I was working my way through the third volume of The Complete Calvin & Hobbes over the weekend and I realized I wasn't really fair to Miss Wormwood in my Frazz posting when I compared her to Mrs. Olsen. There's no evidence that Miss Wormwood is actually a bad teacher. Susie Derkins doesn't have any problems with her that we can see, for instance. In Frazz, though, it's quite clear that Mrs. Olsen hates the students (though, as Frazz points out, that's only because she hates everyone).
One strip in particular emphasized the difference in attitude between Calvin and Frazz, when Calvin tells Miss Wormwood that "You can teach me the material, but you can't make me care". Caulfield's attitude in Frazz is more along the lines, "I care about learning, but you don't have anything left to teach me", a significant difference.
Read more!
Showing posts with label comic strip. Show all posts
Showing posts with label comic strip. Show all posts
Monday, January 16, 2006
Friday, January 13, 2006
Books (Comic Strip): Frazz: Live at Bryson Elementary
One of the more common comic strip clichés is "kids hate school" (of course, this isn't restricted to comic strips). Calvin & Hobbes is probably the best example of this ("best" as in both "best example of" and "best executed"), but it's hard to get away from. FoxTrot first caught my eye because it actually had a character who loved school. Of course, Jason's a geeky science nerd type, another cliché, but a well-done one.
Jef Mallett's Frazz takes a rather different approach. It's set almost entirely in a school (a grade school -- most of the students seen are 6 to 9 years old) and covers a much wider range of school experiences than any other strip. Frazz: Live at Bryson Elementary is the first collection of the strip.
The strip centres around its title character, "Frazz" Frazier, a successful songwriter and grade school custodian who has taken upon himself the job of making sure school is fun for the students, even of some of the classes aren't. Most prominent among the students is Caulfield, named for Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye -- the first of a great many literary references in the strip.
Caulfield squares off against Mrs. Olsen, one of those teachers who really has no business being a teacher. He isn't a Calvin to her Miss Wormwood, though -- Calvin's smart, but lazy. He wants everything handed to him on a platter. Caulfield (aided and abetted by Frazz) is smart and enthusiastic about learning. He reads Hemingway and Faulkner, for example. He's just bored to death by Mrs. Olsen's classes, and hates regimented learning. Truth be told, for all I love Calvin & Hobbes, I identify with Caulfield more than Calvin. I had the good fortune of getting into an "Advancement Program" for bright students who were being held back in the general classes. Unfortunately, those sorts of programs have fallen out of style lately, often in favour of giving the smart kinds Ritalyn to keep them from getting bored and impatient.
Frazz is the kind of guy who could have turned Calvin into a Caulfield. The Foreword by Gene Weingarten points out that Frazz could even be Calvin, a "brilliant underachiever" (and with the same hair), grown up having finally learned to love learning. (Frazz was also a student under Mrs. Olsen when he was in grade three, 21 years earlier. Perhaps "Wormwood" was her maiden name?) Though Mallett says he didn't mean for Frazz to be adult Calvin, you can definitely see the influences Watterson had on Mallett's writing. Curiously, one the places it shows up best is in the use of pacing and silence in the strips -- which could get me 'way off track into a discussion of Scott McCloud's "Count Basie" analogy for pacing comics, but I'll save that for some other time.
The Frazz world is a little broadly populated than the Calvin & Hobbes, too. Bryson Elementary has popular, inspirational teachers as well as Mrs. Olsen, and lots of students other than Caulfield (though Olsen and Caulfield are the ones whose name sticks in my memory). It's not all stuck in school as well -- Frazz is an avid mountain biker, and is often off riding, especially in Sunday strips.
One of the best things about the strip is that it's not just Caulfield and Frazz who are well-read -- it assumes the readers are as well. The jokes work best if you know something of Salinger, Hemingway, Faulkner, and so on. (At one point Caulfield gets his Walkman confiscated by the principal, and Frazz mentions that it might not have happened if Caulfield had explained he was listening to a Faulkner book on tape. Caulfield says, "That's ok, I was getting tired of changing tapes in the middle of sentences anyway.")
