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Opus 133: Opus
133 (March 1). In-depth features
this time on Cathy's engagement and forthcoming nuptials (what
was Cathy Guisewite thinking of, anyway? Cathy married?) and
Julie Schwartz's departure from this four-color realm, plus
another dose of Janet Jackson's exploding bodice (with a startling
photograph, never seen before on this side of the JANET'S JUG,
PART II. I
just started subscribing to The
Economist, and my second issue, cover-dated February 7,
arrived last week (or thereabouts) and with it, my resolve to
become a lifetime subscriber. The journalistic integrity on
display here is simply breathtaking. On the earth-shaking matter
of Janet Jackson's Superboob, the distinguished British journal
committed a small essay on the question of transAtlantic taste
and tradition in the public prints. Despite the obvious and
undeniable national importance of Janet's boob, saith The
Economist, "Highbrow American papers reported the incident,
but with no photo. Lowbrow papers pictured the recapture [of
the errant hooter] but not the [exposed] breast.
... This seems odd to Britons, whose smaller broadcast
channels keep themselves afloat on a sea of smut. Not only tabloid
newspapers, but also the Times
and even the Daily
Telegraph (average age of reader, 55) showed the star's
spangled nipple, waving joyfully in the wind." Why the
difference? For one thing, "Americans have clung to their
religion and associated puritanism." And then there's the
simple matter of competition: in Britain, where numerous newspaper
vie for buyers in every city, the paper with the most news (or
the barest torsos) sells more copies; but in the U.S. where
most cities have only one newspaper, that paper can afford to
be "loftier in attitude." Then comes the part that
has made me a lifetime subscriber: "The
Economist, of course, deplores the degradation of the British
press. As a service to American readers, who should know how
low it has fallen, we reprint the picture below." And so
do I, herewith. Meanwhile,
over in
According to E&P,
over 800 readers sent in suggestions. The winning entry
was a wholly local reference: "Well, that's another one
that Pinkston and Thrash would have dropped!" Todd Pinkston
and James Thrash, wide receivers for the Philadelphia Eagles,
have been underperforming of late. The other entries: (1) "Now,
now, Willie-it'll be on the front page of the Daily News soon enough." (2) " NOUS R This
summer will see the fifth and final annual tribute to Peanuts and Charles Schulz
in the cartoonist's hometown, On
February 23, Garry Trudeau launched in Doonesbury a campaign
to help George W. ("Whopper') Bush find someone who could
testify to his having served in the Air National Guard in Alabama
sometime (any time) between May and November 1972. Trudeau is
offering a $10,000 prize to anybody who can say, with assurance,
that Dubya was on duty any time during the disputed period.
At the strip's website, FAQs and answers include: Q. Isn't this
just a publicity stunt? A. If by a publicity stunt, you mean
an attempt to draw attention to the problem of gutter politics,
trolling-for-trash, and cheap smear tactics, then sure, guilty
as charged. Q. Is there some sort of hitch? A. Well, yes, but
it's a hitch for a good cause. The winner won't actually receive
the reward for himself; instead, we'll be donating $10,000 in
his name to the USO. That way everyone's a winner, including
Trudeau's tax accountant. Trudeau
is following the only course that will lead to establishing
that George W. ("Warlord") Bush was ever there, at
Dannelly Air National Guard Base in Will Eisner found his face on the front
page of the Arts Section of the New
York Times, February 23. The article heralded his work-in-progress,
The Plot, an examination of the origins
of the infamous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion,"
a scabrous concoction brewed in the early 1900s which purports
to demonstrate that Jews are all engaged in a worldwide plot
to rule the planet. The fraudulent nature of the Protocols was
revealed in 1921, when the London Times showed that it was derived from a 1864 French satire.
