The bastion of right-wing comic mediocrity, Mallard Fillmore, is finally taking heat from readers of the Globe who expect comic strips to be actually, well… funny.
The controversy started on Monday with conjecture from the Globe
ombudsman, Christine Chinlund, that Mallard may soon be replaced by Prickly City, a “conservative” strip with a fresher and funnier perspective than the duck. Chinlund quotes two readers in her piece:
But some say the The Duck has a more fatal flaw: “It’s just not
funny,” said reader Michael LaVigne. “He can have his opinion, fine,
but it needs to be funny, too.”Reader Kathy Tappan asks why the Globe wastes precious space on a strip
that is “usually hateful, nasty, ill-informed, or mean-spirited…”
If the strip was also funny, she said, “you might have an excellent comic on your hands.” But, she said, it’s not.
The letters on the editorial pages, pro, con, or flip-flop (plus this letter
from just before the brouhaha), generally seem to miss the point:
Mallard Fillmore lays eggs as a comic artist. Let’s review some recent examples of what passes for
humor in Bruce Tinsley’s hackneyed world:
- Using an elipses to create comic timing… for a one-liner that isn’t funny! Ha!
- Making opponents out to be idiots by drawing them
cross-eyed.
I remember doing that… in third grade! - Earnesty. Oh, and a duck thrown in to remind you that it’s a comic strip.
- Pimping out the tooth fairy for a joke.
- Anger.
Not that Mallard is alone on this score. One Mallard preservationist went after a similarly humor-challanged strip:
Why not drop “Doonesbury”?
Some would argue “Doonesbury” has certainly lost its relevance.
Amen,
brother. (I remember attracting some dirty looks for criticizing Gary
Trudeau at Brown’s 2004 Commencement, where he was receiving an honarary degree. Lighten up, liberals!) Jonathan Franzen summarized the problem with Doonesbury in a sentence:
Garry Trudeau is essentially a social novelist, his topical satire and
intricate family dynamics and elaborate camera angles all serving to
divert attention from the monotony of his comic expression.
Sack ‘em both, I say! And take the cat with you!
6 Comments
The worst thing about this post is that I actually clicked on and read each of those horrid mallard comics.
By the way… Koo, you’ve probably known of this one for a long time, but I just got turned on to it. It’s really good!
http://dwlt.net/tapestry/getfuzzy.rdf
The read problem with reading comics online is that I want it laid out like a newspaper — I want different comics on the same page, not one strip I have to scroll through laboriously.
I was thinking of developing a Firefox plugin that would do this (the problem otherwise being that most syndicate websites don’t allow imgs to be called from other sites). But, who has the time?
You are a fool. I hate the paper. It makes your hands all nasty and dry, it smells like crap, and it’s stupid!
Actually, I like reading strips in my aggregator. I click on today’s post and BAM! A single strip for me to read on a nice white background. Clean, simple, quick, and I never miss them! I also have them all in a nice neat folder so when it’s comic time I can go through them all.
Except for the Boondocks. He doesn’t have a feed so I have to click on a script I wrote that pops open today’s strip without all the advertisements and garbage. I should probably create my own feed from the script I wrote since occasionally forget to run it and miss all of the Ha Has and Chuckle Chuckles.
And that’s not the point anyway. The point is that you need to read Get Fuzzy because it just plain rules! I know I know… not another single man with dog and cat strip… but it’s really good! It’s kind of like Garfield with a brain. I also like that it’s more of a character driven strip than a current-event-poking-fun strip. There are virtually no writers/artists left that can explore humanity and make us laugh like this… kind of like Calvin & Hobbes did….
So back to the original post about crappy Mallard:
http://www.comics.com/comics/getfuzzy/archive/getfuzzy-20050220.html
Really? When I follow that RSS feed I get the whole damn page with all the paraphenalia et.al. If you can get JUST the strip, can you then get a way to put an entire day’s worth of different strips?
The Boston Globe picked up Get Fuzzy a few years ago; I think it’s their “newest” strip. The guy’s local (he’s obviously a huge Sox fan) so it’s actually outrageous that he wasn’t picked up earlier. He makes fun of Garfield almost as much as Opus, albeit more obliquely. It’s funny that he actually uses the same formula (mean cat, dumb dog, loser owner) but freshens it up somewhat… mostly, I think, because he stays current on culture and because Satchel’s much more sympathetic than Odie (and Bucky much more outrageous than Garfield).
Matt met him once, I forgot where.
Yes… only the strip comes up. You’re reader is probably pulling the link rather than the data in the feed… Get a better reader…
Try out sharpreader… It doesn’t have tabs, but it’s everything I need….
Post a Comment