Broken Frontier

Every Sunday, some kind soul in a white minivan delivers the newspaper to my front lawn.  Every Sunday, I pull it from its waterproof sleeve, extract the funny papers, and put the entire remainder in the recycle bin.  Every Sunday, I enjoy a lavish helping of 48 brand new colorful comic strips.  It is an abundant treasure of laughter that brings redemption as ephemeral as the paper on which it is printed.

This week, as Rudy Park celebrates its fifth anniversary, creators Darrin Bell and Theron Heir ruminate on the value of their strip.  It is, they say, "a comic strip, and a source of unrelenting wit, grand perspective and thought-provoking insights."  Such grandiose ambition is characteristic of the artistic endeavor, and such grandiose ambition delivered with a wink and a nod is a hallmark of comic strips and their creators.

Many of the Sunday strips specialize in a humorous look at marriage and family life.  In Baldo, The Buckets, and Zits, parents strive to teach their kids to clean up after themselves, and take an interest in the world around them.   Dennis Mitchell is in trouble, of course, and over at One Big Happy, Ruthie is discovering that even the most tedious of tasks can be a great deal of fun when she uses her imagination.  In the most beautifully drawn strip about family, For Better or For Worse, Lynn Johnston delivers a timeless message about grief and solace through a nearly wordless portrayal of a fight between two young siblings.  When Meredith cries out in pain, Johnston captures the reader's heart by turning the panel bright red, but even this doesn't obscure the exquisite detail of her drawing.  We still notice the sweet little-girl yellow scallops on Meredith's sleeve.

A few of the strips tackle the big political issues of the day.  In Pearls Before Swine, Stephan Pastis examines the predicament of the average American watching the television news.  In Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau turns in a biting critique of television news, this time attacking the self-obsessions of television reporters and the shallowness of the industry in which they work.  In his uncompromising Non Sequitur, fantastically populated by a family known as "The Gravesytes," Wiley Miller shows how truly scary the world is.  The spooks assigned to scare the monsters are afraid of the American Vice President.

The family and political humor is great, but gags rule.  In Rhymes with Orange, Hilary B. Price tickles the funny bone with an unexpected twist on a well-known phrase.  An astronomer writes in his notebook, "Thursday, September 21, 11:53 p.m.  Moon is half empty."  Only a pessimistic astronomer would see a half-moon as half-empty!  Mike Peters has published a number of visits to Hell in his Mother Goose and Grimm, and this week, he laughs at the workout junkie sentenced to Hell's Spa.  Dan Piraro has a guy embroiled in a "mid-past-life crisis" on the hood of a corvette in his Bizarro. The consummate Frank and Ernest are working special effects magic in their office.  And in B.C., the Fat Broad is knocked flat by a giant mouse.

A few strips have it all: beautiful art, laughs, classic characters, and timeless wisdom.   In this week's classic Peanuts, (the only strip that is not new), Lucy holds the ball while Charlie Brown comes running up to kick it.  Charles M. Schulz's masterful study of futility never seems to lose its resonance.  The image of Charlie Brown flying through the air, kicking foot extended, while Lucy holds the ball out of reach with a smile on her face, is one of the most enduring in the history of comics.  In Rose is Rose, Rose's wee son Pasquale is badgering his overbearing cousin Clem for a look at the stars through the binoculars before bed.  Each frame of this charming strip is filled with light and emotional meaning, exploring the deep human connection to the natural world, the cosmos, the divine, and dreams.  

The crown jewel of the Sunday funnies is Patrick McDonnell's Mutts.  McDonnell's art shines with the poetry of the everyday, in this case the barest outlines of fog-bound trees and telephone poles, captured in Japanese style with the fewest possible brush strokes.  "Where are we?" Mooch asks Earl.  Earl promises to find their way home, and off they go, the fog's silence broken only by the sounds of Earl sniffing out the path.  And of course, "home" is nirvana, in this case the Fatty Snax Deli.  Our furry friends are our guides, if we want to find heaven.

In his unsettling work of critical theory, Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno wrote, "The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption." (1991 Verso edition, p. 247)  Adorno called for a philosophy that would expose the world in all its indigence and distortion, rather as it would appear if bathed in messianic light.  But suppose the Redeemer finds our flagrant negativity amusing.  If that is the case, then the creators of comic strips are the exemplars of the responsible philosophy.  And they land on my lawn every Sunday, ephemeral, beautiful, a delight.