If you talk about white people, you’re not talking about race. If you talk about black people, you are. This is arguably the essence of racism; black people are an aberration or a disturbance; white people are natural. Therefore, to end racism, artists should treat black and white individuals exactly the same. If art doesn’t see color, then the art isn’t racist. QED.
This is the logic that Lamar one of the co-creators of the Pixies’ video “Bagboy,” used when he defended his decision to present a narrative in which a white kid gleefully and giddily trashes a house which, at the video’s conclusion, turns out to belong to a black woman who he has trussed up in her own bedroom.
We knew we were taking some risks when we made the video. When most people see a white kid (Nik’s little brother) and a black woman (my older sister) they can’t help but think “racist” and “misogynist”. This is pretty sad.
From the beginning, when we originally thought of the concept, it was never our intention to make it about a white kid terrorizing a helpless black family. I, myself, being black have gotten to the point where I don’t automatically see color in people. It’s the same for Nik. If the character’s races were switched you’d probably have the same amount of stuff to say about the video.
It’s 2013, at what point do we stop seeing everything as racist. At what point do we stop making things a bigger deal than they are.
The problem here, as Bert Stabler points out, is that claiming color-blindness doesn’t make the rest of the world color-blind. Declaring racism over doesn’t make it so, and there isn’t really any way to show a white kid terrorizing a back woman’s home without referencing the way that white people really have, in the recent past, conducted vicious campaigns of terror against black people for daring to move into middle class homes. The video doesn’t come off as color-blind; it comes off as thoughtless, or (as Bert suggests) as cynically courting controversy. Not seeing race now can’t erase a history of racism, especially when not seeing race seems to just result in you unthinkingly mimicking that history.
Danity Kane’s Ride For You does a much better job of suggesting that race doesn’t matter, though not exactly by ignoring race.
Towards the end of the video, the five female members of the interracial group pair up with various hot guys. Those pairings are integrated; there’s a black guy/white girl couple; a white guy/black girl couple, a back guy/black girl couple, and two white guy/white girl couples. This almost surely has to be a deliberate choice; Danity Kane is not a spontaneous punk rock kind of group,and everything else on the shoot, from the multiple costume changes to the round robin vocals, certainly seems focus-grouped within an inch of its life. Someone during the making of that video decided that they wanted to present a color blind world. But to do that, they had to admit (to themselves, and I think to the audience as well) that they could tell which of their singers (and which portion of their studly male window-dressing) were black, and which were white.
Johnny Ryan’s “E.T. on the Street” also is also quietly but deliberately conscious of race in the interest of avoiding stereotypes, though the success is more mixed.
Laurel Lynn Leake dismisses this, arguing “That whole ET comic is just “what if ET was a bl- I mean, urban man! He would be a total greedy sociopathic asshole, amirite?!” And there’s certainly something to that argument. At the same time, though, you can see Ryan (usually thought of as eager to offend everyone) trying quite consciously to avoid offense. The black guy at the beginning of the comic isn’t a gangsta, and he hasn’t been shot — he’s been hit by a car, and E.T. robs him, not the other way around. Along the same lines, the violent thug at the end is white, not black. And, for that matter, E.T.’s race is unclear. Is he supposed to be black? Or is he supposed to be a tourist in a black neighborhood — ignoring the misery there, and then pretending (with that backwards baseball cap) to be one of the folks he’s just callously robbed? Is the joke that E.T. is a black man and is therefore an asshole? Or is the joke that he’s a white guy pretending to be black, and is therefore an asshole?
The strip is conscious enough of race to make that reading plausible, and, I think, even probable. But it’s not conscious enough to exactly make that reading the point, nor to do anything with it. The end could perhaps suggest something like Crane’s suggestion in the Blue Hotel that believing in stereotypical narratives can make those narratives close around you and destroy you. But E.T.’s motivations are too much of a cipher, and his fate too random, to really sustain that. If the first part of the strip seems to be willing to think about and talk about race, the second just shrugs, abandoning the theme of racial tourism for standard-issue tropes of ghetto violence, sanitized by making the perpetrator a white guy. It’s significantly more careful about racial issues than that Bagboy video. But since it doesn’t seem to want to follow through on them, you do end up feeling, as with the Lamar and Nik effort, that race is here evoked mostly for the sake of controversy.
And then there’s this. (Apologies for the crappy scan.)
As with most of Berke Breathed’s Bloom County strips, this one is embedded in a lengthy and preposterous narrative. In this case, the Bloom County characters have all gone on strike to protest the shrinking space available for comics; management has hired scab replacements. Oliver Wendell Jones, the strip’s resident child-genius who also happens to be black (and whose picture you can see off to the side in the first panel), has been replaced by a ludicrous rap stereotype.
