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Funny how important this is
It's a good thing I didn't gripe about the comics. I would have been in very poor company!
To review our story so far: A week or so ago, the Globe decided that it was going to change its lineup. They dropped two strips I happened to like a great deal, but more importantly, they replaced them with strips which do absolutely nothing for me.
I was seriously considering writing a complaint - even though I felt that people who write letters complaining about changes to the comics page obviously don't have enough ways to spend their spare time. The latter impulse won out. I'm glad it did.
A few days ago, the Globe ombudsman returned from vacation and found more than 700 emails waiting for him. (The ombudsman is one of the few Globe staffers with a public email address, a policy I resent. That is, I resent not being able to send email to more of them.) This probably already had him in a foul mood, but it does not fully justify the screed which saw print under his name on Monday.
He starts by saying:
We begin today with a confession. An ombudsman is supposed to represent any reader who has a bone to pick with the newspaper, but it would be dishonest not to acknowledge at the outset that as much as I love newspapers, I hate the comics.
I loathe them, and truth to tell, I'm not all that comfortable about readers who put on the dog a little and blather about the intelligence of Robotman and the intellectual power of Mister Boffo and how the rest of us can't be all that bright if we don't marvel at the brilliant insights into the American character that are waiting to be discovered in Zits.
It only goes downhill from there. Basically he says that the response to the comics change was "surprisingly childish and vastly out of proportion."
Well, them's fighting words. I missed the original screed - I had to dig it out of the recycling this morning. It's probably good that I missed it the first time - given my mood on Monday, I'm not sure if it would have sent me into a red rage or made me giggle hysterically all day.
But I dug it out today, because apparently by then the furor was high enough that columnist Diane White - who is also on the panel that helps review new strips - felt she had to devote her weekly column to saying that she loved the comics and doesn't consider that decision childish, and she was not consulted in the decision to drop those strips ... and by the by, please stop firebombing the ombudsman's office, his is a thankless job and he does the best he can.
Then I did giggle.
Isn't it nice that we can all agree on what the important issues are?
Speaking of comics, I had a disheartening moment a few days ago, one that has happened to me only once or twice, thank heavens: I agreed with something in Mallard Fillmore.
If you are not familiar with this strip, you're luckier than I. It is an extreme right-wing strip, and I'm not sure why the Globe carries it. Maybe to prove they're broad-spectrum. However, it has no extreme left-wing equivalent. (Liberal excesses can be as ridiculous as conservative excesses. Doonesbury is not an extreme left-wing strip. It makes fun of everybody.)
More to the point, the strip is seldom funny, just strident. That day, though - although still not funny - I felt it had some truth to it:
"Amid all the speculation in Time magazine ... about why some kids commit horrible acts of violence ... they seem to have overlooked one possibility .... Kids who commit horrible acts of violence get their pictures on the cover of Time magazine."
Oversimplified, stereotypical, and trite, perhaps, but still containing truth for all that.
I've never griped to the Globe about Mallard Fillmore, even though I detest it - nor about any of the other strips I think are just plain pointless. Maybe I secretly think the ombudsman's right - that they're just not worth the fuss.
As for the new strips, two of them are just plain worthless, but one is beginning to grow on me already. We shall see.
© Columbine
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