Power Failure!

I just got an unpleasant surprise when I woke up early this morning, intending to watch a DVD series I took out of the library, I was near the end of the episode, when the light suddenly started flickering, and then I was staring at a blank screen growing dimmer in the darkness. The first thing I did was complain internally, because there wasn't anybody around to listen to me. I then started off by finishing some odd chores I'd done while waiting for the DVD to load, such as cutting up the rest of the watermelon, putting away some desert I neglected to eat the night before, and switching off all the power bars connecting to my computers in case a power surge came when the power would come back again. But before all that, I got the flashlight which was where I figured It'd be with the batteries still working. Since it was still the middle of the night, I needed to be able to see what I was doing. I'm pretty sensitive when it comes to bright light, but need the allure of a 60-watt bulb to set my mind at ease. I simply can't relax in the presence of a flickering candle flame for the same reason I don't like the great outdoors - there's too much uncertainty in nature. My comfort lies in stability, and not being bothered by the light being disturbed by the waving of tree branches.


















At times like these, I think about a certain innovative "light bulb" for 3rd world countries without electricity that can be easily assembled with the use of liquids and a plastic soda bottle. Trouble is, in order to find out how to produce this innovative piece of technology, I'd need to look it up online, when I had no access to the information beforehand. It also didn't help that this "light" bulb works best when it's bright out, which would be counter-intuitive in the dark.

So when the power went off without any warning, after I finished up the cleaning up, I started to pace around, full of energy, with no suitable outlet. I'm much more of a night owl than a morning person, and took this opportunity to go out and pedal around to see the full extent of the damage. After the infamous Ice Storm, I wanted to see whether the full extent of the power outage would've extended to the outreaches of the city, and whether there was any power still running. I was worried that I would never get the opportunity to embrace the glow of the electronic screen ever again; thinking back to those 3-month stints in India where there were entire populations without power. In situations like these, my mind always goes straight to worst-case scenarios.


















Part of my frustration lies in not having access to certain information. I can't rely on listening to the radio like everybody else - I have to get secondhand information from someone who can actually listen to the darned things. I was also worried that I wouldn't be able to tell anybody that I couldn't contact them, because my primary mode of communication is all electronic based. There's my email and Facebook accounts, my Skype which I talk to a scanlator weekly, and a TTY that needs electricity to work, even though the phone lines are still functioning. Even with all our technological advances, we're still held at the mercy of our electronic devices not being powered up by our transformers. I don't feel secure unless there's at least one backup power source for extra energy as presented in a rare instance where Dennis' "Children say the darndest things" actually made his parents laugh.


















What's especially frustrating when these blackouts happen is that they often occur in a secluded area of town, when the weather is perfectly fine. During strong storms when the rain is pounding against the windows, I'll cautiously turn off the computer during these turbulent times, and surprisingly enough, the power will manage to stay on. Yet when it's perfectly calm and sunny out, the power will suddenly turn itself off without warning. It's very frustrating. I remember a particularly aggravating moment when the power on our block was out, and the lights right across the street were working perfectly fine. Noticing the presence of electricity in the absence of your own is an unavoidable prospect, and the only real plothole in this otherwise fine Dennis comic, which some people have noted is better than the single-panel daily version.

License Request - Herman Omnibus

Last week on May 29th, my favorite single-panel cartoonist Jim Unger died in his sleep. There was something of a minor shock almost a decade ago when I saw that an Unger died in 2003, but it turned out to be Bob Unger, who was responsible for inspiring the majority of the jokes that made up the straightfaced humour of Herman. At the time, some people were worried it might’ve been musician David Unger who died.















I seem to be part of a minority of people who care that a comedic trailblazer passed away. More than any other comic, it was from Herman that I learned about comedic timing and human speech. His characters were capable of spouting the most natural one-liners spouted by what was essentially living mashed potatoes in human form. (Obviously inspired by Don Martin's natural clowns) Amazingly enough, Jim Unger admitted that he couldn’t draw the same guy twice, which was why Herman's character design was always inconsistent. Somewhat fitting for a cartoonist who changed his appearance as often as possible. Like Michael Jackson, no two pictures of Jim Unger are alike. His sense of humour and character designs were unique, and influenced other comics, not just The Far Side, but also spiritual successors Cornered and Close to Home, though none could hold a candle to Herman’s flame.















When Jim Unger first started, he thought that he would run out of material after the first month. It’s saying something that he managed to keep up his ability of being consistently funny for almost twenty years. It's also notable that he decided to leave his strip after he felt he was becoming burnt out, though there was no sign of any slowing down or decaying humour. It seems that twenty years is the ceiling for creating quality material before declining into Cerebus Syndrome.
















