'Golden-More-Tough-Than-Mean' (Episode 194) is a strip I often think of as a stand-alone triumph, a funny premise with promise. It's convoluted, and calls back to the Sunday strips that I never had the attention span to read. 'Prince Valiant' comes to mind: a beautifully drawn adventure that is quite text-heavy, as it also serves as a history education (although I never read it enough to know whether it is based in reality). Basically, as a kid I'd look at Prince Valiant and think that it looked too didactic to be fun.
The premise also tips the hat to the 1960's radio serial "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar," a noir show centered around an insurance investigator dealing with murder while touching base via the itemization of the case's expense account. It's a silly concept: elevating fiscal responsibility and sober record-keeping habits within violent storylines makes for a humorous juxtaposition, and has the air of a corporate compromise trying to justify exciting storylines while also avoiding accusations of youth corruption.
The joke in my comic strip is that it's a dark detective story that has a crow-barred premise that aims to teach ancient history/science/maths, the result of which is a wordy detective that imparts a history lesson to a thug who is in the process of essentially being tortured.
Dragnet is a serial that comes to mind that passes off a 'tough and cool' cop aspect, although they'd never openly mistreat a miscreant. That's the attitude I'm trying to convey, here, in this satire, except combined with a science/history topical education show.
As a result, each episode concludes with crooks in handcuffs, held captive and force-fed paragraphs of unrelated information that would certainly be confusing and unwelcome in the circumstance. Perhaps this is echoing the ethics-based trope that 'a little bit of book learning' is just what these miscreants need to get their lives back on track.
This strip is following on the "Golden-More-Tough-Than-Mean" style, though the look isn't nearly as satisfying, and, as with the earlier comic, the overlaid text is confusing as to who it is that is ultimately speaking the words. (In my head, I'm thinking that this has become clear to regular readers who follow the strip day in and day out.) There are a number of elements that didn't quite work, and looking at it now I just see the hours and hours put into the 'post' work trying to salvage my lack of basic drafting skills. The second panel, particularly, is not at all clear and could benefit from a re-think.
Still, the premise still strikes me as one that has legs, and if someone with actual drawing skills could take it on, I think it could be a great series. The tough-as-nails detective that used basic lessons from science and math history to solve crimes. Or, at least, loosely relate to the crimes in a way that everyone around him has to tolerate.
In the 'nothing new under the sun' department, I was talking a walk this weekend and listening to a podcast that runs old time radio science fiction serials. The podcast served up 'Space Patrol', which I've never heard before. I gather the radio series ran from 1950 to '55, and there was a television show that ran in the US at about the same time...it's not clear if the dates for either of these were confused, or whether the radio series was simply the TV series audio broadcast without picture. I gather there was also a marionette Space Patrol from the '60s in the UK.
In this episode of Space Patrol that I listened to as I got lost in the woods and started to panic about ticks, the heroes directly cited and outlined Newton's Third Law as they repeatedly threw mass off of their stranded space raft in order to paddle their way through the emptiness of space. Doing so allowed them to catch up with the baddies, and when they apprehended them they namedropped Newton as their third crew member (this being before woke ruined our ability to recognize Sir Issac for the genius that he was), rubbing the Third Law in the baddie's face.
I don't know whether other episodes similarly crowbar didactic moments in the exciting Space Patrol adventures, but it surprised me as I'd only created this cartoon a couple weeks' prior to finding this OTR serial. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some hot Ralston cereal to get through so I can submit box tops for a pair of plastic binoculars (useful for watching for my father coming home from work, according to the pitch). Reply
'Golden-More-Tough-Than-Mean' (Episode 194) is a strip I often think of as a stand-alone triumph, a funny premise with promise. It's convoluted, and calls back to the Sunday strips that I never had the attention span to read. 'Prince Valiant' comes to mind: a beautifully drawn adventure that is quite text-heavy, as it also serves as a history education (although I never read it enough to know whether it is based in reality). Basically, as a kid I'd look at Prince Valiant and think that it looked too didactic to be fun.
ReplyDeleteThe premise also tips the hat to the 1960's radio serial "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar," a noir show centered around an insurance investigator dealing with murder while touching base via the itemization of the case's expense account. It's a silly concept: elevating fiscal responsibility and sober record-keeping habits within violent storylines makes for a humorous juxtaposition, and has the air of a corporate compromise trying to justify exciting storylines while also avoiding accusations of youth corruption.
The joke in my comic strip is that it's a dark detective story that has a crow-barred premise that aims to teach ancient history/science/maths, the result of which is a wordy detective that imparts a history lesson to a thug who is in the process of essentially being tortured.
Dragnet is a serial that comes to mind that passes off a 'tough and cool' cop aspect, although they'd never openly mistreat a miscreant. That's the attitude I'm trying to convey, here, in this satire, except combined with a science/history topical education show.
As a result, each episode concludes with crooks in handcuffs, held captive and force-fed paragraphs of unrelated information that would certainly be confusing and unwelcome in the circumstance. Perhaps this is echoing the ethics-based trope that 'a little bit of book learning' is just what these miscreants need to get their lives back on track.
This strip is following on the "Golden-More-Tough-Than-Mean" style, though the look isn't nearly as satisfying, and, as with the earlier comic, the overlaid text is confusing as to who it is that is ultimately speaking the words. (In my head, I'm thinking that this has become clear to regular readers who follow the strip day in and day out.) There are a number of elements that didn't quite work, and looking at it now I just see the hours and hours put into the 'post' work trying to salvage my lack of basic drafting skills. The second panel, particularly, is not at all clear and could benefit from a re-think.
Still, the premise still strikes me as one that has legs, and if someone with actual drawing skills could take it on, I think it could be a great series. The tough-as-nails detective that used basic lessons from science and math history to solve crimes. Or, at least, loosely relate to the crimes in a way that everyone around him has to tolerate.
In the 'nothing new under the sun' department, I was talking a walk this weekend and listening to a podcast that runs old time radio science fiction serials. The podcast served up 'Space Patrol', which I've never heard before. I gather the radio series ran from 1950 to '55, and there was a television show that ran in the US at about the same time...it's not clear if the dates for either of these were confused, or whether the radio series was simply the TV series audio broadcast without picture. I gather there was also a marionette Space Patrol from the '60s in the UK.
ReplyDeleteIn this episode of Space Patrol that I listened to as I got lost in the woods and started to panic about ticks, the heroes directly cited and outlined Newton's Third Law as they repeatedly threw mass off of their stranded space raft in order to paddle their way through the emptiness of space. Doing so allowed them to catch up with the baddies, and when they apprehended them they namedropped Newton as their third crew member (this being before woke ruined our ability to recognize Sir Issac for the genius that he was), rubbing the Third Law in the baddie's face.
I don't know whether other episodes similarly crowbar didactic moments in the exciting Space Patrol adventures, but it surprised me as I'd only created this cartoon a couple weeks' prior to finding this OTR serial. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some hot Ralston cereal to get through so I can submit box tops for a pair of plastic binoculars (useful for watching for my father coming home from work, according to the pitch).
Reply