The Garfield Website. Because It's ALL About the Comic.

Garfield - the never-dying cash cow of Jim Davis. OK, I get it, comics are supposed to bring in money if it's your day job, and I'm definitely not against comic artists selling T-shirts and other merchandise, as long as the comic is still the main thing. But this is just too much. It's become blatantly obvious that Davis only cares about the money. The comics repeat the same boring patterns year in, year out, and the merchandise keeps on rolling.

Most comic websites have the comic and that's about it. Maybe the author's blog, or some links to t-shirt stuff and how to buy the books. Or is that just because I read mostly webcomics? But this site - it's packed with flash effects and ads for the latest Garfield products, and the comic is behind a link. The actual comic. Is behind a link. This is a disgrace.

Yawn

Dear Tim Buckley. This strip is not touching. None of your miscarriage strips are touching. They're simply generic. Any two characters could have this discussion, there's no real reason why Ethan and Lilah would specifically feel these things. It's just "generic male point of view" and "generic female point of view". Only the last panel has anything personal and characteristic, and it's not enough to make the strip feel true.

Yes, losing a baby is touching but you need to actually have a character with a personality to make the readers feel something. Ethan is a pretty one-dimensional guy. He likes gaming. He has a big ego. He's a bit narsissistic. I'm not even sure I really buy him being in a relationship like this.

It doesn't ring true that he'd want a baby, even some day, or that he'd be comforting Lilah, or be this mad at Zeke. He's a guy with very little, if any, warmth.

Just because you may identify with Ethan, it doesn't mean the average reader will. Ethan is a guy who we love to hate, a man-child with no conscience or even much of a brain. He's a joke, not someone who can honestly pull at the heartstrings when he loses a child. He's a fun character, but not one you want to see going through serious drama. You can't make a character deep simply by writing about a sad event involving them. You certainly can't do it all at once after several years of "inflated ego" and "I only care about games, not people" type stuff. Marriage and babies don't magically convert people into caring, empathetic individuals. You need to have some empathy and caring underneath to even get that far.

The readers identify with Lucas. He should be the one getting married and having a baby. You know why Chandler on Friends got married and Joey didn't? Because the viewers think Joey's juvenile. He can't carry a serious relationship storyline. Neither can Ethan. If you do not realize this, you shouldn't call yourself an author.

Best. Get Fuzzy. Ever.

Get Fuzzy is currently doing "Children's books in Soviet Union style" jokes, and as usual, some of it has been a bit tedious. I suspect Darby Conley picks a theme and then does a bunch of strips about it as a way of saving time - newspaper comics have to fill six small strips and a Sunday strip a week, and it's probably hard to come up with a new idea every day. But sometimes he hits the bull's eye. This made me laugh more than perhaps any other Get Fuzzy strip ever. The look on Satchel's face, the drawing of "Ivano" in jail, the backwards R and S... It's perfect.

Quickies

Congratulations to Joe Decie of What I Drew, who had a son! (Did the doctor really say "I declare this child born"? That's pretty cool).

Congratulations to Barry Deutsch aka Ampersand, who got nominated for the Russ Manning Award! See his post here, and read Hereville here! I feel downright proud, even if I don't know Ampersand personally. Hereville is the only self-published comic nominated, and I really hope it wins.

I read Kawaii Not by Meghan Murphy. I like it a lot. I just never seem to get around to blogging about it. Maybe it's a problem of "nothing to say but gushing things", because I seem to post less about comics I like a lot than ones I feel ambivalent about. So just a quick plug - read Kawaii Not. It's really creative and funny.

James Kochalka aka American Elf has a new subscribers-only comic, SuperFuckers. It updates every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and it's full of profanities. The latest comic is always viewable to everyone, but the archive you have to pay for. I don't really get it. I didn't get Fancy Froglin either. Kochalka, like Jeph Jacques, seems to enjoy doing some really non-family-friendly material, intentionally bad and ironic stuff. It sounds good, but it often turns out lame in my opinion. Maybe we just don't share the same sense of humor.

Not strictly a comic, but some very disturbing Lego imagery to accompany the most sexual/violent stories in the Bible: The Brick Testament. I laughed my ass off, but I can't believe some people actually ask them if they can use the illustrations in their Sunday school? Nothing teaches children about the love of God like Onan's sin.

