I tried to fix 'The Dinette Set,' and it defeated me.

(left) Julie Larson's original Dinette Set panel; (right) My "corrected" version.

Julie Larson's The Dinette Set, a single-panel cartoon feature, is somehow celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2015. It started in the Los Angeles Reader under the title Suburban Torture back in 1990 and became nationally syndicated under the name The Dinette Set seven years later. The feature's appeal and longevity baffle me. It's a domestic comedy focused on the adventures of two middle-aged sisters, Verla Darwin and Joy Penny, and their respective spouses and friends. It's supposed to be a gentle satire of middle class life, but it comes off as condescending and snide, and the characters are interchangeable and dull.

What really bugs me about The Dinette Set, though, is that it's a humor strip that doesn't know how to tell a joke properly. Each panel is saturated with unfunny, superfluous textual gags: T-shirt slogans, posters and signs, product labels, etc. All of this extraneous text is handwritten in the exact same style. Larson tries to distinguish each panel's primary, dialogue-based joke by writing it in larger letters, but the words push right up against the edges of the balloons, rendering them only semi-legible. The strip is a difficult-to-read eyesore.

Part of the reality of doing a syndicated newspaper comic is that each installment will contain a certain amount of clutter: the artist's signature, a date, a plug for the syndicate, and probably some mention of a promotional website, too. As distracting as these can be, they're a necessary evil. I firmly believe that jokes, at least when presented in the form of comic strips or cartoon panels, need a little breathing room. A certain amount of negative space helps. Charles Schulz, one of the masters of the form, used tons of negative space in Peanuts. But Julie Larson clutters up every square inch of her panels with unnecessary verbiage. Her jokes are suffocating. And they weren't too strong to begin with!

So I took a typical Dinette Set panel and tried to "fix" it. First, I eliminated as many props and background actors as I could without sacrificing the integrity of the scene, i.e. a baby shower with numerous guests and presents. I wanted to focus the reader's attention on the two primary characters, the ones who are actually talking to each other. I especially wanted to remove any distracting details around those characters' faces. When you're drawing a cartoon like this, you're like a director working with actors. I wanted to make sure their faces were the focal point of this scene. I also reduced the dialogue in size so that it had some air around it, while removing some redundant words in Mrs. Darwin's response. I didn't see any reason for both women to say the words "a Clapper for the baby's overhead light." Once was enough.

But my efforts were in vain. This stubborn Dinette Set panel was still pretty bad, even after my so-called "corrections." I think my version is a slight visual improvement, but the cartoon is still stifling and uninspired, and the joke still doesn't land the way it should. In desperation, I tried to convert this into a New Yorker-style cartoon with no word balloons and the dialogue rendered as a caption below the picture.

Nah. Still sucks.

(today's zomby) AND IT'S A LIZ PHAIR KIND OF DAY...

Ah, Nevada... America's navel, forever collecting the bellybutton lint of society.

Fun fact! Each Zomby cartoon takes about a minute (or less) to write but about 20 minutes to "compose" in Microsoft Paint. It used to take much less time, but the Houston Chronicle website -- my reliable source for nice black-and-white Ziggy cartoons -- started posting grainier, lower-quality scans on its comics page a few months ago, so I can't just click on Ziggy and turn him gray anymore. I have to "paint" him gray, pixel by tedious pixel.

And speaking of the creative process:

Liz Phair at her peak.

This rather bleak, late fall day has put me in the mood for Liz Phair.

The music you're supposed to love the most is whatever was popular while you were in high school. That's not true in my case. The music of the 1990s does not resonate very strongly with me in 2011. I have no real desire to revisit New Jack Swing, for instance, and I largely skipped out on the "alternative rock" boom. I don't have any real nostalgia for that "college rock" stuff, which mostly seemed mopey and defeatist to me. Give me Chuck Berry or Little Richard over grunge any day! But I do make occasional exceptions.

I'm not sure exactly why Liz Phair caught me off-guard in 1994 with her album Exile in Guyville. It was as mopey and defeatist as most of the music I was so actively avoiding back then. But something about the album's lead-off single, "Never Said," must have grabbed me enough to make me go buy the CD, and the entire Exile album remains a favorite of mine today. This will sound perverse, but I get the same feeling from listening to Exile in Guyville as I get from reading Peanuts. Liz Phair's music is about misery, depression, and cynicism, but it doesn't come off as miserable, depressing, or cynical somehow. It's a winning kind of glumness. It's exuberant misery, if you will. I like to think that Exile on Guyville is the album that the Peanuts kids would be listening to if they were jaded college students experimenting with sex and drugs for the first time in their lives. I'm sure that the album would be in the CD collection that Peppermint Patty and Marcie must share, and there's a particular line from "Never Said" which sounds like it could have come directly from my favorite Peanuts character, Lucy Van Pelt: "So don't look at me sideways. Don't even look me straight on."

