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Comic and Rant for Tuesday, April 2, 2002
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As you may have noticed, I’m switching to a larger format for the strip. Let me know (all three of you!) if you like it better this way or if I should go back to the 25% smaller size. Speaking of the strip, the punchline refers to It’s Walky!, a webcomic I highly recommend. I read way too many webcomics, which is partially why I haven’t done anything on the Links page yet (the other reason being that I’m the laziest man on Mars). I don’t want to recommend every strip I read (I don’t think I have that much server space!), just the ones I think are the best (or that are done by friends ^_-). I saw Death to Smoochy over the weekend and liked it. I’m rather surprised how much TV Guide and Ebert hated it. Ain’t It Cool News, while not liking it as much as I did (except in the preview), at least gave it some praise and hit the nail on the head by pointing out “The performers, the characters, they’re all spot-on perfect.” I’m glad to finally see Robin Williams play a dark character - I was always annoyed that Jim Carrey got the Riddler role in Batman Forever, as Robin was supposedly up for the role (though I don’t know the full details) and I was looking forward to seeing him play a villain. It’s nice to see he hasn’t lost “that spark of madness,” to use his own words. The film also pulls off the difficult (though not impossible) task of starting in the middle. Edward Norton makes a character that you’d hate if you met him in real life likeable - I wouldn’t really watch the “Smoochy” show, but I rooted for it to do well because I was emotionally involved with the character - and even co-wrote one of the songs he sings on his TV show. Then again, what do you expect from an actor who can share a film with DeNiro and Brando? Many critics also claimed Jon Stewart was underused. I disagree. Sure, I’d like to have seen more of his character, but he was in as many scenes as he needed to be - more would have been pointless. Okay, now that we’re done with “Movies Nobody Likes But Me,” it’s time for “True Stories of Stupid People!” I was in a Backwards R, coincidentally killing time before the aforementioned film started, and I noticed that the playable Xbox had a warning in several languages that read (approximately) “Your Xbox requires service. Please call Microsoft.” Some guy (married with at least one child) saw the warning, then pushed the “Reset” button. Nothing wrong with that, mind you - sometimes a reset is all something needs. What qualifies him for this category is the fact that, after the reset did nothing to fix things, he started fiddling with the controller (the right one, no less), thinking that might fix things! Okay, so it’s not a tremendous amount of stupidity, but it’s been a slow week... While looking through my local Sunday paper (the State College, PA Centre Daily Times if anyone cares), I noticed something a bit ... uh ... I guess “unusual” about covers it. The “throwaway” panels of Shoe actually make the strip confusing. Take a look and you’ll notice that without the first two panels, the characters appear to be visiting the grave of a friend, as indeed they are. with the first two panels they appear to be visiting the grave of a fuel pump, thus seriously impeding the joke (whether or not the joke is any good is another matter). This is the first time (IIRC) I’ve ever seen this happen. This got me thinking about throwaway panels. For those who don’t know, Sunday newspaper comics need to conform to certain measurements so that newspapers can print them in a variety of ways (though they can do what they want within those confines). Basically, the panels that make up the top row must be redundant, so that papers with less space won’t need to print them. These are the throwaways. Some strips don’t bother putting a gag there at all, but just use a larger title panel. Dilbert and Garfield are two good examples - in fact, Garfield actually has a different title panel every week, which may be the most (some might say “only”) creative part of the strip. I mean, Garfield isn’t utter crap like, say, Mark Trail, but as its popularity grew, it became blander in order to make it more accessible to everyone the world over (I have a German translation of the first book, and quite a bit was lost in the translation, something which probably wouldn’t happen with the later strips). These days all the Sunday panels (except for the disposable title) are the same size (they weren’t always), almost certainly so newspapers can run the strip vertically. Too bad Jim Davis can’t be more like Bill Watterson, who eventually demanded control over the layout of the Sunday Calvin and Hobbes, saying papers could either print the full strip, print the full strip at a smaller (but still complete) size, or drop it entirely. Even Charles M. Schulz eventually demanded that his daily strip be given a little more space and that he no longer be forced to do it in four evenly sized “space saver” panels. I guess I just prefer a gag that a few people get and really find funny to a gag that a lot of people get and sort of find funny. No DDR strip links today (or strip DDR links for that matter, though if you find any let me know!), but I found a LoTR storyline in the User Friendly archives that’s somewhat amusing by virtue of it being from 1999 (though I’m sure the news of the film was out by then). Coincidentally, I was reminded of my rant on product placement where I mentioned how annoying it is to have fake brands. Why is it that UF mentions real companies, hardware & software, but has people shooting each other with “Snurf” darts? That’s more than enough whining for now - See you Thursday! |
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