Then five years later, Herman returned to the newspaper on June 2, 1997 in the form of reruns, with Jim Unger continuing to create new comics for his renewed publishing. Though for the most part, this was reduced to rewording various daily strips rather than drawing new comics. And without Robert Unger’s guidance, they didn’t quite have the same spark of humour to them. Also, like some various Bloom County strips, some old comics had been dumbed down or had grammar corrected, which seemed a sin against Unger’s philosophy as mentioned in The Best of Herman book: “using bad grammar like ‘wanna’ is funnier than ‘want to’.”
















As an added insult, the daily strips were colourized, which seemed less appealing than the detailed screentone patterns in the original black & white. Some forms of media were updated, while other were left untouched, such as box television sets. Also, cultural references were updated to keep up with the times, such as changing telling the husband on an exercycle from “Don’t go too far, you’ll miss Gunsmoke.” to “Don’t go too far, you’ll miss Seinfeld.”





























Oh yes, there were plenty of cowboys & indian homages, back when Westerns were popular, and henpecked wives were a popular theme. (Relaying to Jim Unger’s disastrous marriages) It might've been that reliance to archaic devices that could've alienated modern readers, but that doesn't jibe with other comics & stories where old narrative elements are part of their charm.






























In some cases, the new lines were a shadow of their former selves. In others, the joke was either explained or improved on. A fan could quite literally spend the rest of their lives recaptioning any random Herman comic that would fit perfectly well within The New Yorker.





























Ironically enough, Jim Unger didn’t actually start producing new work for the Sunday pages until recently. Up until then, his last regulated output was limited to creating an extra for Blondie’s 75th Anniversary. (Herman’s right below Elly & John there) This is ALSO going to bump up my tag list with all these extras here, but I don’t care, since I enjoy Herman so much. I even created a Garfield mash-up comic of one of his most famous strips.












However, what I want is EVERY Herman comic published in chronological order, even the bad ones, and the inexplicable ones. I suspect that it was the recent Herman books containing multiple jokes that were already overly familiar in a new coat of paint & dialogue that put off faithful readers. I suspect that if we had a reprint project similar to the Fantagraphics Peanuts reprint, sales would be through the roof. One of the biggest deterrent to collecting every single strip was that a few more were being added late in his life, and thus, a final tally couldn't be figured out. It's just a shame that it would take the death of this fine man for this request to come through.















I also want this nonexistent album to contain the original texts that were used at the time of publication. If some of the references are too unwieldly or obscure, a footnote or alternative text can be inserted elsewhere.









































Only two books containing a large portion of his Sunday comics were ever reprinted. The first one was unique in that it was done in reverse chronological order. Starting from September 27, 1981 to March 30, 1980, as so not to alienate long-time fans with their weird crude amateurish early character designs which weren’t quite as charming as their later incarnations. This was also before the Herman logo would develop the flowery curved design later.


















There were some rumours of adapting his comic strip for an animated show on Teletoon, but nothing ever came to fruition, since the animation company in charge closed before anything could be produced. On the one hand, it’s kind of a shame, since it could’ve exposed an entirely new audience to Jim Unger’s works, and several of the silent Herman strips could’ve served as bumper slots in between commercials, similar to the Ducktales stills.















On the other hand, it’s doubtful they would’ve been able to tie together plots from dozens of Herman comics dealing with similar themes into a single cohesive narrative plot. What made Herman work so well was how much story could be contained within the constraints of a single panel. Free up that restriction, and you’ve got a singular stock man in any time frame trying to deal with absurd situations as best as possible. Herman works when you don’t exactly know who he/she/it is. Herman could be the executive, the doctor, the patient, the wife, the dog, the plant, the alien, or all of the above, or none of the above. WHO Herman was wasn’t important. It was what happened that was worth seeing.














“The new animated primetime series is based on the popular syndicated newspaper comic by Jim Unger, and features Herman, and his reactions to an insane world populated by lovable misfits surviving various life crisis.”
- the pilot pitch














There’s an online archive of many of Herman comics available at this address, and divided by subject and theme for easy browsing, though they’re all considerably reduced in size, which ruins the humour somewhat. It's recommended that you take your time going through all of them, because after awhile, you need to take a breather after so many jokes.















Out of all of the Herman comics, this last one seems more melancholic and thoughtful than the others, and doesn’t exactly end on a typical punchline. It feels more like the Calvin & Hobbes Sunday comic where Calvin & Hobbes would “meet each other in their dreams”. It’s unknown who this was intended for, but seems a fitting finale for a man who made the world laugh.

Power Failure

On Sunday, the fringes of Hurricane Irene hit our shores with all the media hype of a poetry signing, which is quite ironic, given how weather-conscious Canadians are. We're obsessed with any piece of forecast, no matter how mundane it is, since the mention of a slight breeze could spell either a perfectly mild day, or a pouring monsoon on any given workday. Part of the reason there was so little news was because it took place on a Sunday, and most of our news outlets is on standby until Monday. By the time the storm hit, everybody was enjoying their day of rest, and ignoring the weather outdoor, until it started to impact the lives of people.


















