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Cartoons, character, and control
I am at work early this morning. Why am I at work early this morning, you ask? Because I didn't get any work done yesterday afternoon. And why is that, you ask?
(I know, I know, actually you couldn't care less, but just read your lines the way they're scripted and it'll work out just fine, okay?)
I made the mistake of following a link from the Bruno site which eventually led me to Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet. And I read a few of the strips. And once I read a few of the strips, I read some more. Eventually, to my growing horror, I became aware that my brain was simply not going to let me leave the site until I read them all.
All 500-plus of them.
Now, I'd heard of this strip - Dan Lyke mentions it on a regular basis - but I never had given it a look, because I figured it was like User Friendly, full of computer-geek jokes, or like Sluggy Freelance, full of SF-geek jokes.
I'm not dissing those two strips - or geekdom for that matter. They frequently make me laugh (the December 8 User Friendly just nearly made coffee come out my nose - we have people who work here who are like that), and often the ones that make me laugh hardest have the geekiest punchlines. There's a User Friendly posted above the microwave in the kitchen area here which still makes me giggle after all this time, and it has both a Windows joke and a Cthulhu-mythos joke, in the space of three panels. You don't get much geekier than that.
But strips like those are designed to be taken in small doses - not read as an ongoing narrative. Such strips have little or no character development, and justifiably so; when you have to put a punch line in the fourth box every time, it's a little hard to develop backstory. In fact, the characters are mostly interchangeable in these strips - it's telling that the most distinct character in Sluggy Freelance is Bun-Bun, the murderous, sarcastic, take-no-prisoners lop-eared rabbit.
Helen, on the other hand, has character development ... to my surprise. And the character of Helen is so fascinating to me that I would be addicted to the strip even if it weren't also funny. (After all, Bruno is seldom laugh-out-loud funny, in fact it's often rather sad, but the Bruno character keeps me coming back.)
Helen is gorgeous - mythologically so; the kind of impossible creature that causes car crashes because the other drivers turn to see her. She is the queen of all hackers, completely capricious, phenomenally intelligent, and very impatient with fools - which she defines as almost everyone else. She knows that the world belongs to her - because she can make all the computers do her bidding - and she is perfectly willing to exploit that. I do not mean this in a figurative sense, either. If Helen needs money, she just moves a few bits on someone else's computer - and leaves a trail that says someone else did it. (The FBI won't lock her up, according to a recent strip, because they're too scared of her). If she gets mad at you, you're likely to find your assets frozen and your plane trip to Dayton routed through Peru.
(In one strip, she decides to go to Green Bay while she's already on a flight to somewhere else. So she gets on her laptop and reroutes the plane. The captain's voice comes on the intercom: "Um - we have been mysteriously rerouted and will now be landing in Green Bay." Helen thinks, at the same time the captain says it: "I hope they have an airport.")
No, Helen owns the world in a very literal sense. So why is she dissatisfied? Why is she often depressed?
When I see strips like this one, they make me sad. Sad because I have at least one open-ended idea that I want to express in a visual format. After swallowing the Helen site whole yesterday, I went home, and, like I usually do when exposed to something like this, I made a few sketches - just to remind myself: Oh, yeah, I can't draw.
For what it's worth: I have a modest amount of drawing ability. I can turn out a very nice-looking drawing or two - if I sit down with a clear idea of what's going to be in the drawing and take a very long time, with lots of erasures and corrections, to get it right. But that isn't the sort of drawing I'd need to turn out a comic strip. For that you need to be able to draw - not realistically - but clearly and consistently enough that people can understand the facial expressions you're trying to convey. And if you're going to be doing it on a regular basis, you need to be able to do it pretty quickly.
If anything, I'm worse at drawing cartoon-style. If I take the time to actually get out my book on facial expressions and draw a realistic face, it'll work. If my eyes and eyebrows are just squiggles, it won't - I don't know how to distill faces to the one or two essential lines.
And frankly, the story I want to draw doesn't lend itself to cartoon-style illustration anyway. It's way off in Bruno-land, except weirder.
It makes me sad. But not very. Eventually I'll just give up on the visual idea and write it in words, a medium I feel I can exercise a certain amount of control over.
This is all about control, you know. Peter Zale has a habit of putting little comments about his strips. Particularly in the older ones, he's quite harsh on his own work, always wanting to rewrite a punchline or bit of dialogue he felt wasn't quite good enough.
I was going to write him and tell him that the strip is wonderful as is and he should stop slapping himself in the face. Then I saw a strip where one of the characters - also a cartoonist - says something like, "I don't want it to be good enough! I want it to be perfect! Perfect perfect perfect!" (while jumping up and down in a fit).
At that point I realized I didn't have to tell Zale anything. He already knows.
In some ways it's hard having a medium you can almost control, because then you wonder: What's wrong with me that I can't go all the way? If I'm so good, how come I can't or won't write something more compelling? If I'm so talented, why isn't it perfect? If I'm so smart, why am I not independently wealthy?
But I suspect that even if I did control any one aspect of my world completely, I'd find that I had an even bigger empty spot inside than I do now.
After all, look at Helen.
© Columbine
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