Eisner was astonished to discover, when surfing the 'Net, that
"there are people who still believe the Protocols were
real." Eisner, who has been exploring the literary potential
of the graphic novel for the last two decades, recently published
Fagin the Jew, the
first of what he calls his polemic works, this one intended
to correct the impression too often left by Dickens' Oliver
Twist that all Jews are thieves and corrupters of the young,
like Fagin. Eisner gives Fagin a life before he becomes the
underworld character we meet in Oliver
Twist, the fictional "facts" doing what facts
always do, discredit and displace the erroneous beliefs upon
which prejudice builds damaging stereotypes. The book also tackles
the visual stereotypes often deployed by cartoonists and illustrators
in drawing Jews. Eisner recognizes that stereotyping is inherent
in the cartooning medium's modus operandi and admits to having
done some of it himself. There are "good" and "bad"
stereotypes, he says. "We are in an era that requires graphic
portrayers to be sensitive to unfair stereotypes." The
good news out of the beleaguered Mouse
House is that all the current projects being pursued by
the tattered remnants of the once world-class animation department
are traditional, hand-wrought animation. Many animators prefer
the old way to the new, CGI way-a useful factoid to keep in
mind when contemplating the outcome of the Oscar competition
among two computer-generated productions, "Finding Nemo"
and "Brother Bear," and one representative of the
vintage mode, "The Triplets of Bellesville." The voting
that picks the winner is by animators. ... A project to bring
the Simpsons to the
big screen is in the infancy stage, but no one is saying much
about it. Director James L. Brooks murmured: "We have a
very good and interesting idea, and it's different from the
tv show." Bigger, longer, louder, I suppose. ... And Sony
started production on its first full-length CGI motion picture,
"Open Season," about a 900-pound domesticated grizzly
stranded in the woods with a scrawny, one-horned deer, together
fashioning a defense against hordes of hunters. ... Mark Hamill, lately Luke Skywalker of
parts of the famed George Lucas film, has produced a movie about
comic books called, without even a blush of a swashbuckle, "Comic
Book: The Movie." The production is a comedic "fictional
exercise in cinema verite" in which Hamill plays a comics
scholar, and his adventures are focused on the San Diego's annual
four-day comics extravaganza. Hamill, who is a genuine comics
collector with an impressive hoard of his own, thinks of his
film as "a valentine from one obsessive-compulsive to another."
He intends the film to celebrate the diversity-even normality-of
comics fandom and asks the question: "Is it possible to
make a movie where we don't make comic-book fans into some outside
geeks?" Yes, he concluded-by making "us"-the
comic book fans-the insiders and "the civilians" (the
non-comics-reading public) the outsiders. The production went
direct to DVD, which may be an indiction of what caliber it
is; but it includes an impressive list of cameo appearances-Stan
Lee, Hugh Hefner, Gary Owens, Matt Groening, Sid Caesar, and
Jonathan Winters, to drop a few names. MUSINGS. The Manhattan-based Museum
of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) is moving, after only a little
more than a year under one roof, from its Union Square locale
to more commodious facilities at 594 Broadway (between Houston
and Prince) in the Soho arts district. According to a news release
announcing a house warming on February 27, MoCCA is "the
first cultural institution to move into Lower Manhattan under
the City's new program to foster growth of the arts and culture
as part of the economic revitalization of Lower Manhattan."
... The International Museum of Cartoon Art (IMCA), once in
Boca Raton, Florida, is poised to set up shop in Manhattan,
too, which would make New York the only city to have two cartoon
museums, albeit each with ad ifferent emphasis: MoCCA is focused
on comic book and graphic novel art; the IMCA, on newspaper
strips and gag cartoons. Meanwhile, Mort Walker, IMCA's founder,
has signed a purchase agreement to sell the multi-million-dollar
facility in Boca Raton, provided the city's Community Redevelopment
Agency approves the new owner's plans for the structure-to turn
it into a museum and learning center for the humanities. A FEW WELL-CHOSEN
THOUGHTS ON THE ART OF CARTOONING. Asked whether comics are now an acceptable aspect
of American culture, Art
Spiegelman said, "It's a done deal." Interviewed
by Jack Fischer in the San Jose Mercury News, Spiegelman elaborated:
"There are museum shows that will ilnclude comics without
blinking an eye. And bookstores all have their sections for
comics or graphic novels or whatever they're calling them. Universities
are teaching comics." One no longer needs to apologize
for reading a comic book. The down side, though, is that with
respectability comes the impulse to be respectable. Part of
comics' vitality, he said, derived from they're being "lowbrow
trash." And that permitted those who commit them to "fly
below the radar. It meant you could work without having to keep
a critic on your shoulder. ... You could allow the id monster
prone to inhabit this medium to be free." As for political
cartooning, Spiegelman said, it has become just a gag cartoon.