And, as if to emphasize the strip's literacy, two of the three blurbs on the back of the book are by Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen. (Coincidentally, the first time I encountered Frazz, it was in the middle of a story about Frazz reading Hiaasen. I think the book was Tourist Season).
The third blurb is by 1988 Giro d'Italia champion Andy Hampsten, just to cover Frazz's fondness for cycling.
Wikipedia has a good entry about Frazz which covers its literary allusions in more detail.
I don't actually know if Frazz is running in any Toronto papers. I should see. I follow it online, and I will certainly be buying all the books. My only fear is that a comic strip that expects so much literacy from its readers may not be able to survive long. Read more!
Jef Mallett's Frazz takes a rather different approach. It's set almost entirely in a school (a grade school -- most of the students seen are 6 to 9 years old) and covers a much wider range of school experiences than any other strip. Frazz: Live at Bryson Elementary is the first collection of the strip.
The strip centres around its title character, "Frazz" Frazier, a successful songwriter and grade school custodian who has taken upon himself the job of making sure school is fun for the students, even of some of the classes aren't. Most prominent among the students is Caulfield, named for Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye -- the first of a great many literary references in the strip.
Caulfield squares off against Mrs. Olsen, one of those teachers who really has no business being a teacher. He isn't a Calvin to her Miss Wormwood, though -- Calvin's smart, but lazy. He wants everything handed to him on a platter. Caulfield (aided and abetted by Frazz) is smart and enthusiastic about learning. He reads Hemingway and Faulkner, for example. He's just bored to death by Mrs. Olsen's classes, and hates regimented learning. Truth be told, for all I love Calvin & Hobbes, I identify with Caulfield more than Calvin. I had the good fortune of getting into an "Advancement Program" for bright students who were being held back in the general classes. Unfortunately, those sorts of programs have fallen out of style lately, often in favour of giving the smart kinds Ritalyn to keep them from getting bored and impatient.
Frazz is the kind of guy who could have turned Calvin into a Caulfield. The Foreword by Gene Weingarten points out that Frazz could even be Calvin, a "brilliant underachiever" (and with the same hair), grown up having finally learned to love learning. (Frazz was also a student under Mrs. Olsen when he was in grade three, 21 years earlier. Perhaps "Wormwood" was her maiden name?) Though Mallett says he didn't mean for Frazz to be adult Calvin, you can definitely see the influences Watterson had on Mallett's writing. Curiously, one the places it shows up best is in the use of pacing and silence in the strips -- which could get me 'way off track into a discussion of Scott McCloud's "Count Basie" analogy for pacing comics, but I'll save that for some other time.
The Frazz world is a little broadly populated than the Calvin & Hobbes, too. Bryson Elementary has popular, inspirational teachers as well as Mrs. Olsen, and lots of students other than Caulfield (though Olsen and Caulfield are the ones whose name sticks in my memory). It's not all stuck in school as well -- Frazz is an avid mountain biker, and is often off riding, especially in Sunday strips.
One of the best things about the strip is that it's not just Caulfield and Frazz who are well-read -- it assumes the readers are as well. The jokes work best if you know something of Salinger, Hemingway, Faulkner, and so on. (At one point Caulfield gets his Walkman confiscated by the principal, and Frazz mentions that it might not have happened if Caulfield had explained he was listening to a Faulkner book on tape. Caulfield says, "That's ok, I was getting tired of changing tapes in the middle of sentences anyway.")
And, as if to emphasize the strip's literacy, two of the three blurbs on the back of the book are by Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen. (Coincidentally, the first time I encountered Frazz, it was in the middle of a story about Frazz reading Hiaasen. I think the book was Tourist Season).
The third blurb is by 1988 Giro d'Italia champion Andy Hampsten, just to cover Frazz's fondness for cycling.
Wikipedia has a good entry about Frazz which covers its literary allusions in more detail.
I don't actually know if Frazz is running in any Toronto papers. I should see. I follow it online, and I will certainly be buying all the books. My only fear is that a comic strip that expects so much literacy from its readers may not be able to survive long. Read more!