Part of the reason this strip works better than the other examples here is a function of time. Breathed isn’t working with a 3 minute video or with an isolated gag strip. Bloom County is a daily, and we know Oliver Wendell Jones like a friend. We know him so well, in fact, that he isn’t just a racial marker, as black people too often are in pop culture. Rather, Oliver is a particular person, who, like his dad says, speaks good English and loves astronomy and occasionally crashes the world’s computer networks. Breathed has put in the time to ensure that Jones is not a caricature, and as a result the reader can fully appreciate the travesty of having him replaced by one.
So in part the strip deals effectively with race because it worked to erase race. But that work, obviously, involved seeing race in the first place; making your black character a computer genius is a decision that has meaning. And the joke in this strip, too, requires seeing race, and acknowledging the way it turns individuals into the tropes we expect to see. Even Oliver’s dad, at the en, succumbs, and breaks out into rap, complete with bad grammar. In the meantime, his “son” is up on the roof, looking at the stars, and declaring
Ah seen the moon
All white n’ pretty
Like da hind
O’ Conway Twitty.
I don’t think it’s an accident that a strip about ridiculous totemic blackness ends with a ridiculous invocation of totemic whiteness. The round fat moon hoves into the panel, made visible by both telescope and verse, reminding us, perhaps, that if we must see blackness, the least we can do is remember to see whiteness as well.
Color-blindness is also physiologically impossible. But the rhetoric of color-blindness has been an incredibly effective Right Wing strategy deliberately used to destroy the gains of the civil rights movement.
“Color-blindness is also physiologically impossible.”
Not sure what you’re saying here…could you explicate?
Sure, as this is actually what my day job at the ole think tank revolves around. Basically, our brains have evolved to do an enormous amount of automatic processing of and reacting to simuli and life experience. They do this through a few different processes, but they mainly involve creating cateogories, associations between these categories and what get are called “schema,” which are essentially stories our brain tells itself without our conscious knowledge.
The associations and stories we have often involve categories of people, which we call stereotyping (it doesn’t have a negative connotation in psych circles). A lot of stereotyping is harmless. How do you know without having to think about it that a large, bald, fat human that’s crying probably doesn’t need a diaper change but a tiny, bald, fat human does? How do you know that a black rectangle that rings is a phone and not a wallet? it’s all these kinds of processes.
Anyway, not all of our associations are harmless or value neutral, often they involve preferences (when they’re positive) or biases (when they’re negative) about people in certain groups. Simply put, we have a story about them in our heads that we do not realize we have.
This whole phenomenon, one where our decision making and POV is affected by prejudices ovcuring at the unconscious level, is called Implicit BIas. It’s not limited to race and it’s not limited to the United States. It is, in fact, part of the human condition. It also isn’t a moral failing. The majority of white people in this country consciously hold egalitarian values. This is why explicit measures of bias and prejudice basically have no predicative value as to what people will actually do.
Implicit measures, on the other hand, do tend to predict behavior in experimental settings. The most famous of these is the IAT, which you can actually take yourself at projectimplicit.net. The IAT tests categorical associations through reaction times.
Anyway, this is long-winded, but there’s decades now of scientific evidence as to the validity of implicit bias, its predicative power, etc. and so forth. There is also considerable evidence that believing oneself to be objective actually causes people to act with more rather than less bias. There is some evidence that being aware of implicit bias, coupled with context-specific interventions, can help safeguard our decision making processes from implicit bias’s effects.
This is why color-blindness is such a pernitious idea. It’s actually the opposite of what we need. It’s the delusion that we’re objective. And what the Right does is talk about color-blindness through one side of its mouth while stoking White racial anxiety with the other. So they take race off the table as a valid topic for discussion (“playing the race card”) while also talking about it in ways guaranteed to panic Whites. For an example of this, look at Fox’s coverage of the Zimmerman verdict.
Thanks! That’s fascinating, and definitely jibes with what I’m trying to say here.
Something that’s not necessarily on topic, but is always odd to me is the strange datedness of Johnny Ryan’s comics. The reference to bath salts tells me this probably came out within the last several years, but that fact that it’s about E.T. and uses the trope of “what if someone not usually associated with the street was on the street?,” race aside, puts it somewhere long before that trope ate its own tail with Leprechaun: In the Hood (2000). His comics don’t really seem to be aiming for timelessness so much as very specific nostalgia for 80s and 90s humor and racial politics. Why does Ryan choose to actively place his comics in this nostalgic framework? Do other people see this in him? Or am I way off base with it? And what do we do with that nostalgia?
