River of Dust

Recently at CHIP (Communicaid for Hearing Impaired Persons), there was a collection of old VHS tapes that the staff were considering throwing out, because they hadn't used the boxes in an age of DVDs,
and furthermore,  the material on them was from the 80's, and was woefully outdated by now.
However, I talked them out of excising the stuff too soon, and even offered to make some copies by transferring them to DVD, because, hey, you never know.  Somebody might want a particular clip from one of those tapes sometime in the future.  So far, the person who was supposed to go through the tapes hasn't had a chance to do so yet, but it brought up that unfortunate reality of objects of potential historical value - there's too much undocumented and unlabeled stuff out there to ever be categorized entirely.

It reminded me of the subject of Broken Records by Siobhan Roberts that was featured in Saturday Night, a weekly Canadian magazine.  In it, it lamented that our Canadian historical archives are becoming increasingly backlogged without proper maintenance or organization, and is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain as more stuff is included to their already-bursting collection.

The ironic thing is that while the main text version has remained intact online, there's no archived collection of Seth's contribution to the article.  What you see here are photocopies of the relevant missing pages that were taken while I was taking my course on library archives.  A copy of a copy, as it were.

Part of the problem with having an excess of information is that so much of it gets passed over for more recent stuff that's more identifiable to the public.  One of the faults against Google is that they favor more updated news and rumours while neglecting old websites that might have more informative and in-depth articles.  The loss of Geocites and Altavista pages that haven't been backed up via Internet Archive is incalculable.

Much of what is mentioned certainly has some historical value, but the number of people who'd be interested in such items would have no idea that such things exist in the first place.  One of the jobs of a library archivist is not just to accumulate items of worth, but also to slim down the amount of material into something that would be contained in the human mind.  This involves weeding the impressive backlog of old books that have either been neglected or too damaged to be worth keeping.

Certainly there's some valuable information buried within the large collection of boxes, but finding and categorizing the relevant items to parties who would find them useful is outpaced by the sheer amount of available resources versus available and reliable staff capable of sifting throughout the material and sorting them into proper categorizational locations.  And God forbid if you should come across an item that has cross-referential descriptions.  Do you risk putting it in one category where it'd have more in common with the subject, or lump it in its own individual classification where it'd be more likely to be neglected and ignored?  Cross-promotional mixing of similar and dissimilar ideas is one of the cornerstones of creative imagination, and not having archives available for viewing is considered another loss.

In view of the recent flooding disasters that ruined many valuable artifacts and historical records just before they were going to be scanned for posterity this can be seen as either a lost opportunity too late or getting rid of lead weight.  What's worse?  To lose history to natural disasters or to store away valuable items where they'll never be appreciated?

The items can vary from photos, documents, radio interviews, cult commercials and videos that are becoming increasingly corroded to the ravages of time, even with protective elements in place to guard off vermin and mold.  It's one of the cruel ironies of life that the more recent writings has less of a shelf life than scribes written down on papyrus scrolls or parchment.  The latter has survived legibility for years while the former is lucky to last a decade at most without backups.

And yet, updating the documents to compressed computer records just presents another dilemma - by the time all the relevant items had been transferred to the latest digital database, the archived components would be obsolete.  It's an ever-increasing race against Bohm's law that's the inverse of Zeno's paradox.  Every time we started moving our archives to another reliable location, there's an as-yet technical innovation that'll render all our efforts useless.  The closer we get to our goal, the further away it gets away from us.

This is further compounded by by the sheer amount of information available and how people attach sentimental value to some things, and not others.  We're more likely to lament old books read in our youth that's now largely unavailable, because we were confident that we could retain the contents in our heads indefinitely, or we'd simply outgrown the stuff and didn't need it anymore.  Trying to explain the appeal of these nostalgic items without visual aids is an exercise in futility unless somebody out there happens to have enough storage space to hold everything of value ever.

Some items I've once owned that I got rid of that I now have nostalgic pinings for include:

• The early McDonaldLand Fun Times with their painted covers, rather than the later pamphlets that were less polished and more of a rush job.  It's always discouraging to see quality commercial products disintegrate before your eyes, and that's where I first learned my painful lesson about the decline of corporate merchandise.

