2014 Calendars: 365-Day—Dilbert;
Pearls Before Swine; Non Sequitur; Big Nate; Signspotting. Andrews McMeel.
$14.99 each.
The box cover for the 2014 Dilbert page-a-day calendar features
Dilbert telling the Pointy-Haired Boss, “There no kill switch on awesome,” and
certainly fans of Scott Adams’ workplace-skewering comic strip will have an
awesome time throughout the coming year with this full-color compendium
featuring all the strip’s instantly recognizable characters. Adams’ art has
never been the main point of the strip, and as a result it actually looks
better on small calendar pages than does the more-elaborate work of other
cartoonists. Shrinking Dilbert panels
may not make them better, but it
doesn’t hurt them all that much. Besides, the writing matters more than the art
here. In one strip, Dogbert creates “fake press releases for imaginary new
green energy technologies,” leading Dilbert to ask how he will know which of
those technologies are real, leading Dogbert to reply, “Seriously? You think
there are real ones?” And there you have social commentary, Dogbert style. In
another strip, the boss refuses to send Dilbert to a class to make him more
efficient because “you’re working on a government contract and billing by the
hour.” And that is just about all you need to know about government
contracting. In still another strip, Dogbert asks the CEO for inside
information that Dogbert can use in his hedge fund, telling the big boss,
“Think of it as a tax on people you don’t know.” The boss says, “That’s the
best kind!” And that is about all you need to know about senior management of
big companies. In fact, a year with this Dilbert
calendar may teach you so much about corporate America that you’ll end up
determined never to have any dealings with it again. And good luck with that.
Another artist whose strips
shrink well to the size of the pages of a tear-off calendar is Stephan Pastis, whose
Pearls Before Swine owes its original
success to Adams’ endorsement and has often been used to show Pastis’ gratitude
through a series of insults and demeaning drawings. Yes, that is how Pastis
shows he is grateful. Witness the title of his 2014 calendar: “Please move. I
don’t want to catch your stupid.” In one series, Larry the croc gets drunk and
rubs his behind against that of a zebra, the photo is posted online, and –
well, this sort of thing happens to enough human beings nowadays so you can
probably guess what comes next, although Pastis certainly gives the situation
his own twists. Elsewhere, a new and incidental character, Tina Turtle, is
introduced just so Pastis can show the dark side of her apparently devoted
behavior: she carries her deceased husband’s shell around on her back, but only
so she can store beer in it. Pastis also chronicles a war between East Coast
and West Coast cartoonists and their creations, in which Pastis is kidnaped by Mutts characters and Rat refuses to
ransom him because he doesn’t want him back. And then there is the strip in
which Guard Duck turns a flamethrower on The
New York Times because the paper does not have a comics section. Throw in
some awful puns and the occasional tongue-twister, plus a strip whose punchline
is, “Hey! You try coming up with 365 ideas a year!!” – and you have a year’s
worth of dark, death-pervaded, often nasty and definitely not-for-children
pages to take you through 2014 in, um, style…of some sort.
Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur is more stylish and more
complex in its art than the work of Adams and Pastis, but it still works well
in page-a-day format, because most of the time Non Sequitur is a single-panel strip. Miller goes for intellectual
and esoteric comments some of the time, as in the “Libertarian Ice Fishing” panel
showing that someone has fallen through the ice and drowned, with one man
telling another, “I told you the free market could determine if it’s safe or
not.” Then there is the panel in which a monk is carefully lettering an
illuminated manuscript with the words, “Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far
away,” while another monk looks heavenward and exclaims, “Forgive him – he’s
from California.” Also here is “The Job Market for Philosophy Majors,” with a
waiter telling diners that “entrées
come with a choice of quotes by Nietzsche, Chomsky or Goethe.” Non Sequitur means “it does not follow,”
which allows Wiley to take his work in any direction he chooses without
connecting one day to the next. But sometimes he likes to make connections, as in mini-stories featuring
super-cynical Danae – for which Wiley generally divides each of his single
panels into four, allowing him to explore the little girl’s frequent proclamations
of outrage, including outrage at her father for “not taking my outrage
seriously.” A lot of the Non Sequitur
punchiness comes from its passing social commentary, as in the panel in which a
man using a metal detector on the beach explains, “It’s not a hobby. It’s my
pension plan.” Or, in another beach scene, “The Free Market Celebration of
Labor Day,” the lifeguard station has a sign on it: “Lifeguard on duty
somewhere in India.” The full-color Non
Sequitur panels in this calendar are perfect for a year in which –
guaranteed – the days will follow
each other, but what happens during them will not necessarily follow at all.
Also in full color, but more
traditional in approach and less sophisticated – and still a lot of fun – the Big Nate 2014 calendar by Lincoln Peirce
celebrates the ups and downs of 12-year-old Nate Wright, genius (he says) and
super-popular man-about-town (he also says) and, for that matter, a budding
cartoonist himself. Nate’s lack of self-awareness, his slovenliness, and his
general cluelessness about his effect on other people are among the ongoing themes
of Peirce’s strip, and they come through quite well in page-a-day-calendar
form. In one strip, Nate comes up with a new school motto: “Sucking the life
out of students for almost a century.” In a series, Nate tries to find a store
to sponsor his baseball team, and ends up asking mall kiosks to do so. In
another, Nate finds out how much money romance novels bring in annually and
decides to write one. And then there are the mashed potatoes in the faculty
lounge for “prank day.” And the series in which Nate pulls out his eyelashes to
try to get wishes to come true. And Nate’s pride in getting kept after school
so often: “I like to think of all my
detentions as outstanding.” Nate is quite a character – and his antics provide
a full year of fun for everyone who knows him or is just getting a chance to
make his acquaintance.
Of course, comic-strip-based
calendars are only for people who know the strips and enjoy them. But they are
scarcely the only amusing page-a-day offerings out there for 2014. If you want
amusement but are not a comic-strip fan, you can always try Signspotting, whose subtitle makes the
calendar’s topic abundantly clear: “Absurd & Amusing Signs from Around the
World.” Absurd they certainly are. In Ghana, there is a barber shop called “Rely
on God Hair Cut.” In Colorado, an “Information” sign points to a tree – wood
you expect to learn a lot that way? A sign in Ireland offers “Washed Rooster.” At
a Minnesota zoo, the main sign says “open 365 days a year” and the smaller one
underneath says “building closed.” A British restaurant offers “bugers.” In
Vermont, a labeled emergency exit bears a second sign: “Open door slowly.” In
Spokane, Washington, a highway sign proclaims, “End Future 395.” A Belgian
nightspot is labeled “Delicious Floor.” A food special in Monroe, Washington,
proclaims, “Buy one Fish & Chips for the price of two and receive a second
Fish & Chips absolutely free!” Compiled by Doug Lansky, these signs are
sometimes hilarious, sometimes silly, sometimes obvious, sometimes appropriate
in a goofy way – and always amusing enough to brighten your day when you tear
off one page and move on to the next. And sometimes they really do make you
wonder what the sign-posters were thinking, as in the Mill Valley, California
photo of two signs on the same post – the top one saying “Not a Through Street”
and the bottom one pointing straight ahead and indicating “Evacuation Route.”
Just the sort of daily touch of absurdity you can use to help you get through everyday
foibles – day after day throughout the year to come.
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