October 28, 2005

• Interesting. I can see it. 'Calvin and Hobbes' creator keeps privacy
• The humor is wry in kinda the same way too, although seldom as side-splitting or charming as Calvin was. Don't get me started on Bloom County
• Following the links, Jef Mallet is doing a bunch of book signings, which doesn't sound too reclusive.
• Mallet appears to be a real human being, and, apparently a Calvin and Hobbes fan, so perhaps it is just an acknowledged stylistic similarity. There are pictures of an angular, silver-haired bloke claiming to be Jef Mallet on Google Image Search.
• Jef Mallett claims he is not Bill Watterson. But then he would say that, wouldn't he? :)
• Have the two of them ever been seen at the same place at the same time??
• Not the same guy. I will bet you a million dollars. Check this sample C&H strip. The drawing talent is light years ahead; the lines are finer, the feeling of volume much better realized, and the backgrounds convey space around the characters rather than flat abstraction. This "Frazz" is a vile imposter and must be pitched over the castle wall at once!
• Moneyjane is right. C&H had a style that went simply beyond cartooning. Some strips look like traditional Japanese paintings. Watterson's ink work is voluptous sometimes. None of this can be seen in the Frazz comics.
• Frazz is good, real good. But as long as C&H is around he'll always be second best, see? come back to us, Bill! Come back!
• Stylistically, Frazz looks like EARLY Calvin and Hobbes, obviously not something Watterson would be doing today unless he was being artistically lazy. I'm just happy for any attention to come to one of the best strips on the funny papers today (okay, that sounds like damning with faint praise). Frazz Roolz.
• From the linked article:

  At some point, it was revealed that “Frazz” is a derivative of the character’s last name, when he was addressed as “Mr. Frazier.” That’s when I started to get really suspicious. So far as I’m aware, Calvin’s last name was never given in the strip. So it was entirely possible that we were reading about the exploits of one Calvin Frazier.