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Books (Comic Strip): Thriving on Vague Objectives
I wandered into the local Chapters looking for a copy of Sweet Silver Blues, the first Garrett, PI book (I can't find our copy at home) and discovered that there was a new Dilbert book out, Thriving on Vague Objectives.
I've been following Dilbert since before the first strip collections came out, and my Dilbert-quoting habit is almost as bad as my Python and Goon Show quoting, and the latest book is as good as any (and has a shorter title than many of the more recent ones). I've occasionally had a few problems with Scott Adams, though.
Adams has some great insight into the absurdity of corporate life, but he's got a very bizarre notion of how science works. It's generally not a problem, but every once in a while it crops up in his books or (most recently) his new weblog, in which he declared that the Intelligent Design folks and biologists were equally bad at their arguments, and not only did each not really understand the other's argument, they didn't even really understand their own.
This was a very odd claim, given that, over the course of the rest of the post, it became obvious that Adams himself understood the least about the matter of the three of them.
PK Myers at Pharyngula posted a good rebuttal which summarizes the whole thing quite nicely. What was most odd, though, was Adams's response to Myers. Adams said that the problem really is that there are "no credible people" to inform him about the subject, and that (most amazingly) no one who has a professional stake in a matter can be considered credible on that matter -- and that the more stake you have, the less credible you are.
I can even see Adams's point -- within a corporate context. In the politics-heavy world of a business, very often the people most pushing for project A or project B are completely non-credible. And, of course, then there's marketing and advertising.
But outside of that -- are engineers really the least credible people when it comes to how to build a bridge? Doctors the least credible about medicine? Lawyers the least credible about law? No matter how much you might dislike lawyers, they do know more about law (on the whole) than non-lawyers.
That's when I decided that I wasn't going to follow the Dilbert Blog anymore -- I didn't want it to spoil my enjoyment of the strip. And I did enjoy the latest book! It had a number of strips I laughed out loud at over lunch. The last couple of collections were fun, but didn't have anything outstanding in them. This one has some really great strips.
I just have to remember that Adams lives in a world of Pointy-Haired Bosses... Read more!
I've been following Dilbert since before the first strip collections came out, and my Dilbert-quoting habit is almost as bad as my Python and Goon Show quoting, and the latest book is as good as any (and has a shorter title than many of the more recent ones). I've occasionally had a few problems with Scott Adams, though.
Adams has some great insight into the absurdity of corporate life, but he's got a very bizarre notion of how science works. It's generally not a problem, but every once in a while it crops up in his books or (most recently) his new weblog, in which he declared that the Intelligent Design folks and biologists were equally bad at their arguments, and not only did each not really understand the other's argument, they didn't even really understand their own.
This was a very odd claim, given that, over the course of the rest of the post, it became obvious that Adams himself understood the least about the matter of the three of them.
PK Myers at Pharyngula posted a good rebuttal which summarizes the whole thing quite nicely. What was most odd, though, was Adams's response to Myers. Adams said that the problem really is that there are "no credible people" to inform him about the subject, and that (most amazingly) no one who has a professional stake in a matter can be considered credible on that matter -- and that the more stake you have, the less credible you are.
I can even see Adams's point -- within a corporate context. In the politics-heavy world of a business, very often the people most pushing for project A or project B are completely non-credible. And, of course, then there's marketing and advertising.
But outside of that -- are engineers really the least credible people when it comes to how to build a bridge? Doctors the least credible about medicine? Lawyers the least credible about law? No matter how much you might dislike lawyers, they do know more about law (on the whole) than non-lawyers.
That's when I decided that I wasn't going to follow the Dilbert Blog anymore -- I didn't want it to spoil my enjoyment of the strip. And I did enjoy the latest book! It had a number of strips I laughed out loud at over lunch. The last couple of collections were fun, but didn't have anything outstanding in them. This one has some really great strips.
I just have to remember that Adams lives in a world of Pointy-Haired Bosses... Read more!
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Books (Comic Strip): The Compelte Peanuts (1957-1958)
Linus: [Running past Charlie Brown, pointing his finger] BANG BANG
Charlie Brown: [Follows Linus] Cops and Robbers?
Linus: Nope!
Charlie Brown: Cowboys and Indians?
