I’m shooting myself in the foot by trash-talking a blog – especially one written by the very editors whose attention I’ve been trying to get for the past eight years – but some statements cannot go by unremarked.
Humor is all about surprise (a strikingly similar formula to Horror, strangely enough). But it is also about relatability, and demographics, and whatever a syndicate thinks makes a newspaper editor chuckle.
Bill Watterson snuck his weirder tendencies in the back door by making Calvin’s imagination so vivid. Had he sent in Spaceman Spiff as a submission, I have a feeling it wouldn’t have made it to the editor’s Inbox, let alone any newspapers. It seems the safest bet with a comic strip is one that features human characters doing everyday things.
I’m certainly not putting down any of strip that does feature human characters doing everyday things. Like I said, Calvin and Hobbes was, in part, a boy and his parents. Cul de Sac is a “family strip.” Heck, even Charles Addams’ comics featuring the Addams Family could be classified as people doing everyday things (though…weird…things).
Saying “be funny and we’ll syndicate you” is a gross understatement. It should be something more like “be funny in a particular way, with particular characters and particular art, and we might syndicate you. ” But that doesn’t make for a good blog post, does it?
Email me! kid_shay AT joshshalek DOT com