Maybe this has already been brought up in one of the other endless threads and I missed it. But I think it could be a key component of why many people my age are so critical of Ryan, and why I certainly don’t feel like I “get it,” or like I want to get it. I can’t say that we’re over the 80s or the 90s, because that’s obviously not true, and pointing that out can be valuable. However, I do think it gets at the reason Ryan just bores me on a really fundamental level. This gets at what you’re saying about colorblindness, Noah. It’s not that we’re postracial now and to say that we are is racist. But I do think we have new-ish ways of being aware of race and talking about race; we see the same old discussions and the same old racism, but I think in general the vocabulary of both racism and anti-racism, and the rules of the game have changed quite a bit. The mainstreaming of hip-hop is just one example of why “E.T. on the Street” seems really dated, but there are a million other reasons that we’ve attempted to renovate our vocabulary and should continue to do so. This is a sweeping generalization, but Johnny Ryan seems to be having a discussion, many times, that just doesn’t exist. It’s a moot point how aware of this Johnny Ryan is, or whether he’s attempting to signal that things haven’t changed as much as we think they have. If he is, good for him, but he still comes across as oblivious.
Also, when I say the vocabulary has changed, let me make clear that I don’t think that we’re somehow more enlightened now. Things are just as bad or worse as they were before. It’s just that things have changed, and Ryan seems nostalgic to me.
I think that point about nostalgia is really smart.
Johnny is definitely interested in past pop culture, in a way that a lot of comics are, and I think it can cause him problems. It’s not an always thing though; the Ted Nugent thing, for example, and the Spring Break one, are both contemporary pop culture references (Nugent’s old, but is still around and visible, and I think the spring break thing was to that recent film I didn’t see….)
Bloom County is actually from the 80s obviously. I need to write more about it; it really is brilliant. Breathed’s writing, the way he uses words, is really great, in a way that isn’t often the case with comics writers. (The faux rap here, ending with that amazing left field Conway Twitty reference, is a fine example.)
Noah, your take on that Bloom County strip is terrific.
It’s true that Johnny Ryan makes contemporary references, but he’s still working within a nostalgic framework I think. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself, but it does make it really hard for me to see the appeal of his work.
As for the Bloom County strip, it is from the 80s, but it feels way, way more relevant to me. The rap sounds old-school, sure, but the comments on the marketability of hip hop, and the idea that a hip hop caricature would be more appealing than a rounded character have only become more relevant since that time, I think, especially given the white suburban appropriation of hip hop long after the strip was published. It makes us think about blackness and about whiteness, and about the one-dimensional picture of men of color in the media. In these depictions, and in real life, their ability is often defined and assumed to be completely delimited by their ability in sports or music. It really highlights the problem with Ryan for me; Bloom County is still in on a conversation we should be having, and it shows us how things haven’t changed. Ryan seems to be talking to the air.
Also, Conway Twitty = amazing. Great wordplay. The strip presents a hip hop caricature, but it doesn’t devalue hip hop. Instead, it shows the fun, creativity and possibility of rap, and maybe even challenges the idea of “good English” or “smart language.” The joke isn’t just “look at this person who doesn’t usually rap rapping!” It’s also “look how much fun rap can be, and look how it can be about anything.” I think the strip really comments on the exploitative nature of representations of rappers without devaluing their language or their creativity, which is key.
Emily, what a great point about Breathed’s respect for rap. I wish I’d said that.
It’s really weird to me how utterly Bloom County seems to be forgotten. Calvin and Hobbes still gets talked about all the time, and even the Far Side has some profile, but I’ve hardly seen anyone write about Bloom County.
And it’s amazing. I’d forgotten just how mind-meltingly funny and weird and brilliant it is. I think part of the probem is that much of the brilliance is linguistic; his drawing is fine (it doesn’t make me mad like Dilbert or Doonesbury), but it’s obviously not his strength, and I bet that’s made it uninteresting to a lot of people….
Oh, and I think Ryan’s take on gender is in general more relevant. He’s just really shaky when it comes to race.
There was a lot of talk about BC when they started reissuing it in deluxe hardcover. But you’re right, it remains underdiscussed. I have a feeling some of this is because it is so deeply tied in with Reaganism. And often a slanted mirror at Reagan’s America. And thus may feel to some to be dated in a way that Calvin & Hobbes (which also has a lot of commentary on academic interpretation, feminism and political correctness) does not.