  If I understand him correctly, his argument is: Frazz has a last name, and Calvin's last name was never given; ergo Frazz must be Calvin. I think this may be the worst argument I have ever seen for anything, anywhere.
• Unless Watterson is drawing with the wrong hand, that's immediately, obviously, not his art.
• Transcript of a graduation address Watterson gave at his alma mater. It's a good read.
• Watterson isn't Mallett... Salinger is Watterson and Mallett. Dontcha see? He's all reclusive and no one knows shit all about him... Holden Caulfield's antisocial breakdown is inherent in the magic bullet speculating Calvin is comic styles, area 51 the easy left back and to the left. It makes no sense, unless you Jef Mallett through the looking glass, hidden an illuminati by cult worship back thorugh reptoids who sent the M1 Abrams and Bradley's to burn Waco first--unofficial, they don't want you to know about the hemp authority. I ever tell you guys about the CIA vampire recruiter who told me everything (I, a complete stranger) about the telekinetic experiments? Not the MK-Ultra ones, but the MAD-Uber ones. They were using 'missing' and homeless children by force feeding the poor wisacres LSD and forcing them with leet speek commands to manipulate Mad magazine fold-ins and very stiff old shoelaces with their minds...
• Insolent, I could listen to you all the 4-day time.
• Speaking of great comic art, Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland strip turned 100 last year. If you're an admirer of Watterson's art, and you don't know McCay's, you should go immediately to this page, where you can click on the teensy thumbnails on the right and be amazed.
• It's a bold theory InsolentChimp but your closely sourced presentation of the evidence is hard to refute.
• from one of these links: I compared the hand-writing. It’s not the same guy. Watterson’s “i”s look like this: “I” Mallett’s “i”s look like a straight line. I just don’t think Watterson would change his writing habits. Which seems pretty true. Although based on this I'd say Mallett needs some more time or originality
• That's terrible
• I had never heard of the strip, and I can see where Mallett was influenced by Watterson, but I don't thik they're the same guy. It is nice to see a strip that takes kids seriously, though. (or, since this is comedy, treats kids like humans and not little stupid aliens.) I will add this to my reading list!
• I don't know- 'terrible' might be a little strong. 'Cathy' is terrible. But it's hard to believe anybody seriously thinks this is Watterson. Neither the writing nor the art is in the same league.
• He explained the joke. He explained the joke. You never do that. The *only* thing that should have been added was the 'go back & tell him to get a battery' in the last cell. If the reader doesn't get it from the visual of the plug in the socket, then the plug lying there bereft in the next cell, there's no point in emphasising that again, that kills it.
• ( o> -- Stan's right, that's a different league. ///\ \V_/_
• Considering what else in in the Sunday funnies these days, Frazz is pretty good. But much (most? all?) of the humor is delivered through straight-up dialogue, as Chyren points out. You could pretty much eliminate all the art from the strip petebest posted (for example) and it would read about the same. I think that's very unlike Calvin and Hobbes.
• 'Cathy' is terrible. You mention Cathy before Family Circus? I mean, goddamn, is Cathy ever bad, but Family Circus is godawful! Who likes it, Jeffy? Not me! And Ziggy? What's up with these guys? The list goes on. The only reason some comic strips are good is by comparison because most of them aren't worth picking up your dog shit from the curb with. It's like picking shit up with shit--it's an empty gesture. Here's a conspiracy theory: the reason so many people can't curb fido is because they keep flipping open to the "funnies" when they have that nagging urge to commit civic duty. In fact, it might be impossible to tell if the "good" comics are more than mediocre just because the proximity to such utter shit. Anyone seen Overboard? Tee, hee. I said duty.
• I'm so glad someone else besides myself thinks that Frazz looks like Calvin. This strip starting running in our paper a couple of years ago and the first time I laid eyes on it, I cried foul! But I do like Frazz, it's one of the smartest strips out there as far as dialogue goes (strips in the paper, that is).
• Frazz is OK by me. He's a Carl Hiaasen fan. 'Nuff said.
• I actually typed Family Circus first, then changed it to Cathy on the theory that saying 'Family Circus is terrible' might be trite.
• Trite? We're talking about comic strips...
• I think we are not the target demographic for the Sunday funnies. Many of the "classic" strips like Family Circus, Blondie, Cathy, Wizard of Id, are ancient franchises targeted towards the direct descendants of the Visigoths who sacked Rome.
• Oh Snap!
• Metatrite. Heh.
• I want to believe.
• Personally, I just want to put Marmaduke to sleep.
• ...saying 'Family Circus is terrible' might be trite Not trite. Redundant. And understated.
• Remember "Nancy"? Now that was bad.
• There's been extensive discussion of any possible connection between Frazz and Calvin in rec.arts.comics.strips on Usenet. It might be possible to find the arguments and support for the verdict through Google groups, but the consensus has been that Frazz is not supposed to be a grown-up Calvin.
• moneyjane's right, that ain't Watterson. Put the Sunday strips side by side. They're not even close. The main character looks like older Calvin – that's it. That's all. Frazz isn't super great, but it's not a reliable insult to the reader like most of the dailies.
• Nancy? Ernie Brushmiller at his height was great! The stuff they've been peddling as Nancy for as long as I've been alive is terrible. And yes, Frazz is a good strip but there are very few cartoonists out there in the same league as Watterson. And for all the fans out there, the Complete Calvin & Hobbes just came out at the beginning of the month. Three hardcover volumes. *drools*
• There's a certain type of individual who can give us a window on a fully-realised world rather than draw funny pictures, and they are very few. Any Fleshy the cat fans in the house?
• Somehow I can't get dilettante's newsgroup link to work in Firefox. This might be the same problem that keeps me from being able to open email links from websites like I could in the old Mozilla days; any advice? It works when I check the group through Google this way.
• Moneyjane - are you referring to the Monty (previously Robotman) cat? Fleshy's tops! And robotman was a great strip. Amazing what happens even when you start off as a merchandising vehicle.
• Amazing what happens even when you start off as a merchandising vehicle. Heh.. United Features first tried to get Watterson to put Robotman in Calvin and Hobbes.
• Wait...I thought Thomas Pynchon was Salinger.
• I miss when it was Robotman and they used to have the Star Trek cats appear!
• Whoa rajbot, I didn't know that. Thanks for the link.
• Every time I've seen it, I just assumed it was a horrible rip-off. I never once in a million years imagined it might have been written under a fake name.
• Frazz is way too PC. It is nice that the children are real people seen from an adult point of view, but I don't find it all that interesting over the long run. On the other hand, my local paper is running old Calvin and Hobbes strips while trying to find something more permanent that won't put people to sleep. Those old strips are still more fun than anything else running in the paper. For me, I think the key is subversion. I grew up the Katzenjammer Kids and Krazy Kat, then Pogo, where the subversion was much subtler. Even Garfield and Mother Goose and Grimm, in their day had stuff that would make me laugh out loud, but no more. The recently "hot" strips in my local paper are Sherman's Lagoon (sharks in pearls, gimme a break) and some other thing with pigs and zebras, which I find ugly. (Those two have forced me to go back to reading Blondie, which I hadn't for 40 years, just to get that few more minutes of mindless wakeup time.) Do any of you read/like them? I do read Get Fuzzy, hoping for the best, but the dog is the only character I find funny. I do so wish that there were good replacements for Larson's and Waterson's comics. Need more subversion. Actually, what I think I need is a quidnunckid comic.
• Frazz is way too PC. It is nice that the children are real people seen from an adult point of view, but I don't find it all that interesting over the long run. On the other hand, my local paper is running old Calvin and Hobbes strips while trying to find something more permanent that won't put people to sleep. Those old strips are still more fun than anything else running in the paper. For me, I think the key is subversion. I grew up the Katzenjammer Kids and Krazy Kat, then Pogo, where the subversion was much subtler. Even Garfield and Mother Goose and Grimm, in their day had stuff that would make me laugh out loud, but no more. The recently "hot" strips in my local paper are Sherman's Lagoon (sharks in pearls, gimme a break) and some other thing with pigs and zebras, which I find ugly. (Those two have forced me to go back to reading Blondie, which I hadn't for 40 years, just to get that few more minutes of mindless wakeup time.) Do any of you read/like them? I do read Get Fuzzy, hoping for the best, but the dog is the only character I find funny. I do so wish that there were good replacements for Larson's and Waterson's comics. Need more subversion. Actually, what I think I need is a quidnunckid comic.
• Sorry, I think my war over wireless network ownership must have posted that from both networks. Or something.
• I read Mutts. It's never funny. But I always read it. And frankly, it's got the best post-c&h artwork on the funny page these days. Hell, the art may sometimes be better. But it's never funny.
• Yep! Robotman/Monty rules! Fleshy is the cutest hairless braindamaged cat ever!
• It's sometimes funny. Give it up, yo.
• Wait...I thought Thomas Pynchon was Salinger. That's what they want you to think. Pynchon was a top secret gov't agency pseudonym for the old double agent fake. You know, where they pretend to be a reclusive communist doppleganger disseminating unfathomable convolutions. Meanwhile, the presuppositions of this obvious chimaera settle in to the patient observer and you think, "well, now ya can't fool me, Pynchon." Then, when you least expect it they strike. Thing is they gave themselves away. I suppose it was ego or something, but it's all in the stamps, Oedipa. And if that doesn't convince you then just think about the name: Thomas Pynchon is an obvious anagram of SPY NACHO MONTH. I've said too much.
• On this topic, I have recently purchased Gravity's Rainbow and it is, in my opinion, turgid artless crap*. Also, I like "Marmaduke". That adorable dog! You may pity my ignorance, or hail me as a god. The power is YOURS. *I still want Crying of Lot 49 though.
• Bah -- Salinger, Pynchon, Watterson: They're all Mark Leyner and his bonobo chimp friend! In the novel, you as a 13-year-old, with your partner, a genetically altered bonobo chimp, write quite a few novels during your spare time. You use pseudonyms made from anagrams of the names of famous Bougainvillean ... ... tetherball players. Although, I used minor league tetherball players, because some of the big ones were so famous. I didn't want people to figure it out, and certainly in Bougainville, it would be easy to figure it out. We didn't want to anagramize Off-Ramp Tivana Poo Poo, for example. You came up with such names as Donna Tartt, Douglas Coupland, Elizabeth Wurtzel and Martin Amis. Then when you come back to the states, you discover that impostors have claimed to be these mythical "hot" young novelists, when actually, you wrote all those books.
• Nope, sorry petebest. It's NEVER FUNNY. And you can tell that I know what I'm talking about because I wrote "never funny" in all caps. So there.
• I have some serious love for Mark Leyner.