"We've gone far from the tradition of Daumier, which is
where political cartooning originated. Then it was a desire
to distill a complex thing down to a memorable image. Ridicule
[that became attached to political cartooning] is good, but
it leads you down the path where a cartoon is good if it makes
you laugh." Which is where we are today. Spiegelman worries
about the American culture's apparent failure to producing a
reading public in the latest generation of the young. He and
his wife, The New Yorker cover art director Francoise
Mouly, started a line of books for children a couple years ago-"Little
Lit"-designed to encourage literacy. People have been losing
the habit of reading as a way of getting information, Spiegelman
says; they watch tv instead, and that's dangerous. Television
is always in motion, which means "you can't analyze it.
... You can sort information out as it stands still in front
of you." And comics, he believes, "are a good gateway
drug to reading." TICS AND TROPES.
Opus is now well into its third month,
and Berke Breathed,
if anyone is questioning him about it, must be having a hard
time explaining why it was that he needed a half page for his
strip. In the first few installments he played around with the
space a little-using extra-large panels and whatnot-but for
some weeks now, he's achieved his comedic effects with the traditional
grid of rows of panels in tiers. Because he knows all of his
panels will be published, he can stage his humor better than
his colleagues can, forced, as they usually are, to arrange
matters so newspaper editors can discard one or more panels.
But you don't absolutely require a half page to do what Breathed's
been doing. A half page is a nice bonus, but Breathed doesn't
use the space in any particularly unusual way. He also boasted
that the artwork in Opus would be spectacular. (Well, suitable
for framing is what he said.) I don't see that either. On February
15, Opus found himself in a field of dandelions, all gone to
seed-a field of stemmed puff balls, in other words. And that
was nicely handled, but not suitable for framing particularly.
Now Pat Brady's Rose Is Rose -now, that's sometimes suitable for framing. And so's
Michael Jantze's The Norm.
Jantze actually plays with the Sunday strip format in ways
that would justify devoting a half page to the strip. And
maybe Gary Gianni's art
in Prince Valiant will revive fine illustration
in the funnies, too. John Cullen Murphy's work on the feature
in the last few years has been casual to the point of sloppy.
Eustace Tilley is back on the cover of
the anniversary issue of The
New Yorker, where he's been every year except two or three
during Tina Brown's administration of Harold Ross's legacy.
During the Brown Buzz, Tilley was replaced, first, by a Crumb-rendered
teenage slacker, then a female version of Tilley, and then a
Dick Tracy simulacrum-all approximating Tilley's pose; and maybe
one year, I'm not sure I'm remembering this aright-maybe one
year there was no Tilley and no echo either. But for the past
several years, Tilley has been reinstated on the magazine's
last February issue as a way of celebrating the surviving of
another year. That's probably what founder Ross wanted to celebrate
when, for the last February issue of 1926, he used again the
Irving Rea drawing that had introduced
the magazine to a buying public in February 1925. For several
years, the survival of The
New Yorker was in financial jeopardy, so every anniversary
was cause for festivities. And Ross had said that the drawings
in the first issues of the magazine were the best things in
it: they came closer to realizing his vision for the weekly
than the prose he was publishing. So reprinting the first cover
drawing, which had been whipped up by Rea, whose artistic taste
for years informed the appearance of the magazine as well as
the selection of cartoons, celebrates not only survival but
magazine cartooning itself. And for that reason, I've always
sort of revered the traditional anniversary cover. But Tina
Brown wasn't the only person on the magazine's staff who had
reservations about using Tilley every year. Lee
Lorenz, the cartoon editor for years, told me that every
year as they approached the anniversary issue, they tried to
think of some alternative to the traditional cover. They never
came up with anything they thought was satisfactory, so, by
default, Eustace Tilley re-appeared, every year. Until Tina
Brown and Francoise Mouly and Robert Crumb came along. The
anniversary issue this year (and last year, if recollection
remains functional-always, alas, at my vintage, a consideration)
was accompanied by a supplemental pamphlet that reprints on
highly glossy paper a selection of New Yorker covers and an essay by Ben Greenman
and Francoise Mouly. In the listing manner of an art auction
catalogue, Greenman and Mouly wax reflective about how the covers,
over the years, have represented the city it's named after and
its inhabitants. It's a genteel saunter through a graphic topiary
garden. None of the cover art, however, appears to have titles.
