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Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Gary Larson circa 1986

Kleefeld on Comics: Searching for Mr. Larson Review

Patreon: Webcomics Textbook: Resources, Part 6

Kleefeld on Comics: Artificial vs Natural Culture

Kleefeld on Comics: Comics Subjects I STILL Don't Know Enough About

Patreon: Webcomics Textbook: Resources, Part 7  
Complete Wimmen's Comix
I stumbled across a 2013 list of comics related topics that I didn't consider myself knowledgeable enough on. The list read like this...
  • Tijuana bibles
  • Local comic strips of the early 20th century
  • Carl Barks
  • Manhua
  • The creators associated with Wimmen's Comix
  • Mini-comics
  • Mid-20th century comics used in promotional ad campaigns
  • The history of comic book retailing
  • Distributors other than Diamond
  • William Moulton Marston
  • Angoulême International Comics Festival
  • Intellectual property battles involving William Randolph Hearst
  • The cultural zeitgeist in Great Britain that helped foster 2000AD and many of the characters the debuted in that title
  • Métal Hurlant
  • 1960s fanzines
  • Australian comics
  • Jack Kirby's 1970s non-Fourth World work at DC
Reading that list now, not quite a decade later, I find that I could say still say that I still don't know nearly enough about any of those topics. Despite actually having read up on and studied many of them. I've gone through multiple books on Tijuana bibles. I have the complete box set reprinting Wimmen's Comix, and I've had dinner with Trina Robbins. I've at least quintupled my mini-comics collection. I've spoken directly with people who worked at Capital City Distribution. I've researched the legal battles Hearst pursued to keep the rights to some of "his" comics. I've read (I think) all of Kirby's 1970s work from DC... including stories that weren't even published!

And yet I still think of myself as very under-educated on all of these topics.

I was talking with Frederick Luis Aldama recently, and I told him a little about how I got to studying comics. Once I gained an interest in the Fantastic Four, I started reading as much as I could about them. But that broadened to include their "world" so I started reading up on the Marvel Universe in general. And that broadened to include the guys who created it: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, etc. And that broadened to include the other things they worked on. And so on, and so on until the 21st century when I'm now basically interested in all things comics.

It's, of course, impossible to be an expert on everything related to comics. Which necessarily means that there will always be areas I'm not as familiar with. I might have written the book on webcomics, but I can't say I know as much -- maybe that I'll ever know as much -- about comics coming out of Australia. Or Carl Barks. Or Métal Hurlant. Or...

Of course, that doesn't mean I won't try! 😉
It used to be that everyone would sit down to watch Jackie Gleason or Lucille Ball on television, and then everybody would talk about how funny it was the next day. Media options were limited, so there was a set of shared cultural touchstones. Even if you didn't watch Rawhide, you heard about it through other media outlets -- magazines and newspapers and such. Even as recently as the mid-1980s, there were comic strips like Garfield which everybody read and, even if you didn't, you probably caught a segment about it on 20/20 or an article in People.

But media has spread out to such an extent now that those common touchstones aren't there. There are thousands of cables channels replacing the three networks that used to dominate everything. There are hundreds of thousands of webcomics where a couple or a few dozen might have populated any given city's newspaper. There are multiple TV shows even within a single sub-genre like Real Housewives or CSI. You can't reference a comic strip, even popular ones like PvP or Penny Arcade, and assume your audience knows what you're talking about. In fact, you can't even name-drop a lot of popular webcomics and expect even an audience of cartoonists to know what you're talking about.

I don't know that's a bad thing though.

See, the touchstones we used to have were built on largely artificial ideas of geography. Pretty much every newspaper did carry Garfield but just about anything less popular than that was hit or miss. My newspaper growing up carried Andy Capp but I can't say the same about the next major city over. The commonality I shared with others, where we could superficially unite, was over an accident of where we both happened to be. Even if I did like Andy Capp, the next person might not.

"Hey, did you see the strip today? It was really funny!"

"No, it wasn't."
comic strip

With the proliferation of webcomics out there being disseminated on the internet, I'm not limited to the handful of options that were singularly curated based on an individual editor's preferences. I can go out and find a variety of strips that I personally find entertaining or engaging.

Moreover, I can then share that entertainment and engagement with other people who share my sensibilities. As a fan, I'm not limited to the people who might happen to share a physical space with me. I don't have to share my engagement of something I really enjoy with the only other person in town who kind of likes the same thing but for different reasons and that's really the only thing we share in common and he's always awkward to be around and he has bad breath. I can instead share my engagement of that comic with a group of people who not only like it as well, but like it for many of the same reasons I do. We're not going to all have the exact same opinions, or come to the table with the same backgrounds, but we can share in that strip in generally the same way.

Not to mention the joy of sharing that same strip with a friend who you think might enjoy it as well, but hasn't seen it yet because there's so many things out there.