  When I was eight, I was sent to live on the melon farm of an uncle- a sixth grade dropout who attributed his IQ of 70 to sniffing gasoline and glue from the age of five, and whose manner of compulsively clawing at the skin behind his neck was a characteristic sign of amphetemine toxicity. One morning he served me a cereal that consisted of sweetened corn puffs and marshmallow, hook-nosed, bearded "Jews." I asked him to never serve that cereal to me again. The next morning, he set a heaping bowl of the same cereal on my place mat. I killed him with a 12-gauge shotgun blast before lunch. That night I buried him in the cyclone cellar. I stole his pickup truck and drove out to a huge diesel-run electric turbine plant near the outskirts of the city and I had my first sexual experience. Afterward, I lit a cigarette and looked up into the sky- there was God, wearing a pink polo shirt, khaki pants, and brown Top-Siders with no socks, his blond hair blowing in the powerful wind of charged particles and intense ultraviolet radiation from the galactic center. I hated him. And he hated me. (from Et Tu, Babe)

• I'm embarassed that anyone imagines that strip is anything but a lame rip-off. totally different league.
• Yeah, I really don't for a second think that Mallett is Watterson. Among modern strips... the thing is, my fiance is a comics artist. The only strip he likes is Mutts. And I'm like, "Yeah, honey, it's cute in a Krazy Kat way, but you know, the writing sucks. It's boring and cutesy." So I try to get him to read "Get Fuzzy", which is my favorite of the strips (more consistently funny than most), but he doesn't like the art. I also like Pearls Before Swine (the one with the pig and zebra) but do not read it every day. Cat and Girl is great among webcomics. But fiance's opinion is based almost totally on the art and, I suspect, alternative cachet. Incidentally, you do occasionally catch a funny Wizard of Id. But they are sadly infrequent.
• Here's a podcast of a recent interview with Bill "Calvin & Hobbes" Watterson's Mom. The one thing I miss about getting a physical paper is reading comic strips on a daily basis. As for what's out there which I think still merits attention, I would rank Mutts and Get Fuzzy amongst them. But a strip which needs more exposure and accolades is 9 Chickweed Lane.
• Oh, and go fleshy, go!
• And since we're on the comic strip bandwagon, here's Classic Spiderman done right.
• -O-<<