Not That Much Comical
Feb. 24th, 2020 08:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerNewspaper comic strips have taken lumps for years, but I have to admit turning to the comics page remains one of my best parts of keeping myself up to date with a daily paper. In the past few weeks, though, I had to bid farewell to two of the strips that had managed to stand out a little there in these latter days. “Pajama Diaries” was a family strip pretty much from the mother’s perspective featuring two teenaged girls, the older of which had left for university not that long before the comic ended. When it ended, though, its site began re-running it from the beginning, and in really realising how much the kids had grown up over its length I did think the early strips were interesting too. “Retail” ended a few weeks later with the department store its characters worked at finally going out of business and not a lot of time to set up where they would go from there. As much as it featured “inconsiderate customers” and “unpleasant upper management” (not to mention a tincture of the bog-standard “geek” opinions I unfortunately kick back against from a few of its characters), though, the travails could be interesting too.
In the mood I was left in, I stumbled on a short ebook on one of my library’s lending services about Calvin and Hobbes and read it, taking some note of its author acknowledging the loneliness Calvin’s imagination was a hedge against even if I wondered what else might seem to cast the slightest shade on my own reactions to that strip compared to “everyone else.” To seek out another perspective I headed to a “comics news” site I have bookmarked, only to find an obituary for its curator several months old. In that troubling state, though, a weblog I still have in my RSS reader that had looked at the earliest Peanuts comic strips posted a rare update that mentioned a comic called “Haircut Practice.” The four-panel comics I’ve looked at in it have their own bearing on all the comments over the years about “minimalist art” in Peanuts, but so far as “part-parody, part-homage” goes there was something a bit intriguing for me. I’ve had problems for years getting into closely focused “webcomics,” but can wonder about keeping up with this one.
In the mood I was left in, I stumbled on a short ebook on one of my library’s lending services about Calvin and Hobbes and read it, taking some note of its author acknowledging the loneliness Calvin’s imagination was a hedge against even if I wondered what else might seem to cast the slightest shade on my own reactions to that strip compared to “everyone else.” To seek out another perspective I headed to a “comics news” site I have bookmarked, only to find an obituary for its curator several months old. In that troubling state, though, a weblog I still have in my RSS reader that had looked at the earliest Peanuts comic strips posted a rare update that mentioned a comic called “Haircut Practice.” The four-panel comics I’ve looked at in it have their own bearing on all the comments over the years about “minimalist art” in Peanuts, but so far as “part-parody, part-homage” goes there was something a bit intriguing for me. I’ve had problems for years getting into closely focused “webcomics,” but can wonder about keeping up with this one.
Retail: the Comic Strip
Date: 2020-04-04 08:19 pm (UTC)Re: Retail: the Comic Strip
Date: 2020-04-05 01:19 am (UTC)Re: Retail: the Comic Strip
Date: 2020-04-05 01:46 am (UTC)