In recent years, all the covers have been given titles. And
the titles, oddly, make the covers function as cartoons-that
is, as blends of words and picture that achieve a meaning neither
manitests alone by itself without the other. Well, not quite
as cartoons: New Yorker covers stand alone as pantomimic
glimpses of the city and our species and are often humorous
in a mild way. But the titles add a dimension of meaning, sometimes
escalating mild humor to an audible chuckle. One depicts the
sumptuous carpeted and draped interior of a men's club with
two-story windows and an impressive staircase; the men, seated
and walking about, are all in shackles or chained to chairs.
The title, "Lifestyles of the Rich and Felonious."
Another cover shows a man seated on the ground in the snowy
forest reading a book to his dogsled team; entitled, "Winter
Tails." One more: a domestic Thanksgiving scene with aproned
men in the kitchen and the women clustered around the tv in
the livingroom, watching the football game; entitled "Reverse
Play." If we wander off in this rhetorical direction any
further, we'll eventually find ourselves in an epistemological
swamp, drowning in our own terminology. If the artful covers
of The New Yorker are cartoons by reason of their titles adding meaning
to the pictures, then what about all graphic or visual art?
Paintings on the wall in the museum-if they have titles, are
they, then, cartoons? Geez, I hope not.
(Not to worry: think of intention.) ANOTHER SUPERMAN
LEAVES THE PLANET. Julius Schwartz died early Sunday morning, February 8, at
a hospital in New York. He was 88 and suffering complications
from pneumonia. He is a giant figure in the history of comic
books, and his departure was hailed with numerous heartfelt
encomiums, but in extolling the achievements of his 43-year
career, no one mentioned his having turned Superman into a two-syllable
word. Julie was editor of the Superman titles for about 14 years,
and he loved to tell stores about this tenure, stories about
the writers and artists who produced "Sup'man," as
Julie pronounced it. A quick
run-down of Julie's accomplishments includes his producing,
with fellow sf enthusiasts Mort
Weisinger and Forrest J. Ackerman, the first science
fiction fanzine, The Time
Traveller (British spelling), in 1932; founding, in 1934,
with Weisinger, the first literary agency specializing in sf
(among whose clients were Ray Bradbury, Alfred Bester, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch and others
of the same ilk, most of them before they were well known);
and helping to organize, in 1939, the world's first science
fiction convention. He also claimed having played a "seminal
part" in founding comics fandom: in his practice of publishing letters to the
editor in comic books, he included the writers' addresses, which,
in turn, led to their exchanging letters-and, eventually, forming
networks that evolved into fandom. His
signal achievement, however, was in rescuing from obscurity
the superhero genre of comic books when, in 1956, he revived
and revised the Golden Age Flash. The success of the new Flash
inaugurated a series of rejuvenations, culminating in the creation
of the Justice League of America in 1960-and that led to the
creation a year later, at the rival Atlas publisher, of another
group of superheroes, the Fantastic Four, by Jack Kirby and
Stan Lee. The notion of superheroes who had actual personalities
and bickered among themselves, the Kirby-Lee modification of
the traditional formula, attracted an older reader, often college
age, and that, in its inevitable turn, revitalized the comic
book industry. Without Julie's persistence in trying to save
superheroes, chances are we wouldn't have many comic books today. By
the time I knew Julie, he had become a comics convention personality-a
