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Shoe, 10/3/04

Due to newspapers’ pernicious habit of intermittently cutting off the top of some Sunday strips, comic artists can never be sure that the first two panels of their weekly color installment will make it into any given paper, which means that they generally use that space for some throwaway gag. If you do get these intro panels, then you often end up with two punchlines in one strip. Maybe the journalistic cabal is planning even more drastic surgery to the Sunday funnies, though, because today’s Shoe seems designed to survive being cut into three pieces if necessary. In addition, the short-short-long configuration of panels in both the second and third row will allow the strip to be crammed into whatever space a heartless layout designer can devise.

However, like a squat military transport vehicle that’s designed to maintain structural integrity no matter what violence is done to it, the resulting strip isn’t pretty. Instead of one funny punchline, we’re subjected to three sort-of funny ones, including one (the third) that was done better years ago in Calvin and Hobbes. I do have to admit though that I like the solid exposed ceiling beams that have had so much loving attention mysteriously lavished on them in the third panel of the second row. Also, in this strip we learn that Cosmo likes to lounge around the house wearing saddle shoes. A good sign that I’m a comics junkie is that I love finding details like this even in strips that aren’t “funny” per se.

This is a good as time as any to point out the fact that Skyler is mysteriously a ward of his Uncle Cosmo rather than, say, his parents, which is honestly part of a larger comics trend. Of course, actual families produced the old-fashioned way abound in the comics, but still, there are a much larger number of uncle-nephew households in the comics pages and cartoons in general than there are in the real world. I’m assuming that this is to prevent us from having to ever imagine Cosmo (for instance) having sex, which, quite frankly, is a blessing. Those comics artists know their stuff.

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Panels from Herb and Jamaal, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, Shoe, and Doonesbury, 9/10/04

One of the many things about Gary Trudeau that I like is that he’s admitted that, at least initially, he wasn’t very good at drawing. A lot of early Doonesburys consisted of one character sitting in front of the TV for four consecutive identical panels, and while there was a certain pop-art charm to this, I think most people would agree that his strip has improved leaps and bounds since then, especially after his extended early-1980s sabbatical.

Anyway, for me, one of the defining features of modern-era Doonesbury is the “shadow panel,” where the characters are rendered as white against a black background (or vice versa) for a single panel. This is a technique that has spread in one form or another to other comics as well (or maybe it was always there, though Doonesbury is where I noticed it first). It’s kind of arty, and like a lot of art, I don’t have a clue what it’s supposed to mean. I think it’s safe to say that it doesn’t represent a momentary shift in ambient light, or a massive nearby explosion. Sometimes, as in both Herb and Jamaal and Barney Google and Snuffy Smith today, it’s part of a shift in perspective, generally representing something too far away to render details. (Though I should point out that in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, the shadowy characters are not, in fact, too far away to render details; in fact, with their white hands, they look alarmingly like Aunt Jemima figurines.) With the other two, though, we’re looking at the same scene from essentially the same angle, so it’s representing … what, exactly? Time passing? A change in scene? A desire to not draw the same damn details on the same characters for a third time in one day? Anyone who knows more about drawing comics than I do (and Lord knows there must be enough of you out there) should please edify us all.

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Shoe, 7/28/04

When I read today’s Shoe, my first thought was, “Huh, Shoe’s real name is P. Martin Shoemaker. How about that.” Then I realized that I didn’t know the full name of anybody else in Shoe. Then I realized that maybe the reason finding out that Shoe has a first initial, middle name, and last name surprised me is that he and his cohorts are A BUNCH OF GOD DAMN BIRDS.

A friend of mine in California, sentenced to driving school by a traffic judge, chose to go to “Comedy Driving School,” after which she bitterly reported that “there’s a difference between being funny and being in a really good mood.” Similarly, there’s a difference between having a comic strip built on a wacky premise (like, say, that there’s this newspaper staffed by birds) and strip that uses that premise to generate actual humor. The birds of Shoe live and work in treetops, but for the most part they hate their jobs, drive unreliable cars, flunk in school, make clumsy passes in bars, and wear ill-fitting tuxedos and unfashionable glasses just like normal humans. I know that Shoe has been around for decades, so maybe I should assume that every possible funny aspect of its characters’ talking-bird existence was mined for comedy gold before I was born. But frankly, I’m not feeling that charitable. So here’s my challenge to Cassatt and Brookins: start making bird jokes in Shoe or … or … or face further tongue-lashings in this blog!

Oh, and while I’m making demands: no more “sexy” girl birds. They creep me out. Today’s linkbacks go to the weblog @ interbridge.com and Domestic Psychology, both of whom, I trust, support my anti-sexy-girl-bird stance.