Lucy Van Pelt, a budding Liz Phair fan

Anyway, here's "Never Said." Hope you enjoy it:



Of course, for a teenage me, Exile in Guyville was also an introduction to a world of sexual frankness which I had not previously known, especially not in music. Here is the album's best and probably best-known track. This song garnered a lot of attention for its casual use of profanities, but there's a sweet, wounded romanticism in it, too. When she sings, "I want all that stupid old shit, like letters and sodas," Liz Phair really does sound like the female Charlie Brown of rock.



Unfortunately, I -- and many others -- didn't really keep up with Liz Phair's career. Certainly, by the time she put out a record called whitechocolatespaceegg, I had long since tuned out. Her recent, much poppier music has gotten embarrassingly bad reviews, even from such notoriously softball sources as Rolling Stone. But I do have a soft spot for some of Liz's post-Exile work, like the title track from her little-loved sophomore album:

Schulz and Peanuts: a book review

A familiar zig-zag pattern appears on the cover of Schulz and Peanuts.

 

"Cartooning will destroy you. It will break your heart."

- Charles Schulz 

   

Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts is, essentially, The Beatles of comic strips. If you're into newspaper comics (or cartoons in general), you probably enjoy Peanuts, while if you're into classic 1960s rock (or popular music in general), you more than likely enjoy The Beatles. Schulz did not invent the comic strip, as The Beatles did not invent rock & roll, but they both redefined their respective media and broadened people's expectations of what could be done within them. In so doing, Peanuts attained unprecedented commercial success (as did The Beatles) and influenced generations of other writers and artists (as did The Beatles). And both have remained popular over the decades, appealing both to the widest-possible mainstream audience and over-analytical connoisseurs alike.

(Side note: If Peanuts is the Beatles of comic strips, does that make Garfield the Rolling Stones of comic strips? Hmmmm.)

David Michaelis' massive biography of the late Mr. Schulz, Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography, is a fascinating book which provides valuable insight both into the strip and the man who created it. The title has the billing right: this is a book about Schulz first and Peanuts second. Michaelis assumes, probably correctly, that anyone willing to tackle a 672-page book about Charles Schulz is already very familiar with Peanuts and its various characters, relationships, recurring storylines, and running jokes. If you can't tell Charlie Brown from Linus or Snoopy from Spike, Schulz and Peanuts is not the book for you. Maybe some other writer will have to write the definitive book about the internal history of Peanuts. Michaelis' book is much more about the strip's external life, i.e. the real-life inspirations behind the strip (Schulz's own life and his relationships with others) and its growth as a pop culture and merchandising phenomenon.

When Schulz and Peanuts came out back in 2007, the standard line from critics and reporters -- who were looking to quickly pigeonhole Michaelis' book -- was that it exposed the hidden dark side of Charles M. Schulz. To that, I would say Schulz's dark side was "hiding" in plain sight for 50 years, as his strip frequently dealt with frustration, disappointment, fear, depression, and cruelty. Even the sentimental and reassuring TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas features moments of angst, despair, and emotional brutality. In short, Schulz put his dark side on display for the entire world to see.

Michaelis presents Schulz as neither a hero nor a villain, but as a surprisingly complex human being. The life of Charles Schulz is neither a comedy nor a tragedy. It's not quite a Horatio Alger story, an allegory, an epic saga, or a cautionary example either. The cartoonist's life, therefore, did not follow any of the standard templates for a biography. I think critics painted this book as a "dark" expose because that makes for a better story. Michaelis does explore some of Schulz's various character flaws, such as his emotional withdrawal from his first wife Joyce, but I never for a moment felt that Michaelis was trying to make Schulz into an "unforgivable" monster. Instead, the author remains sensitive and sympathetic throughout the entire book -- sympathetic both to Schulz and to the people around him.

Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography is probably of interest mainly to comics junkies in general and Peanuts fans in particular, but I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in the creative process or in exploring the relationship between Art and Life. And if you just like funny cartoons, Michaelis generously includes many, many examples of Peanuts strips from all the different eras of Schulz's career. If anything, this book made me eager to explore those strips again.