I was browsing the internet, doing nothing particularly important, when the power abruptly went out. I'd overconfidentially thought that this would be nothing more than a little storm, and the whole thing would blow over. When the computer blinked out as well as all the lights in the house, I simply resigned myself to my fate. The more often I get exposed to a certain traumatic event, the more desensitized I get to it.

I first went around turning off the power switches for the computers, so if (when) the power came back, it wouldn't create a power surge and risk frying the main CPUs of our hard drives. I'd gotten so used to the layout that I was able to figure out the location of the switchboards by feel alone. After that, there didn't seem to be much point in doing anything else - the DVDs I'd taken out wouldn't work, I couldn't play any video games, I couldn't even do any creative writing. And I normally preferred to read my with the light on and blinds closed. Under these situations, I'd have to read with the lights off, and the blinds open, which would ruin my enjoyment somewhat.

Without anything else to do, I spent most of the day just lying down feeling tired. While there are people who say that the dependency of electronic devices dehumanizes us, there's the other side of people who're utterly dependent on electronics to survive. I'm an artificial man who needs electricity to feel normal. I wouldn't be able to communicate well in person if I didn't have my hearing aids to compensate for any sounds I might miss. Would these anti-technologists insist that I just "listen harder"? It's like asking a heart patient to operate without a pacemaker.


















By the time I got up, it was still slightly light out, and I was amazed it was still 7:00. I finished reading a book about a rich kid (Elliot Allagash) who was a cross between Yoichi Hiruma and Douglas Fairchild in the pale cloudlight. When it became too dark to read, I settled for reading the remaining pages by flashlight. My mother who tried to complete her dossier wondered how novelists such as Leo Tolstoy managed to do their reading and writings by candlelight. The constant flickering was even more annoying than a fluorescence bulb. I suggested reading with her back against the candle, but it didn't work out too well.

















I started off on a tangent that in the olden days, people were too concerned with living on a day-to-day basis than actually bothering themselves with silly pastimes such as reading, which was why they relied more on oral narratives. Oralists debased writing, because they felt that it couldn't possibly match the intensity and emotive power of someone speaking in the presence of their audience. (though writing certainly made it easier to understand what these people were talking about) Before Nikola Tesla invented the 20th century, people must've been bored out of their minds.

In the meantime, our food was limited to what was lying around that could be eaten without opening the fridge. There wasn't much. The others cooked canned Campbell soup using a fondue stove, no milk. I settled for matzoh with peanut butter and jam. Crunchy, but it makes a terrible mess.










I wasn't feeling that hungry anyways. I was too worried that the food in our freezer would go bad without power, since the last time we had a massive city-wide power failure, we had to cook everything so nothing would go to waste. It was extremely distressing, because I'd just bought some pizza rolls from a meat man who sold his wares from Toronto, and was in semi-retirement, so he'd only come every year or so. These pizza rolls were some of my favorite snacks, and I'd stocked up on a large batch so I wouldn't suffer from withdrawal until the next visit. When the power hadn't come back as soon as I thought, I thought I'd have to cook two years supplies in one night (I like to stock up).

Fortunately, the power came back just as I was going to sleep - my buzzer alarm woke me up, surprising me. (When my alarm goes off, my bed shakes) Once the power was back on, I immediately went about setting the clocks back on the VCRs, so there wouldn't be any annoying 12:00 flashing lights, and I waited a little longer until midnight so it'd be even easier to reset the time. The most annoying was the old microwave, which because of a slight repair mishap, the only numbers that work are 3, 6, 8, and 0, which means that I have to wait until 3:00, 3:30, 3:33, 6:00, 6:30, 6:33, 6:36, 8:00, 8:30, 8:33, or 8:36 to reset it. Until we found out that the zero button worked, our options were even more limited.

















The one major plot hole of this Dennis story is that his parents are utterly ignorant of their block getting power back until they find out from Mr. Wilson. This isn't like the Simpson's version of Australia, where the closest neighbor is 20 miles away. For anyone who's been without electricity for a long stretch of time, they'd instantly jump on the latest current when it became available. My block is notorious for having our houses across the street getting their power back before us, and we often gaze at them in envy while cursing the power company for ignoring us. The only way Dennis' parents could be clueless for so long would be if they were utterly blind to this newfangled "electricity" thing.











The really ironic thing is, this post won't be identifiable to these people whose homes are still without power, until they get their electricity back. At least the power outage isn't as bad as in China, where they lose power at least twice a day. It can't be easy to save anything on the computer unless you save every five seconds. This kind of thing is why I'm hesitant to turn any electronics back on until I'm sure the power's really back, because I've had times when the power turned out as soon as we blew all the candles out, and we had to re-light our candles again.