Emily: “I do think it gets at the reason Ryan just bores me on a really fundamental level.”
I think it’s safe to say that Ryan bores most people so you’re not the exception. If it were otherwise, Ryan would be a much bigger star in the comics firmament. He’s probably got the most positive word in his life with Prison Pit which is less nostalgic than his usual stuff.
I actually like(d) Bloom County more than Calvin + Hobbes (which I never really got into unlike most people). But I think Bloom County peaked pretty early and became considerably less funny in its later years. Isaac’s point is correct – the strip is probably badly dated by its political content unlike C+H (which has a more marshmallow take on things).
Isaac: I took that online IAT test and it gave me the weirdest results imaginable. Quite contrary to what my life experiences would have predicted.
Everybody still loves Doonesbury, though, right?
And…my son actually read a bunch of Bloom County, and loved it, though I’m sure he didn’t get most of the references. So…if it’s not alienating the 9 year old, you’d think other folks could deal with it.
Bloom County was great to the end, damn it. The concluding strips were some of the funniest of the run. (Outland kind of sucked, though.)
Suat,
I’ve taken a bunch of them There are dozens and researchers customize them to be about different topics. I just read a write up of an experiment that used four, all related to math and gender.
It’s important to note that the IAT is MOST useful in aggregate. Obviously not every single individual’s IAT predicts outcomes. One of many, many reasons why the scholarly community does not want the IAT used in discrimination cases, even as they push for the inclusion of implicit bias insights.
Sorry Noah, I’m with Ng Suat Tong here. I thought that Bloom County didn’t just decline in its later years but actually became painful for me to read. Weeks of Bill the Cat and Opus standing around in their y-fronts? Ugh.
As defunct strips go though it does seem as though it lacks the reputation of Calvin & Hobbes, which continues to yield endless “tributes” and unofficial sequels e.g., Frazz, the “Hobbes & Bacon” strips that made the rounds a few years back, and that “in the manner of” strip illustrating Watterson’s Kenyon College commencement speech that’s making the rounds now (which I thought was bizarre and misleading). What amazes me about C&H’s long-term reputation is that at least based on the tributes and whatnot, a lot of people seem to have gotten something very different out of it than I did. I truly loved the strip, but it seemed to me that Calvin was actually not a very likeable character and that despite occasional “awww” moments, Watterson actually quite successfully avoided having things get too warm and fuzzy. The tributes all seem to focus on the warm and fuzzy stuff. Calvin was never Christopher Robin, but that seems to be how he’s remembered.
Re: Johnny Ryan, I thought that this particular strip was quite timely:
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/johnny-ryan-riots-student-guide
IIRC it appeared right after the riots that erupted following Joe Paterno’s firing in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal, capturing the absurdity of rioting over stupid things while simultaneously poking fun at a certain type of fanboy mentality (indeed, the same fanboy mentality that we’re now seeing in the wake of the recent Affleck-as-Batman nonsense). One of his best strips I think.
Finally, I do indeed still love Doonesbury though I think its best years are behind it. The strips with Melissa, the US Army aviation mechanic, have been great, as have a lot of the ones with Toggle and the other active military and veteran characters. The strips with former CIA hack Jeff Redfern as a kind of Ian Fleming-esque novelist supposedly drawing on his own experiences have been pretty amusing too. It’s also odd and refreshing that B.D. has actually become a main character again, which sort of brings things full circle, since a lot of of the earliest Doonesbury strips focused on him. Of course the strip has been on hiatus all summer while Trudeau works on a new TV show, but it’s supposed to be starting up again soon.
Heh; I do like that strip. The last panel is the clincher.
That spring break strip is still the favorite of those I’ve seen recently, though. I may need to try to write about it….
I’ve only read a little bit of Bloom County, but I really need to read more. It does feel really Reagan-Era, but I think it points out how we live in the super-Reagan era in a way Johnny Ryan really fails to. Everything about this strip speaks to today, even if the spelling, for example, is a little unsettling and probably would be executed differently now. The spelling and the potential counter-positioning of “rap” and “smartness” made me nervous at first, but I think the creativity and fun of the rap really saves that.
Re: Johnny Ryan on gender (and race, too), Noah, I’m glad that you can use him to think about those things, but I just can’t follow you there. As long as we’re talking about color-blindness, we could talk about gender-blindness too. You’ve mentioned a lot that Johnny sees people as sort of interchangeable, genderless sacks of meat, and I think that’s a fairly interesting idea, although I don’t personally see it in Johnny’s work. But even though race and gender of course aren’t the same, doesn’t that seem like the same kind of postracial logic at work on gender? If, as you’re saying here, we have to point out race in some ways, doesn’t that also apply to gender? This is an honest question, not an assertion.