Linus: Nope!
Linus: Liberals and conservatives!!
Two things struck me about this strip from The Complete Peanuts (1957-1958). The first was that, even though it was published in May, 1958, nothing much has changed (you can buy Liberal Hunting Permits online these days). The second is that one doesn't think of Peanuts as a political comic. But going back through the early strips, I can now see that there was more going on than I thought when I read the old paperback collections when I was 10.
In the last years of the strip, Charles Schultz was often criticized for coasting on his success. It didn't really bother me -- I figured he'd earned it, and I didn't really notice it that much. I still enjoyed the strip, after all. I still had all my dog-eared copies of the paperback collections that I'd read growing up, but I rarely went back to them, so I never compared the late strips to the early strips.
Now that Fantagraphics is putting out The Complete Peanuts, I'm going back to the beginning, and catching a lot of stuff I missed when I first read them. Everyone knows Charlie Brown as the lovable loser -- but it's really striking just how seriously depressed he often was (and how unloved he felt!). Consider this strip:
Charlie Brown: Tomorrow is our first game.
Charlie Brown: So far in practice we have a team batting average of .002 and a fielding average of .001.
Charlie Brown: [Throws away his stats sheet, staring off into the distance]
Charlie Brown: [Point of view jumps back until CB is a quarter is usual size, surrounded by an empty field] Suddenly my stomach hurts and I feel all alone.
That's a very depressing strip for a comics page -- especially for a comics page in the 50s! Even now, you'll rarely see any character truely depressed in a comic strip, let alone a child. That sort of thing only happens in the "serious" strips like Doonesbury or For Better or For Worse, and even those wouldn't use the character's depression as a punchline -- Doonesbury would throw in a zinger, and For Better or For Worse would have some words of wisdom or consolation. Calvin and Hobbes is the only other strip I can think of which would come close to doing this, and even then, Calvin's misery would often be the result of his own greed or misbehaviour.
The day after that last strip, Charlie Brown had made himself sick with worry and missed the first game. On the third day, the team comes running up to his sick bed to let them know that they'd won the game, and they didn't even miss him as a manager (this is the very first time the history of the strip that team wins any game). The last panel of this strip is probably the most miserable I've ever seen a comic strip character (Calvin included) look as depressed as Charlie Brown looks as he rolls onto his side, three sets of curvy "worry lines" on either side of his eyes, and says "I'm very happy" in small letters in a large, black word balloon.
Schultz is considered one of -- if not the -- all time greats of the comic strip world, and going back to the beginning really shows just why that is. If he coasted in the last few years of his 50 year run of writing and drawing the strip, I think he earned the right.
One more strip transcription, a Sunday strip:
Shermy: [As Charlie Brown walks by] Hi, Charlie Brown... How's the friend of all mankind?
Pig-Pen: HA HA HA
Charlie Brown: [Walking away] Good grief!
Shermy & Pig-Pen: HA HA HA HA!
Patty: Will, if it isn't Charlie Brown!
Violet: Good ol' wishy-washy Charlie Brown!
Patty & Violet: HA HA HA HA
Charlie Brown: [Clutches his chest]
Lucy: Hi, Charlie Brown... Is that your head or are you hiding behind a balloon?
Lucy: HA HA HA HA HA
Charlie Brown: [Grimaces]
Charlie Brown: [Goes home, takes off his coat]
Charlie Brown: [Turns on the radio]
Radio: "...And what in all this world, is more delightful than the gay wonderful laughter of little children?"
Charlie Brown: [Kicks the radio across the room]
You know, back before my teens I used to identify Charlie Brown. Being a proto-nerd, I was on the receiving end of a lot of "gay wonderful laughter". I can point out dozens of strips in this volume that strike home, which is probably why I loved Peanuts so much. But I don't think I ever had it as miserable as good ol' Charlie Brown. Read more!
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Books (Comic Strip): The Complete Calvin & Hobbes
Yesterday, I got a very nice birthday present (even though I bought it myself). Months ago, I had pre-ordered Bill Waterson's The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, and it finally arrived right on my birthday.