Now, some would argue that that lack of cultural lodestones has in part gotten us to where we are today as a society. Things have become so fractured that we might not share ANY common touchstones with the person next door. Depending on which news outlets they stick to, it's entirely possible that they don't even recognize the same reality that you do!

But, really, that's always been the case. For generations, "American culture" was defined through a lens of the white, cis hetero male gaze. But the lived experiences of a good chunk of the population didn't line up with that. Black people didn't see their lived reality reflected anywhere. Asian people didn't see their lived reality reflected anywhere. Gay people didn't see their lived reality reflected anywhere. The country accepted -- not entirely willingly -- that "American culture" looked pretty much exactly like what was shown on Leave It to Beaver or The Andy Griffith Show. But that was not what everybody experienced. Ask yourself this... what moniker do you associate with June and July 1967? "The Summer of Love" with hippies and music festivals and flower power? Or "The Long, Hot Summer" with nationwide race riots and the FBI's illegal targeting of the Black Panther Party? Your answer probably depends a lot on your cultural background, not necessarily America's.

Those shared touchstones were never as widely shared as people claimed. They circled within segregated geographies. So when somebody started talking about how much they loved the comic strip Torchy in Heartbeats, they would probably get very different reactions, depending on where they lived. Because that comic strip circulated in Black newspapers and was never run next to Blondie or Dick Tracy.

What's happening today isn't that the touchstones are slipping away; what's happening is that people are starting to see that what they thought were touchstones never were anyway. Sure, there's a gazillion more options just generally than there were a half century ago, but you're no longer at all limited by geography in finding people who you can share your touchstones with. I can be the only person who reads a webcomic in the entire state, and still connect with like-minded fans half a world away! So I can build up a more natural culture of shared ideologies, instead of an artificial one based on where the roof over my head is.
Searching for Mr. Larson
Yesterday, I mentioned the Documentary Now episode in which they created a spoof documentary called "In Search of Mr. Larson" in which Brad, a 50-something fan of The Far Side, tries to make a documentary about his quest to meet and make a connection with cartoonist Gary Larson. I caught a short interview with the producers who said that they basically wanted to parody that style of filmmaking (although the comparisons to Dear Mr. Watterson specifically are obvious) where film that are ostensibly about the titular subject are really an ego-centric focus on the filmmaker themselves. As such, Larson himself does not appear in this movie, apart from a few shots of 35-year-old photographs.

The movie starts with Brad talking about his love of The Far Side and how he's decided to go on a road trip with his largely disinterested father to find Gary Larson. He leaves his wife with their newborn baby, and starts driving, knowing nothing more than he think Larson lives in Washington state. He does manage to connect with a guy who used to run a Far Side fan site that Larson's lawyers had shut down and a childhood friend of Larson's who's now an attorney. Brad's IndieGoGo campaign, though, is wildly successfully and he's eventually able to hire a private investigator to find Larson for him. But once Brad pulls up to Larson's house, he finds the street and driveway filled with vehicles, which he soon learns is Ken Burns' film crew who is just wrapping up a huge documentary about Larson. They kick him out, and Brad takes solace in the fact that it was such a bizarre trip that it was like actually being in a Far Side cartoon.

The movie is short -- barely over twenty minutes -- which I think is a strong point. It's long enough to get the point across, but if it were any longer, I think it would start to drag. Unlike a mockumentary like Spinal Tap, there's not really any humor inherent in the characters or the situations. The joke is really in the concept itself. It hits most of the tropes of that type of film, mostly by way of having this amateur filmmaker clearly trying to copy the things he's seen in other similar movies without having any deep understanding. So when Brad's feeling dejected, for example, he knows that he needs footage of himself looking dejected, and the resulting shot is pretty obviously a self-conscious one because he doesn't have an actual film crew; it's just his dad, following his directions to shoot him looking dejected. So the scene isn't funny in and of itself, but seeing all the checkboxes ticked off in pretty rote order provide the parody. Much longer than what it is, and you'd start thinking, "Yeah, ok, we get it!"

That said, I did find one of the sub-plots kind of distractingly bad. Part of the story is that Brad is going all out for his passion project here... going so far as to be willing to sacrifice his family. He kind of darts out of the house, leaving his wife Lisa alone to take care of their newborn, despite some pretty desperate pleas that she needed help. And when Brad checks in with her periodically by phone, the situation keeps getting worse. She's throwing up in the bathtub with some kind of postpartum sickness that doesn't seem to be going away, and Brad dismisses it out of hand. He continually calls on her for validation and moral support, and he provides less than zero in return. I get that they're trying to highlight that Brad is essentially a self-absorbed man-child, but his wife regularly and repeatedly just accepts it. Not just within the context of Brad trying to make this movie, but the family photos they show clearly indicate that Lisa is not at all happy with their relationship in general, but just continues to put up with what is effectively emotional abuse.

