Hello everyone. This is me, right now.
Someone’s getting a dye job on Thursday. I sort of like the luminescent glow of the computer screen, however.
I’ve been having another one of those relaxing weekends. I finished A Hat Full of Sky with Bryon. I’m not sure if Pratchett should write another one of those, as he’s wrapped things up quite nicely. I also indulged in an old Boondocks anthology, and I’m convinced that MacGruder may be the best comic strip artist of the last decade. Solid, solid work.
Announcements? This one.
You should probably pop over to Book View Cafe and pick up Breaking Waves before they’re all gone. All the money goes to relief in the Gulf Coast. Some of these writers, among them Tiffany Trent and Rachel Carson, actually know a thing or two about the environment, making it doubly interesting.
All right. Laundry, and then I’ve got to put in some writer time.
Catherine
Okay, I’ll have to check out Boondocks. I pretty much figured that newspaper strips (for the record, one of my favorite artistic forms) ended with Calvin and Hobbes.
But Birth of a Nation rocked. And I have read Boondocks strips that I liked. And he does have a graphic style that manages to convey a certain realism in the sad spacial confines of a newspaper strip.
Anything else I should be aware of? Gotta say, the last thing I read that I loved in this line was the first Gasoline Alley collection. A perfect example of how commercial art can inadvertently become capital-A art.
Right now, I’d have to say that the comic pages are kind of the wasteland you imagine them to be.
Boondocks is one of those rare comics which knows itself, like Peanuts, Bloom County, and Doonesbury.
I miss some of the older, brighter comics myself. Strangely enough, like Little Abner.
This is old, but have you read Guindon?
Catherine
As a matter of fact, I’ve got two collections of his work, and an anthology of The Realist that has a lot of his stuff as well. He’s a good one, all right.
And while I’ve never gotten into Lil’ Abner, I was recently leafing through a collection of Fearless Fosdick stories taken from the strip. Graphically excellent stuff, and funny as the dickens. I’ve been thinking of checking out more.
Peanuts from the sixties and seventies are sort of amazing. I have no idea how anything that sad got marketed that heavily. It just goes to show that if you make it cute, people won’t even notice the bleak, relentlessly despairing contents.
But have you ever checked out Mary Perkins? I’ve got one collection, and it’s nifty stage-drama stuff, very well drawn.
I have to say, it’s the adventure strips that I miss the most. Little Orphan Annie, Thimble Theater, Alley Oop — that stuff needs a certain amount of real estate to work, and newspapers just don’t want to give them the page space anymore.
Oh, well.
I don’t know Mary Perkins. Give me some links if you can.
I’m kind of a closet Dick Tracy fan. The villains are just so over the top!
Catherine