• My Sesame Street magazines.  I've kept my collection of Chickadee and Electric Company / Kid City and the occasional World and Owl magazines, even though I'm long past the required reading age, simply because I can still recall my innermost thoughts when going through these entertaining educational primers.  I have no memory of any of the inside articles, save for a few cutouts of the cut & paste pages, I have no idea what the contents of the magazine were like.  I even had the double-page spread of a Halloween special used for the exterior of a TV set costume.  Sadly, all shots of me in disguise are out of focus, and the page I used for the picture is lost.
• 
  
• A Dukes of Hazard 3D comic that was included in a cereal box.  A quick search gave the hint that they might've come from Shreddies, but without seeing the interior, I have no way of knowing if it's the same one I remember.  The interior had something to do with a beauty contest, and Boss Hogg stealing Daisy away so his less-than-pretty wife would stand a chance at winning.  Like the show, it was hardly anything that would be considered high art.  What I most remember is out-of-focus cars in red and blue zooming along every other page, and dialogue consisting of "They got Daisy!" and  "Come here, Daisy!", and a judge declaring "The winner!" to a crowd of spectators, while an old man and his wife looked miserable.  There was also a Dukes of Hazard Wallet, but since I never saw the show, I didn't attach much sentimental value to it.  Too bad - it probably would've fetched a pretty penny.
• Not owned, but a lavishly illustrated children's library book titled "The Bath", where a boy cautioned not to play with the knobs ignores his mother's advice, and playful creatures as well as water pours out of the faucet.  It starts out fun at first with his rubber ducky, but eventually, the water takes on oceanic proportions and the once-friendly creatures start becoming more menacing, including one that somehow manages to light the seas on fire, and a robotic one splashing water HARD.  All the while, there was an ever-looming warning that his mother would be coming back to see this mess in a few minutes.  The nightmare only ended when his anthropomorphic duck got the idea to pull the bathtub.  It was awesomely terrifying, and I'm sorry I can't find any information on it.
• Also neglected are the various 80's Transformers toys that I played with, with most of their custom boxes and styrofoam packing intact.  The main reason for getting rid of them was that they were becoming more of a chore to transform into their respective shapes.  (Sixshot in particular)  Also, Astrotrain had a wire that kept falling off one of its wings, and Bruticus chest plate kept falling off.  That, and freeing up room in my closet for my books.  Years later, I could swear that I saw one of my toys, Metroplex being up for display at a convention for a far higher price than I'd originally asked for.  But I'm not bitter.  I had my fun with them, and still have fond memories of playing with them.  Besides, I still have the mini-pamphlet advertising books included in every box.
• I don't have too much significant attachment to other children's toys, but there's two I have fond memories of - one is the Fischer Price ringing apple, whose chime was strangely relaxing to my ears.  The other was a Tomy Tutor Play Computer which would slowly produce educational images similar to dial-up access to the internet.  The added benefit was that by pressing the space bar, you could have the pixelated effects become slightly animated on the screen.

The following aren't exactly material, but are a few video game oddities I've come across that I haven't seen mentioned or repeated anywhere:

• There was an odd glitch in Super Mario Bros. 2 where I slammed a POW block at the same time I picked up a key.  The resulting earthquake somehow forced me to the top of the level, bypassing the ceiling of world 3-3.  This game-breaking glitch meant I had to restart since there was no timer and no enemies up there.
• In Banjo-Tooie, you get a cutscene if you manage to rescue every Jinjo before facing the last boss.  However, if you take the hard route and skip over every Jinjo in the game, you'll get a different cutscene of King Jingaling all alone with no Jinjos around to celebrate.  Whenever I've replayed the game using the extra-speed cheat, I always get the celebratory video.  Having gotten used to the super-fast mode of Kazooie's running, I can't play it normally to see it again.  It's not even available on Youtube!
• I managed to collect all the items in Majora's Mask in one day, save for a heart container that's only available if I beat the Goron Mountain boss.  I could get it by beating him, but then I'd miss the opening caption from Tatl when I re-enter a finished temple for the first time.  The 4th dungeon animation is quite interesting since it starts off from an extreme close-up, and then rotates around to Link's entrance.