I’m paraphrasing both this article and your previous points re: Johnny Ryan on gender so I might be on the wrong track.
Oh yeah, there’s plenty of evidence about gender and implicit bias too. And a little evidence re: age, attractiveness etc.
Maybe when we’re done with the indie comics and context rndtable we should think about doing a Bloom County roundtable? I keep saying that the strip should get more attention, so might as well put my bytes where my mouth is….
I would do a Bloom County Roundtable in a heart beat.
Okay; need to finish the indie comics one first. But we’ll definitely do Bloom County next.
I would read Bloom County for a roundtable. Our house is named ‘Bloom County’ and I had a stuffed Opus toy I loved as a kiddo.
I grew up reading Bloom County and, much like your son, Noah, didn’t get a lot of the references. I loved (and still love) early bloom county though. It definitely deteriorated as it went, and don’t even MENTION the 2000’s OPUS reboot.
Bloom County may be undiscussed by critics, largely, but it certainly hasn’t disappeared. Over the last couple of years, the complete run has been reprinted in handsome hardcovers (including a volume of Outland, and one of the Outland sequel, Opus–which was only Sundays too I believe). Part of these collections is marginal explanations of pop culture references that haven’t survived. I found the “footnotes” distracting and annoying when I read volume 1…but, it does actually include lots of strips that were never reprinted in the original paperback collections. I wanted to buy them all, but couldn’t afford it. Read the first one from the library.
Love Bloom County… though I do think it lost some mojo towards the end. My favorite strips were always the whole crew on board Cutter John’s wheelchair…and esp. Portnoy’s crazily enthusiastic contributions.
You’ll eat this one up Noah.
Studies have shown that there is an own-race facial discrimination/recognition bias even in babies which has lead a bunch of “people” to say shit like “The WHITE MAN knows how to RECOGNIZE his OWN RACE from BIRTH”. But it turns out that it’s actually a development/exposure effect rather than being some hard-wired tribal shit. This is suggested by the fact that the effect can be reversed if you have a white baby in a black household or vice versa.
Aaron McGruder’s strip The Boondocks had a definite Bloom County vibe to it though with far more radical political outlook of course.
Bloom County winning the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning is still one of the great mysteries of the universe.
Wow; that’s awesome that it won that. I had no idea.
If you decide to pursue a BLOOM COUNTY roundtable, I, too, will give the strip another chance. I haven’t looked at it for decades, and it is tainted my distaste for the comic from the ’80s.
I read it every day back then, and even as a younger squishy lefty, I thought that Breathed’s work was just a big soft and flamboyant hug for squishy lefties. It was an obvious feel-good strip, politically and philosophically. This is where Oliver the black computer nerd came from, as well as Cutter John, the wheelchair-bound ‘Nam-vet-pacifist (and Steve Dallas’s macho buffoonery). This it where all lying-in-the-grass strips, thinking wistful thoughts came from, as well as the cuddly Star Trek flights of fancy. And then there’s Opus.
I’ll admit I was biased, of the crowd who said (paraphrasing the Comics Journal from back then) that the strip had a modicum of style — all of it Trudeau’s — and that its political edge was soft and gummy, or at least granola. No teeth, just pats on the back.
And it’s obviousness often extended to the strips just picking and sloppily brandishing 80s pop culture. This even extends to the strip above, not only with its rap silliness, but even with it so-called left-field Conway Twitty reference. In the 80s, Twitty was known best known (to folks like me and, I assume Breathed) for being a fixture in UHF-station commercials, selling his K-Tel and Heartland “Best of” records (and other things like “Twitty City”). Using him as a joke here, isn’t digging deep into the culture; its just skimming off the frothy surface. It would have been like making Slim Whitman the punchline of the joke. Not so clever.
(Then again, I do seem to recall liking the strips where that Binkley kid cut off George Lucas’s head with a light sabre.)
So I’m partly with Emily and Isaac, at least in my unrefreshed opinion. The strip trails the Reagan Era behind it.
****
Then again, I was a high-school Doonesbury fan. Even got the parents to take me to a party at a local bar to commemorate/mourn the start of Trudeau’s 1983 hiatus. Won a press proof sheet of the final week of dailies.
It’s left field because it’s unexpected, not because no one would have heard of it. In a mainstream comic strip, you’re going to use big pop culture references; you’re trying to make sure everyone gets the joke, I think.
