Pop Culture

and a little tribute to another cartoonist

Mrs. Oldman returns today after a long absence. I thought it might be fun to give her a part time job, since she obviously enjoys dressing up.

Mrs. Oldman is 73 years old and has reached the age where she does not care about what other people think of her. In her case, this resolves as comic behaviour and sometimes a bit of risk taking. She can do things that nine year old Kate can’t do.

https://www.gocomics.com/furbabies/2025/01/05

I am still working out storylines for the spring. Some will be repetition with variation. Since FurBabies is such a young strip, and has changed so much in 18 months, very little material from 2023 can be revisited. Year 2024 featured longer story lines. I need more of these since I am familiar with developing longer stories. One off Gags are harder for me to write.

Animation story has a beginning and an end. Comic strips are an open ended story, a little slice of life from a particular comic strip world that continues as long as the cartoonist does. The online comics also allow the cartoonists to be in direct contact with the readers and receive instantaneous feedback. This can be daunting or (in my case) extremely helpful.

Kate will always be a terrible baker and Sirius will always react to everything as if it is new. Shawm will still make puns. Floof will still tease Sirius. She and Stella have changed the most and will have new material. None of the characters will get any older even if they celebrate birthdays.

Every day I get a ‘feed’ of many other strips, especially the ones with talking dogs and cats. I want to be sure that I’m not copying them. Sometimes gags and characters that I am thinking of using appear in the other strips first, so I cross them off the list.

One of my favorites, Richard Thompson’s CUL DE SAC, is a good one to study. It had a short run, only six years, since Richard sadly left us at an early age. You can see it from beginning to end and two collections feature the original weekly strips that appeared in the Washington POST for comparison together with informative interviews with Thompson. The characters changed slightly (he eliminated Mr. Danvers the talking guinea pig fairly early on) but he never lost the focus on the eccentric children and equally eccentric adults. I’ve read about his working methods and discovered that he also sometimes had trouble coming up with new ideas for his projects. We all do. That doesn’t always make me feel better but it helps me think in a new way.

So, there is a little ‘tribute’ featuring Alice and Petey Otterloop in today’s strip. I figured that Mrs. Oldman could have traveled to Washington, D.C. for a Santa Claus parade that was affected by cutbacks.

Speaking of cutbacks, Ann Telnaes left the Washington Post two days ago. She is here on Substack (The Open Window) and I recommend it highly.