Penguins / Fuzzy / Agnes
May. 4th, 2004 12:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishRichard and Florence Atwater, Mr. Popper's Penguins
First reread in a good many years. Mr Popper gets a penguin from an Antarctic explorer, and then gets another one from a zoo because his is lonely, and then has a bunch of baby penguins, and then they become a performing act. It's cute and amusing, but also very dated. The general feel of late-1930s household is overwhelming. Mrs. Popper says things like "I don't know how I'll be able to get all the cleaning done with a man sitting around the house all day." Etc. Plus large plot holes, but I really shouldn't be taking a children's book about performing penguins to task for that.
The penguins are pretty cool, and what good is litereature if it can't give you penguins tobogganing down fire escapes?
Darby Conley, Get Fuzzy: The Dog is Not a Toy (Rule #4) / Fuzzy Logic / The Get Fuzzy Experience / Blueprint for Disaster
Get Fuzzy isn't as brilliant as Pearls, but the art is better. ("Better?" The technique is better; the Pearls art does its job without distracting from the funny. "Good art" is basically a useless phrase.)
Most comic strips feel like the work of one person. I imagine Darby Conley as two people, though, riffing off each other until there's enough funny to support a strip. Or a week of strips. [Like the week of the cat conference, featuring cats who want to take over the world. Fidel Catstro. Meowsollini. Karl Manx. Kitty Amin. Etc.] Maybe it's that the conversations just seem so natural, so much like people I know only wittier.
Tony Cochran, Agnes: I'm Far Too Young to Look This Hot
Comic strip about a middle-school girl who lives in a trailer with her grandmother. Cute and amusing, but not nearly brilliant. I do appreciate seeing a nontraditional family in a comic strip, though.
First reread in a good many years. Mr Popper gets a penguin from an Antarctic explorer, and then gets another one from a zoo because his is lonely, and then has a bunch of baby penguins, and then they become a performing act. It's cute and amusing, but also very dated. The general feel of late-1930s household is overwhelming. Mrs. Popper says things like "I don't know how I'll be able to get all the cleaning done with a man sitting around the house all day." Etc. Plus large plot holes, but I really shouldn't be taking a children's book about performing penguins to task for that.
The penguins are pretty cool, and what good is litereature if it can't give you penguins tobogganing down fire escapes?
Darby Conley, Get Fuzzy: The Dog is Not a Toy (Rule #4) / Fuzzy Logic / The Get Fuzzy Experience / Blueprint for Disaster
Get Fuzzy isn't as brilliant as Pearls, but the art is better. ("Better?" The technique is better; the Pearls art does its job without distracting from the funny. "Good art" is basically a useless phrase.)
Most comic strips feel like the work of one person. I imagine Darby Conley as two people, though, riffing off each other until there's enough funny to support a strip. Or a week of strips. [Like the week of the cat conference, featuring cats who want to take over the world. Fidel Catstro. Meowsollini. Karl Manx. Kitty Amin. Etc.] Maybe it's that the conversations just seem so natural, so much like people I know only wittier.
Tony Cochran, Agnes: I'm Far Too Young to Look This Hot
Comic strip about a middle-school girl who lives in a trailer with her grandmother. Cute and amusing, but not nearly brilliant. I do appreciate seeing a nontraditional family in a comic strip, though.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-04 10:27 am (UTC)