The cartoons are awfully wordy the last couple of days.
I remember being a kid and reading the newspaper comic strips every day. Not all of them. Doonesbury was one I typically didn’t read because it had too many words. I guess if I wasn’t spoiled for choice, I’d have read it no matter what. Back then, I read anything that had a cartoon aspect to it. Ernie Ball Strings & Things catalogs had a cartoon feature in them of an Eagle and his son explaining the guitar business. I didn’t know diddly about guitars and stuff, but by golly, I read and re-read that stuff ’cause it was well-drawn cartoons.
I saw the Ernie Ball material at my dad’s store over the summer holidays when I was too young to be left on my own, both parents were working and anyone else who could look after my brother and me were otherwise occupied. That’s also where I first saw a Doonesbury treasury book. Big thick book full of comic strips. Amazing. One of the guitar teachers had brought it in. I ignored it as long as I could but after a certain point, it was a book full of comic strips. It had to be read, and I had a summer in a store full of stuff I didn’t know diddly about.
And that’s how I lost my fear of “too-wordy” comic strips. The book was the one where, lost in the midst of all the other cartoons, an American couple adopts a Vietnamese baby, who cries about the black specks in her oatmeal ’til it’s pointed out that they’re just raisins. Doonesbury-style, she looks back into the bowl thinking, “I thought that was shrapnel.” The baby’s name was Kim. I’m convinced that she eventually became the Kim that Mike Doonesbury married and started the Mikim company with. That comic strip has been telling stories for a long, long time.
Makes Hubris’ six years and piddly few words seem like a drop in the ol’ bucket.