character of his own invention, part legend, part history. He
had retired in 1986 from active editorial duties at DC Comics,
where he'd spent his entire comics career, and was now a so-called
"goodwill ambassador" to the comics fandom he'd helped
bring into being. I don't mean to imply that we were friends
or cohorts of any sort: I knew him, but I'm pretty sure he didn't
know me (although when we'd run into each other in convention center hallways, he sometimes looked at me as
if he'd seen me before). In 2000, Harper Collins published a
book of Julie's recollections and anecdotes about his career
in comics and science fiction, Man of Two Worlds (written with the help
of Brian M. Thomsen). By then, I'd heard Julie talk at conventions
enough to recognize in the book many of the stories he'd regaled
us with at various presentations over the years. A typical story
is the one about how he'd effectively created Sup'man. Here
it is, in a nutshell: one of the subscribers to The
Time Traveller was Jerry Siegel, who, in 1933, was aspiring
to be an sf writer. Inspired by Schwartz's fanzine, Siegel produced
his own, calling it Science
Fiction. And in the first issue, he wrote a story entitled
"The Reign of the Superman." This superman was a villain,
but Siegel and his drawing partner Joe
Shuster later revived the idea and made the superman a heroic
figure in a circus strongman costume. History was made. Julie's
chaos theorizing went like this: if he and Weisinger and Ackerman
hadn't produced a science fiction magazine, Siegel would not
have read it and would not have created his, would not have
written the original superman story, and would not have created,
eventually, the Man of Steel, who, in turn, fostered the modern
comic book industry. So we all have Julie to thank for our present
livelihoods. (Thanques, Julie.) Many
of Julie's stories were of this sort-blatant, unabashed self-aggrandizement
but with what seemed suspiciously like tongue-in-cheek self-mockery
beneath it all. You thought he was making fun of himself-and
the rest of us, too, with our inflated sense of the importance
of funnybooks-but there was always enough truth in Julie's tales
that you could never be quite sure. My guess is that the mixed
message means that he never took himself too seriously, but
he had a high regard for the creative enterprise of which he
was a part and he diligently performed his duties to the best
of his ability-and he didn't want to sell his life's work short.
He knew he had figured importantly in comics history, and he
wanted us to know what his contribution had been. But he also
wanted us to realize that there was something more playful than
pontifical in his self-appraisal. Perhaps
the strangest thing about Julie's career is that he maintained
he didn't know anything about art. He was working in the creative
enterprise of a visual artform, but he claimed not to understand
that part of it. Stranger still, this professed incompetence
endeared him to artists, who, doubtless, had encountered their
fill of ignoramuses among editors, wordsmiths who pretended
to understand graphic art, too-but who clearly, the minute they
opened their mouths, didn't. On this subject, here's artist
Murphy Anderson, who'd encountered plenty of such "people
in a gate-keeper situation who have no understanding of the
craft that's involved, or the art, and they're trying to call
the shots. ... Maybe it gives them a little sense of power.
But I don't like to think it's that. I think it's just wanting
to do something but not knowing what or how. ... They think
they're helping somebody." But they're not. Anderson continued:
"That's why Julie Schwartz was such a great guy to work
for. He's the first to tell you that he doesn't understand art.
