2014 Calendars: Desk—Dilbert;
Tokidoki; Wall—The New Yorker; Pearls Before Swine. Andrews McMeel, $14.99
each (Dilbert, New Yorker, Pearls);
Universe/Andrews McMeel, $14.99 (Tokidoki).
From the abstruse to the
everyday, from the funny to the offbeat, 2014 will be yet another year in which
you can express your individuality and gain the occasional new and different
perspective on life through the simple expedient of selecting calendars to
display at home, work or both. The wonderful variety of these paeans to a year
yet to come makes it possible for anyone to find one, or several, to reflect
the likely moods of the day – or deflect
them, as the case may be. That case may be especially apparent when it comes to
Scott Adams’ Dilbert, which once
again in the coming year provides a strong argument for continuing to use
spiral-bound, open-flat desktop calendars instead of switching over entirely to
electronic calendar displays. The 2014 Dilbert
desk calendar is called “The Word You’re Trying to Think Of Is
‘Indispensable,’” and even if Wally were not the one saying the sentence,
readers of Dilbert would know
immediately how ridiculous it is in a world where the only indispensable things
are money and, apparently, irrationality and stupidity. Each brightly colored
two-page spread of this calendar offers space for taking a few notes per day
(how many do you really want to take?) plus a full-page color Dilbert Sunday strip filled with
typically Dilbertian difficulties. There is the one in which consultant Dogbert
gets Dilbert to tell the Pointy-Haired Boss that their meeting is a waste of
time and a ripoff, and Dogbert then charges the boss $400; and the one in which
Wally proclaims that “being disciplined is almost the same as being useless”;
and the one in which Dilbert notices that “options are only good when other
people don’t have them.” Luckily for Dilbert
fans, they have the option of using this desk calendar all year and laughing at
the absurdities in which they regularly find themselves enmeshed.
Even more colorful and even
thicker – it is a 16-month calendar – is the Tokidoki offering from Italian manga artist Simone Legno. Filled
with manga art of the “cute” style rather than the “intense” style, this
calendar nevertheless has a certain edge to it, as is clear from its symbol: a
heart and crossbones. Legno explains that the title means “sometimes” in
Japanese, and certainly anyone looking for a mixture that is sometimes cute and
sometimes offbeat will find it here. One page has a pretty, bright star with a
skull inside. Another has adorable pink and blue cuddly characters with vampire
teeth. Sometimes all is adorableness, as in the character selling “tokidoki
donuts” and wearing a costume with sprinkled-doughnut ears. Other times are,
well, different, as in the equally adorable character wearing a heavily spiked
body outfit that looks like a baby’s onesie – and brandishing a gun, next to
which are three bullets with expressive faces. There is a slice of strawberry
shortcake with a bewildered-looking strawberry on top – and the filling between
the layers looks suspiciously like blood. There is a skull-faced cupcake, and a
cute little mermaid whose bra is made not of two shells but of two skulls – you
get the idea. But there are also plenty of straightforwardly pleasant pictures:
a multicolored seahorse, happy little crab, jewel-bedecked cake, sweet-looking cartons
of milk and latte walking together. Tokidoki
is cute sometimes, strange sometimes, offbeat sometimes, and an interesting
desktop calendar for 2014 all the time.
Whether or not you use
desktop planning calendars, there is likely room in your room (or cubicle) for
a wall calendar – not only for jotting down notes but also for creating a touch
of personalized atmosphere. Andrews McMeel offers plenty to choose from for
2014, with a lot of choice depending on whether you would rather go the
highbrow route or the lowbrow. The New
Yorker is of course on the esoteric side, maybe even too much so for some
people – but it is just right for fans of the magazine for the self-proclaimed
beautiful and elegant people (and those who want to be like them). The humor in
New Yorker cartoons generally comes
from incongruity and juxtaposition: a lion hands money to a gunman and says,
“Make it look like natural selection,” for example, and a roller coaster rushes
toward a solid brick wall as one rider tells another, “I hear this is the
scariest part of the ride.” If New Yorker
cartoons are to your taste, you will find two dozen black-and-white ones to
enjoy here, two per month (one large and one small), with plenty of room on
each date to jot down a highfalutin thought or two of your own.
Or you can go to the
opposite extreme with Stephan Pastis’ Pearls
Before Swine, whose 2014 wall calendar is called “It’s My World, and I’ll
Dominate if I Want To” – the words of the megalomaniacal Rat, of course. Do not
seek the elegant here, for you will surely not find it. Each month brings a black-and-white
or full-color bit of Pearls oddity or
idiocy in the form of an entire sequence; a full-page blowup of one panel from
the strip; and a couple of small drawings at the start and end of each page
(the one at the end, “The Pig Dipper,” is the same month to month). The strip
often turns on outright silliness (a house-trained German shepherd turns out to
be an actual shepherd – from Germany), frequently on misinterpretation (people
who are “swingers” are ones who enjoy riding on swings), and a lot of the time
on utter incongruity (Pig’s goosebumps turn out to be injuries inflicted by a
bat-wielding goose). Add in some atrocious puns (“a Hoffa they can’t re-fuse”)
and you have a real winner of a calendar for the entire coming year. Or a real
loser, depending on your point of view. Either way, it’s really…something.
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