Further, the relationship angle to the overall film is never resolved. The last conversation they have is her giving him a pep talk after he pleads for her to do so. And then... that's it. We get Brad's resolution to 'connecting' with Larson, and there's a Larson-style animation of him driving off into the sunset and all is happy and good. Except Lisa is still back at home with this baby. Presumably just continuing to accept whatever childish, self-absorbed notion he has next. The conflict is still there, even if Brad doesn't recognize it.

I felt this approach to having Lisa letting herself get emotionally trampled on, without any of her own agency, was a pretty sexist approach. I think they still could've kept Brad's obliviousness to Lisa's needs, but not just portray her as metaphorically barefoot and pregnant. It came across as "Well, of course she's just going to let him do whatever he wants! She's the wife and that's her role!" She doesn't factor heavily into the overall film, but that they choose to make her a distinct sub-plot and treated her in this manner felt pretty ugly to me. As if it never occurred to anyone working on this that she would do anything other than roll over at every instance. A bit clueless on the part of the producers, and it left a bit of a taint on the overall movie for me.

To borrow a quote from another mockumentary, "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever."
The show Documentary Now apparently did an episode last year that was a spoof of the type of documentary where a film maker goes on a quest to find their hero, recording all of it in order to make the film. In this case, the fictional novice film maker was looking for Gary Larson. Larson was no doubt chosen as the subject in part for his relative reclusiveness. I can't find a photo of him more recent than the 1980s, and video interviews with him are even more scarce. The closest there is to a 'public' appearance by Larson in the 21st century is a short cameo in a 2010 episode of The Simpsons where he's drawn pretty much exactly how he looked 20 years earlier...
With that said, I thought I'd share the only video interview with Larson I can find. It's a piece done by 20/20 back in 1986. I'm posting here as a sort of time capsule of the period.
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Disaster & Resistance Review

Kleefeld on Comics: Horizontally Inclined Redux

Patreon: Webcomics Textbook: Resources, Part 4  

Kleefeld on Comics: Changing the Conversation

Bloomsbury Comics Studies: Webcomics 

Kleefeld on Comics: Happy Webcomics Book Launch Day!

Bloomsbury Literary Studies Blog: How to Get Started in Webcomics

Patreon: Webcomics Textbook: Resources, Part 5  

Kleefeld on Comics: Comic Strips Circle Around & Around
Back in 2016, I called out the storyline running in Get Fuzzy at that point. The plot centered around Bucky thinking that everyone in the strip was boring so he was trying to convince them to re-use dialogue from a fictional 1930s Dust Bowl Willy comic strip. What struck me at the time was that, by 2016 when I read it, Get Fuzzy had entirely consisted of re-runs for several years, with a few years before that being a mix of old and new material. That storyline had originally run in 2008 and had already been recycled at least once before I ever saw it in 2016. And on Wednesday, Chris Hansen pointed out that it's come back around yet again and is being run as the current strip.

Get Fuzzy strip

Re-running old strips is hardly unique. Peanuts has been in re-runs since Charles Schulz's death in 2000, and other strips like Cul de Sac, For Better or For Worse, Calvin & Hobbes, and Boonbdocks all continue life in syndication despite ending a decade or more ago. But what about the rest of the comics page?

Blondie, Alley Oop, The Phantom, Wizard of Id, Barney Google, Mary Worth, Beetle Bailey... Regardless of whether they fit your particular taste, regardless of their level of quality, a good chunk of the comics on the funny pages are legacy strips of some kind or another. Even ones that seem newer have often passed into others' hands. Dan Piraro stopped doing Bizarro dailies in 2017 to let Wayne Honath take the reins, Scott Stantis turned over The Buckets to Greg Cravens in 2000, and Rina Piccolo picked up the writing duties on Rhymes with Orange a few years ago. If the strips are not out-and-out re-runs, they're strips that have been passed on to other creators. I'm reminded of a tweet from Spike Trotman from several years ago...
How many newspaper strips are original these days? There are some, certainly. Pearls Before Swine, Doonesbury, Mutts, Dilbert... (Garfield seems like that's open to some debate. The last I heard, Jim Davis still claimed to be writing them all and had others do the artwork, but I suspect he doesn't do the bulk of the writing any more and merely keeps that story alive for branding/marketing purposes.) I'd be curious, though, to see a broad analysis of newspapers across the country -- how many comics do they still run, and what percentages of them are re-runs, legacy, or new? Offhand, my gut instinct tells me the number of new comics would be in the single digits for virtually every paper.

I just find it striking that newspaper comics are increasingly less about entertainment and more about nostalgia. People aren't looking to read something funny or witty or exciting, they're looking to read something familiar. Readers take comfort in seeing the Born Loser get slighted once again, whether it's by Art Sansom or his son Chip. And later on, maybe one of Chip's kids will carry on the family business so readers can keep up their routine of seeing the ongoing failures of Brutus P. Thornapple. Readers won't care who's working on it, just so long as they can take a few moments of comfort in seeing that the character is still worse off than they are.