He'd say, 'I only look at a picture, and I know if I like it
or not. And if I don't, I'll just say, I don't like it-let's
see what we can do to make it meet my standards but without
my trying to tell you how to draw it.' And he, more or less,
just left his artists alone. He picked those whose work he liked
and let them do their thing." When
Maggie Thompson,
editor-in-chief of the weekly
Comics Buyer's Guide, heard Julie was ill, she thought she
could cheer him up by producing an issue of the newspaper dedicated
to him and his career. But, sadly, Julie died before he saw
that issue. She was commiserating with a sympatico editor at
DC after she'd heard Julie died without having seen the tribute,
and the DC factotum consoled her: "Like the editor he was,
Julie just moved up the deadline." To which Maggie said,
"It is possible to laugh and cry simultaneously." And
so Julius Schwartz left in the full command of the circumstances,
ever the editor, the panoply of his calling furling behind him
in somewhat the same vein of self-mockery that he'd employed
himself. As Harlan Ellison said, marking Julie's departure:
"He was a living legend. He told me so himself. And how
could I doubt anyone I loved so much?" THE NEW WEDDING
BELLE. Cathy, the comic strip heroine whose struggles with young single working
womanhood made her an icon for an entire generation of American
women, will be getting married sometime in the next year. Irving,
her long-suffering beau, finally popped the question on Valentine's
Day and-in a move that shook to the foundation the comic strip
tradition of postponing outcomes indefinitely in order to sustain
the suspense that keeps readers buying newspapers day after
day-Cathy accepted. All in a single daily installment of the
strip. But then, Cathy has been a pace-setter all along. When
Universal Press introduced the strip in November 1976, it was
the only one of its kind-a daily comic strip about a young single
working woman, produced by a young single working woman, Cathy
Guisewite. Another woman cartoonist, Dale Messick, was still
doing Brenda Starr, definitely
about a young working woman. But Messick, who would retire from
the strip in 1980 after a 40-year career with Brenda, was only
young at heart by this time. Besides Brenda
Starr was a serious adventure strip. Cathy
was comedy. "The comic page was almost solely a male
province," said Lee Salem, Vice President and Syndicate
Editor at Universal. "Cathy brought a much-needed female perspective to humor comics-a breath
of fresh air," he said. But Cathy's
uniqueness arose not so much from the genders of its star and
its creator as from the emotional posture of the strip. Said
Salem: "Women's feelings of insecurity in relationships
and at work weren't discussed openly on the comic pages or many
other places in the newspaper, for that matter. Cathy made it okay to be candid and open
about these issues." Guisewite
says she owes it all to Charles Schulz and his landmark strip,
Peanuts. "Peanuts had helped define my sense of humor," she once said.
"I'm sure I never would have thought to sum up my insecurities
in picture form if Sparky [Schulz's nickname] hadn't done it
first. A strip like mine would never have had a place in the
paper if Peanuts hadn't
paved the way." That
Guisewite's strip bears the same name as its creator is not
merely coincidental. Cathy
has been, from the very first-in fact, before the very first-autobiographical
to a great degree. In the 1970s, Guisewite, working by day as
a writer in a Detroit advertising agency, would come home to
her empty suburban apartment and, at night, assuage her frustrations
and disappointments by drawing comical pictures of herself,
which, shortly, she began sending home to her mother as a way
of demonstrating that "I hadn't completely lost my sense
of humor." Her mother, duly impressed, did as all good
mothers do in such situations: she assembled a list of newspaper
syndicates to which she thought her daughter should submit her
work. Universal bought it: "They told me," Guisewite
said, "that they bought Cathy
because the writing was so genuine. They had been hoping to
find a strip that dealt with how radically the world was changing
for women. All the submissions they'd seen before mine had been
created by men and didn't exactly have the same emotional honesty
about the massively conflicted feelings women my age were experiencing
in the late seventies." For
the next 27 years, we've had chorus after chorus of massively
conflicted encounters between Cathy and chocolate, Cathy and
swimming suits, Cathy and diets and fat thighs and a host of
other plagues to which contemporary women are subjected, including
sexual harassment and, briefly, decision-making in the voting
booth. And the terrors of dating and of aspiring to some sort
of relationship with the opposing sex. In some fundamental way,
the core of the strip's appeal has been Cathy's day-by-day quest
for the unattainable, as Mike Peters at the Dallas
Morning News wrote. With engagement achieved and marriage
in the offing, he asked Guisewite if she is at all hesitant
about giving her alter ego "a chance to win one."
In short, is she worried that the comedic steam will go out
of the strip? Guisewite
admits that the prospect is harrowing: "I feel exactly
the same way I did when I got engaged," she said, "-partly
thrilled and partly panicked. But it's too late to back out
now!" Besides, she adds, "Irving and Cathy haven't
had a functional relationship for more than 50 hours at a time,
so whatever happens, it will be another evolution of relationship."
And with each evolution, more possibilities for comedy ensue. Guisewite
has been thinking about getting Cathy married for several years.
