzy- the animal characters are all too cutesy for me to enjoy, even Bucky as the anti-Garfield. It just doesn't hold my interest. I much prefer to read Pears Before Swine, where actual humor is being demonstrated everyday, even if some of the gags can be construed as "predictable". Schlomo just doesn't understand the time honored tradition of bad puns. Also, I do have to say that Pearls Before Swine is probably one of the more ruthless comics to appear in the daily papers. Animals that eat other animals make it worse by taunting their prey. Now that's funny.

Oh, and I got a brilliant Pearls Before Swine Anthology from Mr. Joshua for Christmas (which he almost didn't give me because he covets it). In the true spirit of the holidays (spite), I will not be sharing it with Schlomo.