Doug Wright's Cats

I seem to have a kind of knack for finding rare books that I like. I was lucky enough to find garage sales that sold old collections of Sunday comics of For Better or For Worse and Herman, especially since they're no longer printed anymore. I even found some old Pogo books of original stories that weren't in the newspaper for $0.25 each. (I highly recommend Pogo's Peek-a-Book, which has two of the funniest stories I've read that had a direct influence on Calvin & Hobbes) In that same bookstore, I passed up five issues of the colourized Akira comic, issues 1, 2, 13, 19 and 27. Incredibly enough, I later found those very same issues for sale at a garage sale just outside my jurisdiction. That led me on a serious comic-hunting spree to find the rest of the series once I got the most expensive issues cheap.

Some months ago, I was doing some book-hunting at library booksale looking for bargains. After finding several out-of-print children's books, I didn't want to leave just yet, because I felt a slight buzzing in the back of my head that gave me the sense that there was still a good book lying around, just hiding in plain sight. Then, tucked in a corner of the non-fiction section, I saw the title Stolen Innocence, a biography about growing up in a polygamous society. I figured my mother would like it, since she enjoyed the first three seasons of the HBO series Big Love, a kind of cross between Desperate Housewives and the Sopranos. Once I found it, the buzzing stopped and I was able to pay and leave.

Prior to that, I made an amazing discovery. Buried somewhere in the humour section was a collection of Doug Wright's editorial cartoons. Knowing that Doug was finally gaining some respect in the comics field by having his Nipper comics reprinted, it seemed too good to pass up.

It feels a little unusual seeing Doug's normally silent people giving lengthy monologues in a New-Yorker style of speech. It's the same problem I have when reading Groo - I'm so used to Sergio's pantomime that Evanier's script seems overly redundant. Most of the comics are in the very dry joke category, rather than the laugh-out-loud kind. Not to mention that despite the title, many of them are hardly political at all. They seemed more like large one-panel strips that could fit comfortably between Hi & Lois and The Family Circus. Except that there's no reoccuring characters; it's a different set of people and location every time. The closest it gets to an editorial comic is a meeting between Nixon & Trudeau, who're doing each other's makeup on live TV. What this is supposed to mean is anyone's guess.











The front cover isn't much to look at, but it's the back cover that's the main selling point. I'm always amazed at how much effort artists put on the unseen portion of a cover, when they're likely to be overlooked. Most online bookstores don't even bother with the back cover unless it's covered with reviews of glowing praise from multiple sources on how good the book is.

There is one saving grace though. There were three pages about a cartoon cat, whose philosophies seemed pretty much spot on. It's radically different from any of the other strips in the book and seems to be done for a special in the Spectator magazine it originally ran in. For the sake of saving anybody's bank accounts from having to pay for an overpriced book online just to see the best parts, I'll be reproducing them here:






















The cat's exasperation in the next-to-last panel there is very reminiscent of Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory. Even better when you consider that there's a children's book titled All Cats have Asperger's Syndrome. This could tie in to how Sheldon could relate to cats when his "girl-not girlfriend" didn't want to see him anymore.

Next up is a perfectly explainable reason for why cats are constantly wanting to go in and out of houses, seemingly on a whim.


































The dog in that last panel there is modeled exactly how Farley in For Better or for Worse tended to run. Goes to show just how influental Doug Wright was.

Pay special attention to the upper left hand corner of the next strip...

FOOB Redundancy?

After doing the calculations of the latest collection, with 368 pages, I figured it’d be more like 2 ½ years than three years. (52 weeks x 3 pages [Dailies & Sunday]) x (3 books) = 468 pages. If it were 468 pages, that would be an exact 3 years, fitting in with the 30 years she’d put up with the strip. Instead, with 100 missing pages, we’re out by almost half a year. (-100 pages ÷ 3 pages) = (33 weeks) So, instead of having 10 books, in a decade’s worth of releases, we’d have 12 books for the remainder of Lynn’s lifetime. (30 years ÷ 2 ½ years) = 12 books. (33 weeks x 11 books) = 363 pages for the last book.

