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Thursday, August 28, 2008
Loving the Unloved
I've always had a sort of soft-spot for the Duck artists of the seventies. A lot of that comes from them being the artists I first associated with Duck comics. But some of it has to do with feeling a little bit sorry for them.
The artists in this period are doubly damned by most Duck fans. For one, people bash them for not being Carl Barks. Which is insane when you stop to think about it. Barks was the master for a reason, and it's grossly unfair to use him as the baseline. But the artists of this period are also complained about for not being the more stylized European Duck artists of the last decades, as if there was any remote way that the European style would have found a welcome home in cheaply produced licensed comics put out during a recession.
Granted, there's a lot not to like from this era. The characters are stiff. The backgrounds are frequently non-existent. The coloring is garish. And everyone is just a little bit off-model at the best of times, and grossly unrecognizable at the worst.
And, besides childhood nostalgia, that's actually, I think, part of their charm for me. I'll take a well-meaning failure over a cynical exploitation of what a big corporation thinks their customers want anyday.
Thumper decided to take up blogging as a pastime, sharing with the world everything there is to know about himself and his furry forest friends.
Thumper gained some popularity early on for, basically, telling the other forest creatures who were online what they wanted to hear and engaging in a not subtle at all campaign of complaining about the activities of the animals who hung around that other watering hole.
Which led to lots of comments from Thumper's readers along these lines:
One day, flush with his own ego and determined to show the world how great he is, Thumper tried to make some cash-money off the fact that he had a "very popular blog." It was then that Thumper discovered something very important, when he tried telling people who had never even heard of his blog how important he is:
Namely, that the real world doesn't give a good god-damn about how "important" your commentators think you are.
Tom Swift: Cyborg Kickboxer, 1991, Victor Appleton Given how every single world-threatening crisis Tom Swift deals with is caused by his own scientific arrogance, it's a wonder the kid didn't have his lab privileges revoked years ago.
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