This isn’t too far off the mark, though I would argue that its political edge was less “soft and gummy” than nonexistent, beyond a few jabs at right-wing religious types. That’s why it was so puzzling to me that it won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.
This article from 1987 offers a bit of context:
http://articles.latimes.com/1987-11-26/news/vw-24832_1_bloom-county
Yes, I remember that dust-up, and I was with you all the way. It was Pat Oliphant’s criticism about BLOOM COUNTY’s empty politics that earned him some swipes during this same “striking” storyline.
The replacement for Opus was a stand-in for Oliphant’s “Puck” character. Breathed had this scab, showing off his real political edge, yell “Reagan Sucks!”
Yeah; the oliphant thing in Bloom County was hysterical. I just reread that.
Breathed uses political content as something to riff off, rather than as a way to call for change, usually. Still…I think he can be quite perceptive at times. I loved his strip mocking economists for example. As I say in the linked article, I wish there were more of that.
It’s worth pointing out that most political cartoons are toothless. It’s kind of a debased genre.
I’d forgotten the jab at Oliphant and Puck the Penguin. The Puck vs. Opus thing was sort of a sub-kerfuffle when Oliphant was (IIRC) trying to do some marketing of his own around Puck.
Breathed’s mocking of economists was amusing enough I suppose, but compared to Trudeau at his seventies best, it’s pretty lukewarm stuff. That kind of “a plague on both your houses” throwing up of one’s hands in lieu of any kind of real critique strikes me as a bit of a cop-out.
Well, for me, Trudeau’s smug liberal platitudes are a lot less interesting.
Breathed isn’t saying a plague on both your houses. He’s saying, specifically, that economists are full of shit. That’s a message that is (a) true, and (b) hardly ever expressed by liberal or conservative pundits, both of whom have a huge investment in economic expertise.
The rap strip above is also pretty subtle, I think. As I say (and Emily elaborates) it both talks about the way that black people in media are represented by stereotypes, while insisting that rap is also exciting and intelligent — and also by pointing out that whiteness is packaged and used as a cultural touchstone without activating the same kinds of stereotypes or totalizing frames. It’s funny and surreal and weird, but that doesn’t mean that it’s less meaningful than a talking white house.
It seems to me that Brethead’s advantage was always that he was aggressively silly. So does he make a lot of super-deep explicit commentary on politics? No. he’s for the most part a class clown. But the level of mischief he brought to the project (particularly as his drawing improved) was impressive.
BUt it’s not like he had no substance. In particular, Opus and Binkley’s embodiment of male anxieties, and their contrast with Steve was pretty wonderful. And the transition of Steve from, essentially, 80s Tom Cruise Man to 90s Sensitive New Age Guy via alien mind control ray still cracks me up.
It sort of reminds me of Sontag’s observation about authors being husbands or lovers. Trudeau is a husband, Brethead a lover. I like them both, actually, but despite some surface similarities their approach and project are really different.
I believe the exact term for Steve’s switch was that he was Gephardtized.
See. How can you not giggle like an idiot at that. That’s brilliant.
I think there’s a lot more to Trudeau than “smug liberal platitudes”. For example this strip for which you could substitute “Benghazi” and it would still ring true today:
http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1981/03/13
Or this skewering of John Kerry from 1971 that is still 100% relevant not just this year, but this week:
http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1971/10/21
By contrast, “Gephardization” seems like kind of thin gruel as seen in this example, which is absolutely an example of the “a plague on both your houses” cop-out I mentioned:
http://www.thecomicstrips.com/store/add.php?iid=85713
Late to the party.
I loved Bloom County back in the day and would love an excuse to dive back into it (I have one or two books somewhere, including the collection that has the final BC strips).
While I agree with the consensus that the funny flagged near the end, I remember interpreting it at the time as Breathed losing his ability to satirize some awful shit (I mean the whole Mary Kay, animal testing/torture plot line was more morbid than funny – but I couldn’t turn away!) So, I cut him some slack.
I loved how he endlessly skewered Trump.
I do think that if I went back and spent time with Bloom County, though – I would find a lot more of it problematic.
P.S. the captcha codes for commenting on this site are the fucking worst! ;)
Christ; you think that John Kerry thing is anything other than utterly banal? “Hey, politicians are self-absorbed, allow me to make that statement with neither verbal nor visual wit, in a series of panels that allow me to do my trademark drawing the same thing over and over again.”
And how is that first one not “a pox on both your houses”? With,you know, warm fuzzy sitcom laugh track?
I fucking hate Doonesbury.
