Seriously Funny

I've always enjoyed the cartoons/funnies/comic strips you get in newspapers, but I think my appreciation of them as genuinely remarkable works of the imagination has only really blossomed in very recent years. At one time I might have cited admiring the obviously classy stuff like Doonesbury - not that I get to see that too often now as it's not run in the dailies here, and I rarely look at this stuff on-line. But now my admiration is more general, extending to material that doesn't do all that much for me personally - Garfield, for example.

Why so? I suppose it's my belated recognition of the staying power of the creators involved - their extraordinary ability to be funny, in their own terms, every day of the year.

And another factor in my heightened sense of appreciation is that I've arrived a greater awareness of the visual qualities of the drawings in themselves. Just one example: I've become a bit of a fan of Baby Blues, run daily in The Straits Times. Yes, it's a bit cutesy and has a distinct sense of appealing to a definite demographic, but within its self-imposed limitations it creates a wonderfully rich world. And the drawings of the kids are in themselves so absolutely right that it's startling, yet the rightness is achieved in a remarkably spare way.

I'm guessing the guys who are responsible for the heavily syndicated strips earn huge amounts of money. They deserve it.