Posts Tagged ‘capitalist pig’
4 items.
I did start out thinking this wasn’t really worth writing about, but a storyline started to occur to me and now I think it’ll be running through the strip for a while, so stay tuned. I plan to do a couple of storylines running concurrently, so they might take a while to finish, but hopefully they’ll be worth it.
I do like the idea of telling longer stories in this short strip format, because it’s fun to me to take something so rigid and see how far it can bend. Of course, long storylines in daily strips are nothing new. Dick Tracy in the ’30′s was doing massive stories that today would probably be considered “graphic novels” but at the time were doled out a few panels per installment. Today, though, the strip format seems to have gotten so set that you’re a little bit shocked when anything out of the ordinary is done with it. We’re conditioned to a degree to expect an exact rhythm of setup, beat, punchline. If the joke happens in the penultimate panel, you’ll probably go back and reread it to figure out if you missed something. I think that we’re not too far away from two daily cartoonists doing the exact same joke as one another without even realizing it. There are already Zits strips that do Calvin and Hobbes jokes almost panel-for-panel, but I’m not sure how “accidental” that actually is. The difference between the two is that Zits has lolled in its own refuse for years content to repeat in different fashions the basic concept, “Isn’t it funny how teenagers are lazy and say stupid things?” while Bill Watterson is a genius who could be working with a nub of yellow crayon and a discarded cheeseburger wrapper and would still manage to transcend and say something profound and entertaining. Then again, Get Fuzzy is nearly always a few panels of Bucky saying something mean, Satchel saying something stupid, and Rob expressing exasperation over it, and I love Get Fuzzy, so maybe there’s something enjoyable and useful in repetition. The best comics like that are a little bit like watching different artists cover an old blues song. You can hear a million different people sing Stack A Lee, and it gets more interesting the more it’s done, because you want to find out if there’s anyplace new to take it. And then you can be the Dixie Chicks molesting Landslide. It really all depends on how it’s done.
Anyway. I love Satchel. Buck too. Can’t they just all be happy? Maybe in their own way they are.
I started with the idea of the Capitalist Pig character so that I’d have someone for my rabbit to argue with about matters of money and financial success, since I figured my own internal conflicts on the issue might provide some interesting comics. I haven’t really used him as much as I thought I might, but recent economic times have given me some cause to push him toward the front a little more. That, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to throw in an occasional slightly-more topical strip to break up the pornography.