Whereas the Bloom County is completely weird; I love the hand on top of the alien’s head. And it’s not a plague on both your houses; it’s not a plague on anybody’s house. He’s sneering at individual politicians, just as Doonesbury is in that first strip — except that Breathed’s is actually funny and weird.
I love the switch in rhetoric in the last panel, form science to slangy pop cult ridiculousness. The bit about “not particularly mature” is great too; Trudeau never pays attention to language like that. Probably afraid someone might think he’s not a serious cartoonist if he got too imaginative.
I mentioned I hate Doonesbury, right? It’s totally cartoons by which to listen to This American Life.
Osvaldo; I’m sorry about the captcha. Are other folks having trouble?
I’ll admit that the first is definitely plague-y but you can hardly call it “smug liberal platitudes” and it’s way funnier and meaner than Breathed’s aliens.
The John Kerry one is very Kerry-specific actually if you’ve paid any attention to his rhetorical style in the past 40-odd years.
Re: captcha codes, the only thing I’ve noticed is that they seem to have a time limit and sometimes if I take a long time to add my comment I have to reload it. Not a big deal.
It’s not actually funny at all, to me. It’s just saying politicians are politicians; that they self-promote. Shocker. And I guess it’s meaner in some sense, but that’s because it’s so flat. A flamboyant insult has a sense of fun that you don’t get if you just say, “John Kerry sucks.” But that doesn’t mean that “John Kerry sucks” is more profound or braver. It just means less effort went into it.
Do you like the drawing? It just seems so utterly half-assed to me; there’s no effort to even try to present anything of visual interest. It’s not quite as straight-up ugly as Dilbert, but it’s kind of more anonymous….
As I said, I think you need to pay attention to how Kerry has presented himself over the years and how he has been perceived in doing so. YMMV, but I thought that strip nailed him and it would not have worked with just any politician.
I do actually like Trudeau’s static drawings. It’s hard to defend, and yes, several days in a row of unchanging drawings of the White House does get tiresome, even if he does change the angles from panel to panel these days. But I think that’s just the nature of the strip, sometimes it’s talking heads, sometimes it’s just talking. You could certainly argue that it doesn’t always make the best use of the comics medium and I wouldn’t argue the point, but when the “just talking” strips are actually funny (as they often are) I suppose it’s comparable to an “info dump” passage in some 900-page Neal Stephenson novel or something. A bit of action and “showing not telling” would be nice, but it serves a purpose.
One of the worst things to happen to Trudeau IMO was when he started getting all artsy after his eighties sabbatical and I’d say that the endless (and unfunny) Reagan-as-Max-Headroom series was the worst example of that. But he kind of bounced back from that I think and found a reasonable compromise. My only real complaint about how it looks now is that the coloring is awful, but just about everyone’s coloring is awful these days.
I like the way Dilbert looks too, it seems entirely suited to its subject matter, but it’s another one whose good years are well behind it. Again, it’s often “just talking, no head”, but if you worked for a tech company in the nineties, as I did, it often rang very true.
In both cases, the static drawing actually seems quite suitable to the subject matter. I can hardly see how they’d be improved with art by someone like Alfredo Alcala! I will say this though; obviously they’re not action strips for the most part, so when something does actually happen (usually in the last panel) it’s like someone opening a window in Andy Warhol’s “Empire”. It’s so startling that it calls attention to itself. I’d have to call in a comics theorist like Scott McCloud to really explain this particular approach though.
Breathed isn’t a particularly great artist either, but I feel like he’s imaginative and uses what he’s got with intelligence. (I like the image of the real Oliver in the first panel up there for example…and again, the hand on top of the head is nicely goofy.)
Peanuts was talky, and yet it doesn’t look like crap….
I actually liked Breathed’s drawings quite a bit, particularly by about 1982 or so when he really seemed to find his groove and the characters’ appearances were more or less settled. And he definitely learned a lot from Trudeau, in terms of pacing and timing, not just how the characters looked. When he applied those lessons to his own strengths, the strip was really something special.
But liking Breathed’s drawings and hating Trudeau’s seems a bit like loving Rich Buckler and hating Jack Kirby or something.
I don’t know who Rich Buckler is!
I’m sure Breathed liked Doonesbury a lot more than I do. But his visual style is really different. Like I said, Breathed works to make the visuals imaginative and distinctive. Trudeau seems to mostly just feel like he has to have a drawing because it’s a comic.
