For Worse!
So Lynn Johnston is making some type of move to fulfill the idea she raised several years ago, to end "For Better or For Worse". Although the article is kind of vague, but she appears to have reached a point where the characters will go into stasis.
Although I lost interst in the Patterson clan years ago (I never got over the death of Farley) this strip was a lot better than most of the garbage that appears in the comics today. It had an evolving story, althought the plots got blander and the resolutions more predictable over time. But it never devolved into an endless recycling of unfunny gags that strips like Hagar the Horrible, Tiger, and The Born Loser do day after day. Who can read that stuff? Maybe that's the real reason newspaper circulation is dropping.
The comic strip is in serious decline. Old comic strips calcify, and editors are hesitant to remove them. A trend has developed in "ethnic" strips where the race or national origin of a character is supposed to be essential to the strip (Baldo, Candorville). But these "progressive" strips never seem to capture anything related to the culture they come from, they recycle the same stale gags other strips do, and think throwing in a reference to "Sabado Gigante" is supposed to justify their space on the comics page. At the bottom of the pile is "Mutts", an ugly-looking, monotonous strips that centers around the fact that cats like to sleep and eat, and dogs sometime chase things.
The only thing that ever seems to draw attention to the comics is when a cartoonist does something mildy controversial, like suggest that Condoleeza Rice needs to find a man. Then strips get slammed for trying something modern, and everyone bemoans the fact that the children who read the strips had to deal with a real-world issue. But considering how outdated comics are, what kid would be interested in reading them?
Although I lost interst in the Patterson clan years ago (I never got over the death of Farley) this strip was a lot better than most of the garbage that appears in the comics today. It had an evolving story, althought the plots got blander and the resolutions more predictable over time. But it never devolved into an endless recycling of unfunny gags that strips like Hagar the Horrible, Tiger, and The Born Loser do day after day. Who can read that stuff? Maybe that's the real reason newspaper circulation is dropping.
The comic strip is in serious decline. Old comic strips calcify, and editors are hesitant to remove them. A trend has developed in "ethnic" strips where the race or national origin of a character is supposed to be essential to the strip (Baldo, Candorville). But these "progressive" strips never seem to capture anything related to the culture they come from, they recycle the same stale gags other strips do, and think throwing in a reference to "Sabado Gigante" is supposed to justify their space on the comics page. At the bottom of the pile is "Mutts", an ugly-looking, monotonous strips that centers around the fact that cats like to sleep and eat, and dogs sometime chase things.
The only thing that ever seems to draw attention to the comics is when a cartoonist does something mildy controversial, like suggest that Condoleeza Rice needs to find a man. Then strips get slammed for trying something modern, and everyone bemoans the fact that the children who read the strips had to deal with a real-world issue. But considering how outdated comics are, what kid would be interested in reading them?
posted by Beukey @ 5:01 PM
3 Comments:
At 11:01 PM,
Anonymous said…
Ethnicity isn't supposed to be essential to Candorville. I've always thought the humor was universal, and the characters just happen to be ethnic.
What you said struck a nerve with me because it's the same thing my boyfriend says about Candorville, and I just don't get it. Just because a strip has minorities in it, why does it have to be ABOUT them being minorities?
At 8:06 AM,
David said…
IIRC, the presence of Franklin in Peanuts was not about race.
But to answer amy, there are thousands of strips competing for syndicate distribution and very finite space in the newspapers. Humor based on stereotypes is something that a reader audience can get right away - they already understand the context. Strips like Get Fuzzy or FBFW are easily understood if you've been reading them for a while.
And by walking a fine line of "edgy" I think cartoonists feel they can appeal to editors, get a buzz, and differentiate from the cute animal strips.
At 9:06 PM,
Anonymous said…
I don't know... I don't think newer cartoons are "edgy" because it'll get them more papers. If anything, I think that hurts them, since editors don't want to offend their older readers above all (I've worked at newspapers for a decade, and I can attest to that). The most successful new strip, Zits, is, not coincidentally, the most bland new strip. I've met several cartoonists, and I think being "edgy" is a generational thing. People in their twenties and thirties aren't going to write the same bland stuff that Baby Boomers write. They were raised on Married With Children, Simpsons and South Park, and just can't help it. It's who they are.
I tend to think people who consider the humor in Candorville and the other strips like Baldo to be "stereotypical" aren't reading the strips regularly. All the strips I can think of that feature ethnic characters play with stereotypes, but they subvert them. It's a fine line between using a stereotype and satirizing a stereotype, and I think strips like Candorville fall on the satire side of that line.
We've had these discussions around the newsroom since we first picked up Curtis, and I've found that the people who think these strips don't really touch on "Black culture" or "Latino Culture" tend to be White (I don't know whether you are, I'm just sayin'...).
The minorities around here (such as myself) often find ourselves in the awkward position of having to point that out. And more than once, I've been told by a White person that I don't know much about Black culture (I put up some Candorville strips on my cubicle that dealt with that same thing and now I just make people read them when this comes up!).
It's frustrating.
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