Potpourri

I really have no idea what to write today, but since my traffic is up recently, and it only takes one day off to be totally forgotten and drop back down to double digits in hits (yes, I actually worry about that kind of thing, I'm a mess), I'll just write whatever the hell comes to mind.

--I got the first season DVD box sets for both The Simpsons and Futurama yesterday. I hadn't gotten them before because A) I don't think the first season of The Simpsons holds up very well at all, and B) I've seen the first season of Futurama plenty enough in reruns on the Cartoon Network. But that Amazon sale ($15.99 each!) was too much to resist.

--Next up from Amazon: The Complete Peanuts 1953-1954 and Random Zits. I loves my comic strips! Too bad the new Doonesbury isn't out for another couple weeks, or I'd have added that to my order, too.

--Comic strips that don't get collected in books anymore, but should: One Big Happy. Drabble. The Fusco Bros.

--You know what comic strips I don't love?

• Fox Trot. Hate it. Same structure every damn strip: a line in panel one gets repeated in panel four, either by a different character or in a different context. So uninventive and predictable.
• Get Fuzzy. Having the dog actually say "Ha! Ha! Ha!" doesn't make the punchlines any funnier. In fact, they're not funny at all.
• Non Sequitur. Seriously, does anybody like that crap?

--If I had a regular newspaper subscription, I would revive the Baltimore City Paper's "Funny Paper" column on this blog every Friday. For those of you who have never run across it online, it was a weekly critique of the Baltimore Sun's daily comic strips -- a very harsh and hilariously meticulous critique. Sample from the last time the column ran (last February):

MOMMA: Wednesday, Momma mistakes a door-to-door scythe, cassock, and sandals salesman for the Grim Reaper. Sandals? The Grim Reaper isn't a fuckin' hippie!

There are tons of columns in the archives, go check 'em out. And maybe I'll start getting my local paper, just to have a guaranteed post once a week. As opposed to this rambling mess today.

COMICS: PvP vs. the World Crime League

I love comics. But I love comic strips even more. I'd gladly trade away Spider-Man for my daily fix of Doonesbury. If it came down to Batman or Dilbert, Batman would be out the door so fast his freakin' cowl would spin. If I had to choose between Peanuts and... well, no need to even finish that sentence. I would give up every comic ever for Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

What's got me thinking about this is one man's plan to renovate the comics page: Scott Kurtz's post about comic strip syndication. Kurtz, as you may or may not know, is the creator of the fine and funny online comic strip PvP. And in a few short paragraphs, he's put forth an argument for a comics page business model that's so radical, so revolutionary, so crazy, that it just might destroy the comic strip syndicates, and completely change the world of comic strips.

I'm not going to go into his plan here; if you're interested, he explains his ideas much better than I could. He's got some sound logic and some grand ideas. But he also has some holes in his proposal; primarily, he totally fails to consider that, even if the newspapers want the syndicates to fall, many of the comic strip creators will not. Even with the promise of ownership of their own creations, as well as 100% of the profits from the books and assorted other merchandising the strips may spawn, many creators will still prefer the safety and security of the syndicates to a free market. For one thing, not every strip has a lot of merchandising, nor even the possibility of it; for every Garfield, there are dozens of Mr. Boffos or Drabbles or One Big Happys, for which there's barely a market for the books, let alone the kind of greeting card/birthday hat/plush toy merchandising that would generate enough money to make abandoning the syndicates worthwhile.

I said he fails to consider that fact, but perhaps he has considered it, and discarded it. For one thing, he is presupposing that the comics page is ready to self-destruct on its own, that newspapers are already close to rejecting the syndicates and shutting down their comics pages altogether. And it sounds like his plan is for a younger, newer crowd of strips to take over the comics page, to hell with what came before. And while it may be fine for Get Fuzzy to suddenly be in competition with hundreds of free (or much cheaper) new comic strips, and while it may also be fine for relics like Dennis the Menace, The Family Circus, Marmaduke, and so forth to be permanently retired, what about those established but deserving strips that suddenly find themselves unable to compete in such a market? For Better or For Worse might be a good example here. I think it's still a decent strip, though clearly of another generation. Would it suddenly be lost in the shuffle?

All this is idle speculation, obviously; it may even sound like I'm against Kurtz, but I'm not. The truth is, it's more than likely that Kurtz won't change anything with his plan, and even if he does, it will be in slow and minute increments. But I admire him for proposing such an ambitious plan. And I'm hoping that if he (and hopefully other online cartoonists) and the newspapers successfully take a stand against the stranglehold the syndicates have on the comics page, that one of my fondest dreams may at long last be realized:

Cathy will finally die.