Mr. Adams should have stopped right there. That panel is hilarious and the rest of the strip was pretty much a downhill race to grind the punchline into the ground. I read just this panel to my wife yesterday. She laughed out loud. More importantly, she assumed I was reading the punchline, not the strip opener.Which leads me to this idea: maybe when a comic strip gets tired and saggy, one way to re-energize it might be to switch to a one-panel format. The fans all know the characters from Garfield, Dilbert, and many other newspaper strips. Why not take advantage of this familiarity by chopping the comic back to one punchy panel? Since the players are all well-grounded in years of past characterization, you can even do character-based gags in one line.
To put it another way, how many comic strips do you read that seem padded, even though they're only a few panels long?
I read about a very similar idea a while back. This Forum seems to be talking about it, too with some funny examples (Garfield examples):
ReplyDeletehttp://www.truthandbeautybombs.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=4997
You know that comic "Close To Home"?
ReplyDeleteIt's about 3 panels too long.
My local paper doesn't carry that one. And after a little googling I'm very happy with that decision. It almost makes up for them dropping Boondocks.
ReplyDeleteMan, that "Close To Home" "comic" wastes ink in my local every gorram day, Sunday included, and it's like a big lump of stupid tied to an ugly stick.
ReplyDeleteDamn. The things some people get paid for. "Speedbump", however, is consistently clever, and it runs next to "CTH" in my paper; I wish that the former had a leg, so it could kick the latter's ass off the forking page.
I haven't read newspaper comics in a coon's age, but I do seem to recall a couple of strip artists maintaining a pattern: the first panel will have a quick, one-liner type joke, and then the rest of the strip will lead up to another joke. Kind of like a two-for-one deal.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, it seems difficult enough to me to try to be funny every day, so I don't envy these people. And from what I remember, it was always the best strips that got the axe or only appeared on Sunday, while the same tired old shaggy dog strips churn out day after day.
It's a funny old world.
Hey! I just remembered something that may be of some help to those lame comic blues.
ReplyDeleteScott McCloud has frequently mentioned a game called "Five Card Nancy," based on the similarly dreary comic book, "Nancy and Sluggo":
http://www.scottmccloud.com/inventions/nancy/nancy.html
I wonder if it would work for comic strips, considering how much they recycle their backgrounds and "stock" angles?