Two years ago, Gary Larson published The Complete Far Side, a very heavy two-volume hard-bound collection of all of the Far Side cartoons. The Complete Calvin & Hobbes is similar in concept: even heavier (I had to schlep it five blocks from the post office) and three volumes, it's another beautifully printed collection of one of my all-time favourite comic strips (up there with The Far Side, Pogo, and Peanuts).
I've only just started reading the books. They open with a nice little biography by the very reclusive Watterson, and then goes straight into the strips. It's going to take forever to get through them (just like it had with The Complete Far Side). They're just too big and heavy to read in bed, and they're so beautifully made that I don't dare read them over dinner.
Calvin & Hobbes is currently being re-syndicated on the web by United Media Comics. Read more!
Two years ago, Gary Larson published The Complete Far Side, a very heavy two-volume hard-bound collection of all of the Far Side cartoons. The Complete Calvin & Hobbes is similar in concept: even heavier (I had to schlep it five blocks from the post office) and three volumes, it's another beautifully printed collection of one of my all-time favourite comic strips (up there with The Far Side, Pogo, and Peanuts).
I've only just started reading the books. They open with a nice little biography by the very reclusive Watterson, and then goes straight into the strips. It's going to take forever to get through them (just like it had with The Complete Far Side). They're just too big and heavy to read in bed, and they're so beautifully made that I don't dare read them over dinner.
Calvin & Hobbes is currently being re-syndicated on the web by United Media Comics. Read more!
Books (Comic Strip): Surfer Safari
I missed a few days in there, so it's time to catch up on the books. Back after my post on FoxTrot, I said I'd get to the latest (tenth) collection of Jim Toomey's Sherman's Lagoon, Surfer Safari.
Like the FoxTrot My Hot Dog Whent Out, Can I Have Another? collection, there's not much new in Surfer Safari, but it's still fun. The biggest change is the addition of Herman, Sherman & Meggan's new son, but like Filmore's adopted son Clayton, he's off-screen most of the time. The rest of the characters have been well-established for years now, but the strip still manages to keep the jokes fresh (most of the time -- there are a few rehashes here and there). Another good addition to the bedtime comics rotation. Read more!
Like the FoxTrot My Hot Dog Whent Out, Can I Have Another? collection, there's not much new in Surfer Safari, but it's still fun. The biggest change is the addition of Herman, Sherman & Meggan's new son, but like Filmore's adopted son Clayton, he's off-screen most of the time. The rest of the characters have been well-established for years now, but the strip still manages to keep the jokes fresh (most of the time -- there are a few rehashes here and there). Another good addition to the bedtime comics rotation. Read more!
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Books (Comic Strip): My Hot Dog Went Out, Can I Have Another?
The latest comic strip collections that I collect are showing up in stores now. When I picked up Corpse, I got caught up on those as well. I don't just read science books!
I often read comic strip books in bed before going to sleep, especially when I'm reading heavier material (like biology or forensics) during the day, just to relax. The problem is that I have a limited number of comic book collections, so I end up re-reading them a lot. So the more new ones I have, the better.
The first one that I picked up today is My Hot Dog Went Out, Can I Have Another?, the 18th FoxTrot collection. There's not a lot to say about it -- it's fun, but nothing new. The Spider-Man 2 storyline was a little thin as FoxTrot movie geek stories go, though the family vacation story was refreshingly light on "Dad's an idiot" gags. A nice addition to the pile.
The other comic strip book is the latest Sherman's Lagoon collection. That's for tomorrow night. Read more!
I often read comic strip books in bed before going to sleep, especially when I'm reading heavier material (like biology or forensics) during the day, just to relax. The problem is that I have a limited number of comic book collections, so I end up re-reading them a lot. So the more new ones I have, the better.
The first one that I picked up today is My Hot Dog Went Out, Can I Have Another?, the 18th FoxTrot collection. There's not a lot to say about it -- it's fun, but nothing new. The Spider-Man 2 storyline was a little thin as FoxTrot movie geek stories go, though the family vacation story was refreshingly light on "Dad's an idiot" gags. A nice addition to the pile.
The other comic strip book is the latest Sherman's Lagoon collection. That's for tomorrow night. Read more!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)