If the new collections adheres to this rigid standard, there probably won’t be any room for any of the doodles she did in place of the missing strips in previous collections. (Some of which were very memorable.) I’ve oftentimes wondered if there was ever going to be a collection of the comics she did for the Calendars, which were large one-panel jokes. Some of them were ripped off from the daily strip, while others were entirely new.


















While trying to figure out how much of the previous collections would be in the latest omnibus, something else came to mind - I was thinking too much about a strip I used to care about.


















Lately, I’ve been wondering if the FOOB Livejournal has any further purpose to its existence? It no longer has as many visitors as it used to in its heyday. Most of its audience has left for greener pastures, leaving only the dedicated who’ve stayed. The last group of faithfuls include trumanf, aprilp_katje, dreadedcandiru2, forworse, and howtheduck. Not to mention that the AllFOOBedUp parody page has stopped updating after the last of Lynn’s new dailies stopped circulation. The other parody sites, Foob's Paradise concluded last year, and The Fifth Panel hasn't updated since March 17th. The only new element is Elly's twitter, which updates infrequently, and would be funnier if we had the comics they were referencing. (Something that Coffee talk with Warren & Paul solved) All they’re essentially doing at this point is preaching to the choir to the faithful few who’ve stayed.

At this rate, they run the risk of only talking to their own audience in the same way that Lynn was surrounded by adoring fans. When nobody has any substance to say, any further talks loses all meaning. I’m reminded of how Dirk Deppey of The Comics Journal finally decided to end his continual arguments with Brian Hibbs over selling comics at the bookstores - he decided to leave one final argument and go home. He’d only refer to that article if the man decided to bring up the issue again. There comes a time where it’s easier to stop making the same argument every time, especially if you’re not going anywhere. There are other things worth wasting your energies on.

Everybody knows that Peanuts in its last decade wasn’t as good as Schultz’s work in its peak years. Yet you don’t hear anybody constantly harping over those lackluster strips. The only defender of those later strips was, ironically enough, Bill Watterson. Although he was constantly bemoaning the limitations of the Newspaper strip, he continued to lavish praise on his favorite cartoonist.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Peanuts. Every now and then I hear that Peanuts isn't as funny as it was or it’s gotten old or something like that. I think what's really happened is that Schulz, in Peanuts, changed the entire face of comic strips, and everybody has now caught up to him. I don't think he's five years ahead of everybody else like he used to be, so that's taken some of the edge off it. I think it's still a wonderful strip in terms of solid construction, character development, the fantasy element...Things that we now take for granted–reading the thoughts of an animal for example–there's not a cartoonist who's done anything since 1960 who doesn't owe Schulz a tremendous debt.

The problem was, compared with the earlier Peanuts, there were week or month-long stories, and we were reduced to one-panel jokes. There were very few highlights other than Rerun experimenting with Underground comics. I would’ve liked to see more of Lydia, the girl who continued to infuriate Linus by constantly changing her name and because she was born a few months after Linus, always asked, “Aren’t you too old for me?”

The FOOB Livejournal certainly didn’t think that Elly was a horrible woman until the last ten years or so of the strip. If the people at the FOOB journal are reduced to talking about how dysfunctional the Pattersons are, then they’re grasping at straws. For a REAL dysfunctional family, they should check out Alan Moore’s The Bojeffries Saga, which is like a British version of the Addams Family.

Not to mention that with no newer strips coming from Lynn Johnson, what else are they going to focus on? How long are they going to re-analyze the older strips with the same mean streak? Until John & Uncle Phil goes on the canoe trip that opened up the FBOFW world and showed more than just Elly’s viewpoint? That could be years off, and could be very tiring to continuously hear nothing but negative interpretations of Lynn’s mental state, now that we know how much of a messed up person she is. I’d rather enjoy the story these people make, rather than be constantly reminded of what kind of people they are.

There have been many people who’ve tried to get through Dave Sim’s ambitious comic, Cerebus one issue at a time, but they’ve never gotten further than the first volume, which was Sim’s weakest, back when he was still experimenting with the form. Even the CereBlog, which found new historical interpretations for those early stories never even made it halfway through.