I don't really get The Tao of Geek. I read it periodically to see if I'd get the joke this time, and I never do. But here's a plug anyway - they are doing some what if strips, so maybe it's going in a new direction. Check it out.

Red Meat in Finland

A new double pack has been published here of Max Cannon's Red Meat and More Red Meat. While the double image of a fattened-up Ted Johnson is suitably amusing, I wonder about the Finnish translation. The Finnish title is Raw Meat. It might not carry all of the same connotations as "red meat" does. For one thing, raw meat seems more... well, raw, or intense, than simply red meat. There's a more macho connotation to raw meat, at least in Finland. On the other hand, it loses the negative connotations of red meat. Raw meat can be white meat, which is considered much healthier. What about the outside-meat connotations of the color red? Blood, passion, danger? Can "raw meat" carry all of that? Does it make it too literal?

In addition, Milkman Dan has been turned into a mailman in the Finnish edition. We don't have milkmen here, but it seems like it would ruin many of the jokes, or at least pose a considerable dilemma for the translator who has to rewrite the content of the strip to make "Mailman Dan" work. And again, the change of connotations - red meat and milk can come from the same animal, while mail takes us away from the animal product metaphors.

For instance, how would this work with Mailman Dan? More very disturbing strips over at Meat Locker. All of the sections on the official Red Meat homepage are a bit grossly meat-associated. Newsfinger sounds particularly unappetizing.

Red Meat is an interesting comic, because it employs a very vacant imagery. There are no backgrounds, and the same characters appear again and again. In fact, it looks more like the same picture of them is copy and pasted each time, and only the dialogue is added. It's not a complete Dinosaur Comics thing though - there are different positions, sometimes added elements, etc. The humor is extremely black and often makes me uneasy, especially when reading several strips at a time. The characters seem to exist in some disturbing parallel universe where violence and cruelty are an accepted part of everyday life. There's an oppressive element to the imagery, too - the repeating images and often closed mouths of the characters give a robotic impression.

I've laughed at many a strip, but I can't say it's one of my favorite comics. It makes me a bit too uneasy. Nevertheless, I can appreciate the creativity of the strip, and Max Cannon definitely has his own style.

Girls With Sex Toys

I love a comic that deals with female masturbation this openly. It's not just meant to be a big "oooh, a hot chick masturbating" for men. It can be read as a statement that women need and want sex too, and enjoy pleasuring themselves.

Girls With Slingshots by Danielle Corsetto is one of those comics that I'm always planning to get into, but never seem to catch up on. I like the drawing style; the characters look varied, not just skinny-with-big-tits and skinnier-with-big-tits like in many other comics. I like that there's a realistically chubby yet sexy girl. And I like the openness about women and sex.

I suppose what turns me off is the focus on relationship issues. I've never been into that, and I tend to get bored with narratives that only deal with who's dating whom. Since women in men's stories tend to be girlfriends and wives, it seems dull to have a comic about women that mostly focuses on said women as girlfriends.

Either way, I like the sassiness of the characters, and there's a lot of good stuff in the comic. I think I'll like it once I get a hang of it.

Silent Comics Day

Both Questionable Content and Ctrl+Alt+Del were unusually non-wordy today.


After much thought, I must finally admit it - QC has gotten better lately, after a long slump. I think it's going in a good direction: less dialogue, more events, more fun visuals. I've been following it for about a year and found it increasingly disappointing, but that has changed lately. Last time the vent was an issue, Raven went in there and we only got a second hand account of what happened. Now we get to see the pidgeon and the racoon. The look on the racoon's face was genuinely amusing. The original is here; I use pictures hosted from my blog so I don't hog the comic sites' bandwidth.



Ctrl+Alt+Del, on the other hand, is sliding ever deeper into the abyss of jumping the shark (if that metaphor makes any sense). My prediction was right - they were going to miscarry, because this gives sympathy points without bringing in the added ethical drama of abortion. I will say that this strip is fairly effective because of its silence. The looks on the characters' faces say more than any dialogue could. For me, however, it's all ruined because it's a very predictable plot twist. Woman gets pregnant + baby doesn't fit in with the rest of the story = Miscarriage. I've seen it in so many TV shows. I know miscarriages really do happen and so forth, but it also seems like a cop-out in this context.