Political Cartoon

By | Monday, May 21, 2007 Leave a Comment
I generally kind of like Non-Sequitir for the lack of continuity almost Far Side qualities about it. Today's strip seemed unusually politically driven, though, and heads down a path that one doesn't usually see in daily strips of this nature...
I find it interesting largely because it points to the reason, I think, so many comic strips that appear in the newspaper today aren't funny. (Let's face it; they really aren't.) The problem is one of irrelevance. If you read Blondie, for example, it largely recycles the same jokes over and over again. Dagwood's late for work; Blondie tries to get Dagwood off the couch to do some work; Dithers yells at his employees. How many of those types of statements would you need to make to encompass the whole range of Blondie strips? Not too many, I'd wager.

There was (and I suppose still is, to a degree) something of a debate on whether or not B.C. should continue after Johnny Hart's death. In my mind, it's a moot point because B.C. hasn't been funny in years. No disrespect to Hart, mind you, it certainly had a great run and there were some really good strips, but that hasn't been the case for at least a decade now. It had past its prime (as everything does eventually) and should've been re-tooled to get it out of its rut.

Most good art is reflective of the culture that helped to spawn it. That's what made Peantus so popular when it first came out; Shutltz was talking to ideas and mores that were fairly current. Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury attempts the same, but he's often a little too specific in his jokes which then require more foreknowledge of socio-political happenings than most people can keep up with. But if you take grand, sweeping ideas -- whether they fall under the heading of politics or society or parenthood or whatever -- and apply comedy to their current (let me stress, current) status, you get humorous strips like the one above. If you ignore that current state, you land on cultural irrelevance and people look at your work as dated or, worse, redundant.
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