I’m with you, Daniel. Trudeau’s pre-sabbatical style — static, often well-lived spaces with small (occassionally illogical) changes — was enchanting, and as relaxed as his characters’ own bodies were often slightly slumped. That strip had its own rhythm, sometimes similar to the more contemplative Peanuts strips: a small downbeat, rising, with a tone of resignation in the final panel. (Take that, Noah!)
Not a great example, but nice — about Reagan’s vacationing proclivities. Just found it by typing some random dates into the URL:
http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1982/07/28
I’ve never like it as much — or sometimes at all — since it returned in (I think) 1985, with its revamped visual style and progressively more lame and self-satisfied jokes. The Max Headroom stuff was awful, eventually leading to the politicians-as-floating-icon gag (feather, waffle, helmet, etc.). And I’ll take the four frozen White-House shots over the unmotivated “camera shots” any day.
I don’t know, Peter. If you can’t see a big difference between that cluttered, wordy, visually drab effort and something like this, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
No, Peanuts wins hands down — visually, verbally, compositionally. Then again Peanuts 1958-1972 beats everything hands-down.
I’m saying that Trudeau’s rhythm (maybe 76-82) — the rhythm of a run-down world — can be traced back to Peanuts.
I was looking for a different strip, but this type of Peanuts seems to have the seeds of a Doonesbury rhythm.
Hmm. Can’t we all just keep fighting about Lucy?
I don’t think that Doonesbury would have been possible without Peanuts, both visually and to some extent thematically. Even the recent “Red Rascal” Doonesbury strips that I mentioned earlier are in a very real way the descendant of Snoopy’s WW I flying ace strips, but with the Trudeau twist that they are the flights of fancy of an ex-CIA hack.
Total agreement with Peter about the awfulness of the waffle/cowboy hat strips representing Clinton/Bush. And his attempts at actually drawing Donald Trump are really embarrassing.
Bloom County was heavily influenced by Peanuts too, I’m sure. The two main influences are probably Peanuts and Doonesbury, I’d guess.
In the last Bloom County collection, BB finally acknowledged the doonesbury influence and showed an early strip where he inadvertantly ripped off an entire doonesbury strip. But he also did it to essentially say “can we stop fucking talking about this now?”
If memory serves, Trudeau went after BB a bit for ripping off Doonesbury, which prompted Brethead to joke that they were best friends in a Bloom County strip and to portray him as Vladimir Lenin at one point.
It turns out my buddy and occasional writer on my blog Sam Thielman has actually interviewed Breathead on this subject!:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/comics/article/43048-berkeley-breathed-sets-the-record-straight.html
Re: Olyphant:
PWCW: So you won the Pulitzer Prize for cartooning, but there was some controversy over it. Do you mind to talk about that?
BB: It was really spearheaded by this guy Pat Oliphant. He did not like me, he was sure that I had stolen the penguin from him—that little character down by his signature is a penguin, apparently. It was a cover story in the Washington Journalism Review. I took it lightly, but I should have gone over and punched him in the face. In their minds, you don’t win a Pulitzer unless you’re cutting heads off. Now it’s no longer called editorial cartooning—it’s called cartooning, which is what it should be called.
Re: Trudeau:
PWCW: You spend a lot of the introduction to the first book (and the notes) apologizing to Garry Trudeau; do you guys have any kind of relationship?
BB: We exchanged some tough letters the first few years of the strip and I was not as respectful as I should have been. A few years later when I’d hoped we could meet and I could apologize, he desperately avoided me. If I was speaking somewhere he’d go hoofing it out of the room.
I had not been a massive student of his, but his was the only comic strip I had ever read. I went searching for things later—Krazy Kat came in during Outland.
It’s good that Breathed freely acknowledges his debt to Trudeau and so the success of Bloom County is another demonstration of one of the interesting things about comics, which is that unlike many other artforms, creators with very little knowledge of the history of the medium have often done quite compelling work within it.
Limiting ourselves to just newspaper comic strip artists for the moment, one might argue that the best cartoonists have been those who were very much engaged with the history and conventions of the form (e.g. Bill Watterson or Schulz). By contrast, Breathed basically only knew about Doonesbury and Peanuts but was able to bring enough of his own sensibility and style to the table to use it quite effectively and produce (at least for a while) a funny and memorable strip. And if Outland is what he did after becoming more knowledgeable about comic strip history (specifically Krazy Kat) then so much for engaging with the history of the medium!
I too am perplexed that Breathed is mostly ignored. Bloom County was one of the truly great latter day strips, always reading like a cross between a novel and a play, or a really clever TV show that gets cancelled after the first season.
I also have to acknowledge him as a major influence on my own cartooning endeavors. He showed how free you can be with the medium in both visuals and storytelling.