The cartoonist adopted a child 11 years ago and got married
in 1997. And since the strip is more than somewhat autobiographical,
Guisewite found it difficult to create situations for a character
living a life she no longer lives herself. "My relationship
with the dating world had changed drastically, to say the least,"
she told David Astor at Editor
& Publisher. "I missed being able to write a little
bit closer to home. And whenever Cathy went out on a date, I
felt like I was cheating on my husband." Moreover,
she continued, at 57, she's closer to the age of Cathy's mother
and identifies with her as much as (perhaps more than) with
Cathy. And Cathy's mom, as faithful readers know, has always
wanted her offspring to marry. But the real reasons for the
change in cartoon Cathy's life are creative and, maybe, just
a little competitive. Guisewite told Astor she wanted to get
out of the ruts of routines that had become too familiar, even
repetitive, in the strip. "Part of why I'm doing this,"
she said, "is to re-energize the strip for readers and
myself." Helena
Oliviero at the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution asked Guisewite whether Cathy's engagement,
her having achieved her presumed goal in life, signals the end
of the strip. "Boy, that's a tempting thought," laughed
Guisewite, thinking, doubtless, that she would, perforce, escape
deadlines forever after. But, no: "The truth is, for me,
this is a great new can of worms that gets opened and is going
to be too much fun to write about." Another
aspect of Guisewite's thinking is that Cathy's most dedicated
readers, the ones that started reading the strip ten or twenty
years ago, are now married themselves. They can can longer find
echoes of their lives in Cathy's, and many of them have written
Guisewite, urging her to let Cathy move on. And then there's
Tina's Groove, a new
comic strip about a young single working woman by a young single
working cartoonist, Rina Piccolo. Since its debut a couple years
ago,Tina has elbowed Cathy off the comics page in several newspapers.
And surely this circumstance, combined with a cartoonist's never-ending
search for fresh source of humor and readers' supplications,
has had some bearing on Guisewite's decision. In any case, the
satirical comedy in Cathy in the weeks following Irving's proposal
has had a fresh sparkle without sacrificing in the least Cathy's
essentially befuddled personality. The strip, in other words,
is still "in character." Meanwhile,
Picollo recently got engaged. Maybe, by now, she's even married.
So whither Tina? FOOTNIT: "Cathy opened the door
for the female cartoonists we love today," Lee Salem observed.
"But even 27 years later, the reality is you can count
the number of women cartoonists in the newspaper almost on one
hand." JUST A LITTLE
BUSHWAH TO CLEANSE YOUR PALATE. George W. ("Whopper") Bush predicted, just a few
weeks ago, that his tax cutting economic policies would create
2.6 million jobs before the end of the year. Now he's backing
away from that prediction, saying it is the result of "economic
modeling" and he's not a statistician. Well, sure. But
all we expected of him is that he can read the reports he's
handed by his advisors with some measure of comprehension. That,
it turns out, is a vain hope. And if his mistake about the existence
of WMD in Iraq weren't clue enough that he's a complete dunce
when it comes to reading reports and divining meaning in them,
there's the cost of the new Medicare that he was wrong about.
Now this, the number of new jobs he'll create. "The president,"
his press secretary said, "is interested in actual jobs
being created rather than economic modeling." Say what?
This is the sort of gobbledegook that results when you try to
talk out of both sides of your mouth at once. (And if you want
to know what that looks like, watch Dick Cheney's lips moving
around his face, east to west, any time he's speaking.) The
alarming thing is that the White House apparently expects us
to embrace this Bushwah as if it had some sort of actual meaning,
some relationship to a reality we would recognize. All that
spinning at the White House is making the inhabitants dizzy. A Political Confession. In case my political perversions haven't been more than evident in the past, it's now time, as we gather speed racing downhill to the Presidency, that my biases be formally announced. Not unexpectedly, surely, my choice is based upon the same criterion as any editorial cartoonist's: who do you want to spend the next four years caricaturing? Not George W. ("War Lord") Bush-no surprise there: he is difficult to caricature because there's not much distinctive about his physiognomy except, mayhap, the vaguely simian aspect. As for the Democrats, Kerry is the winner by several noses. (Not to mention a magnificent brow and a chin of heroic dimension.) So there.
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