Although I don't follow newspaper comics on a regular basis it seems to me that they aren't drawn as well as they used to be. I think the guys making the comics are better writers than they are artists. Is Dick Tracy still around? I used to like that strip with his weirdo criminals; Flattop always gave me the creeps. And whenever Tracy fired his gun there were two parallel lines showing the path of the bullet, which impressed me greatly as a child.
When the family made out of town trips I was always amazed at the different comics that would be in the local papers. The nuances of syndication were unknown to me. I thought all newspapers had the same comics as we did in Chicago with the Trib and Times/Daily News but no, they had a whole different group although some were shared. Henry, The Little King, The Katzenjammer Kids, and even Mickey Mouse showed up in those papers. Different syndicates, different comics. A newspaper can drop a comic strip but will replace it with another one from their syndicate pool. I don't know how it all works; the life of a comic strip is weird, often outliving the original artist who created it. Some guys are purists like Bill Watterson, the guy who drew Calvin and Hobbes. He decided he said all that he wanted to say and shut it down, refusing all the lucrative licensing and merchandising deals that came his way. There are no official cups, t-shirts, dolls, toys, or anything, quite unlike that dumb cat Garfield. I admire the guy and the way he kept the strip untmanyainted by commercial influence. But he's not hurting for cash as there are bound volumes of the strips being published, some of which are quite pricey.
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After following the news of the last few days it occurred to me that a certain lawyer needs a new nickname. How does Rudy "The Baffler" Giuliani sound?
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As a fan of science I am usually glad to see some news about recent discoveries but I think it can go too far. Maybe reviving 40,000-year old worms isn't going to prove to be such a good idea. There's a lot that go wrong, I think. The worms we have now are plenty good enough without needing to defrost worms from Siberia. Damn Russians are behind everything these days.
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