It’s a strange thing that Lynn Johnson and Dave Sim (both of whom are Canadian) both got increasingly mentally hinged in their later cartooning days. So far, only Jim Unger (of Herman fame) avoided this escape into madness by retiring early. (Even though Jim was British-born, he later emigrated to Canada, but made one-panel comics there)

Part of it might be that Dave and Lynn were influenced by one of the unsung hero of the Canadian Cartoonist world, who’s only just now being recognized; Doug Wright.




















































































































































































Doug Wright’s works first appeared in the Montreal Standard, which was released bimonthly (every two weeks) which is why he wasn’t widely known outside his country. He wasn’t well known, even in his home country, which is something Fantagraphics is trying to change with their release of two large hardcovers of his works. Granted, these collections can be daunting for the average customer (the things are the height and width of a small table), so it’s fortunate that a more user-friendly collection, Nipper has been announced.

Nipper was created before Hank Ketchem’s Dennis the Menance, and with his bald head, was considered to be a homage to Charles Schultz’s Peanuts. The difference between these two being that Nipper was entirely silent, with only a few sound effects and store signs being the sole exception. Not to mention its unusual format - every strip was vertical instead of horizontal, and was in black and white and red.

As Lynn Johnson wrote in the foreword to the collection, “The Doug Wright family was what I wished my own family was like.” Indeed, the boy wasn’t bratty 100% of the time - he had brutish tendencies, but didn’t act on all of them. And the parents could be exasperated, but could be just as understanding in the same instance.




















































































































































































There were even two Nipper comics that inspired two FBOFW strips. If you’re going to rip off someone, rip off from the best, and an obscure source. (Sorry about the discolouration - I couldn’t fit the entire book on the scanner, which should give you some idea of how big the collection was)





























































































































































































































More than anything, I’d like to think that FBOFW had more good influences than bad. Raina Telgemeier, the illustrator of The Baby-Sitter’s Club even said she based her drawings on a FBOFW pastiche. However clean her works look, I feel it suffers from an insistency of sameness, where the profiles are identical throughout the stories. It might not be obvious to younger readers, but to a comic veteran like me, it’s glaringly obvious.

Then there’s Lynn’s background stories, which would happen in silence while the main story was in the foreground. Next to the fighting clouds between Mike & Liz (which were always different every time), these were some of my favorite details in FBOFW. Samm Schwartz (the definitive Jughead artist) used this kind of thing all the time, and was a popular element in the early Yakitate! Japan chapters.


























































































Then there’s the inimitable Posy Simmonds, whose works predated FBOFW. (and who I blogged about in an earlier post) I might make a separate post about her Wedding, if anybody’s interested.

















Not to mention there’s plenty of Family-friendly French BDs that’s never been translated that would be a big hit on this side of the shore. One title that comes to mind is Margot et Oscar Pluche (later shortened to Sac a Puces) [Fleabag in French]. It’s about a Girl & her stray Dog, her large family (6 children, counting Margot, not counting the baby who was born at the end of a later volume)

















Then there’s Nathalie, who has shades of Calvin in her. She has grandoise plans of traveling to exotic places, oftentimes involving her baby brother who she rentlessly tortures every other strip. Her father’s being a workaholic and her mother suffering from maniac depression surely have nothing to do with her antics. Not to mention her Uncle looks and acts a lot like Uncle Phil in his early days.










































































Of the translated BD family strips available over here, only Cedric from Cinebook has been brought over. Apart from bringing home bad report cards and having a crush on the Chinese girl, he’s pretty much like any other kid. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen his Grandfather laugh.







































































Anybody hoping to find a new Family Newspaper comic strip on par with FBOFW in its peak years should give up. You’d have more success finding a webcomic capable of filling that role. Their autobiographical comics are nothing like the self-loathing Robert Crumb versions that Indy comics are most reputed for. They’re more likely to have humourous elements, the good with the bad, and have visual metaphors in the mix.

What I worry about is not the stagnation of comic writers who develop a rut in their style, but the legion of comic fans who simply stop looking for something better. Sure it’s safe to stay within the comics you’ve grown up with, but that also cuts off your possible enjoyment of other comics with better potential. It’s always scary venturing out into the unknown, especially if there are some known stinkers out there. But the pay-off is worth it for those willing to devote their time and effort. For the less adventurous out there, having a helping hand to traverse these unknown waters could be a huge help.