Go Add Value Someplace Else: A
“Dilbert” Collection. By Scott Adams. Andrews McMeel. $19.99.
Breaking Stephan: A “Pearls
Before Swine” Collection. By Stephan Pastis. Andrews McMeel. $14.99.
You Can’t Fight Crazy: A “Get Fuzzy”
Collection. By Darby Conley. Andrew McMeel. $14.99.
Year after year, certain
comic-strip creators manage to produce work that sustains their strips and
their readers, work that is at the same time familiar and new enough to keep
fans interested – even though the newspapers in which comic strips have
appeared for well over a century continue to fade. And interestingly enough,
there are frequently strong professional and/or personal relationships among
the creators of the top strips, to a point at which some of the cartoonists
make fun of others and even reuse or abuse others’ characters. Of course, there
is plenty of abuse to go around in a strip such as Dilbert, which continues to chronicle the big-company misadventures
of the (usually) mouthless title character and his various compatriots and
nemeses. Scott Adams’ strip is so successful that its latest collection, Go Add Value Someplace Else, appears as
a hardcover book (in full color, too) rather than the more-traditional
softcover collation of material. Adams’ drawing remains mundane, although it
has improved significantly in recent years – but his characterizations of
Dilbert, Dogbert, Alice, Wally, the Pointy-Haired Boss, and such newer
characters as the company CEO are even better targeted and more pointed than
they used to be. At one point in the new collection, Alice misinterprets as
negative every remark made by a hapless co-worker, then explains that the
“monster” vibe is what she is going for. Dilbert is abducted by the government
and looks forward to being waterboarded. Ratbert clings to Wally’s neck so
Wally can get the benefits of increased oxytocin levels without human contact.
On the Dogbert News Network, Dogbert announces that “people all over the world
continued to act like idiots.” The Pointy-Haired Boss injects Dilbert with job
performance enhancing drugs – and Alice suddenly finds Dilbert attractive. The
PHB gives Dilbert the task of building drones for an international terrorist –
and when Dilbert finds out who the customer is and tells the CEO, the CEO
considers responding by transferring Dilbert to a department with a poor safety
record. And an evil genius replaces the entire marketing department and alters
intern Asok’s preferences so he becomes “a gay anarchist who loves football and
string cheese.” Thus do the absurdities continue and mount – but somehow seem
just barely possible, not only in the world of Dilbert but also in the big bad outside world on which Adams’ strip
is so clearly based.
Stephan Pastis credits the success
of Pearls Before Swine to Adams, who
recommended Pastis’ strip when it was new, and Pastis has shown his admiration
for Adams through such heartfelt tributes as portraying him as an overweight
Elvis Presley type and then killing him off (Pastis likes killing things in his
strip). At this point, Pearls Before
Swine is moving along quite well on its own, with Pastis more than breaking
even on the strip – he is Breaking
Stephan, as his new collection’s punning title has it (Pastis likes puns –
really bad ones, if possible, and oh yes, they are possible). In this
collection, :Pastis – a former lawyer – has Rat create “The Lawyer’s Book of
Fairy Tales,” in which Humpty Dumpty sues the king’s men, the wall’s engineer,
and the city where the wall was built, making Humpty rich and wall-sitting an
activity requiring many warning signs, a helmet, an air cushion and a fee to
pay for liability insurance. Elsewhere, Pig confuses the superstring theory of
physics with Silly String in a can. Larry the croc’s sophisticated parents pay
a visit and leave after becoming disillusioned with their jobless, uneducated
failure of a son. Guard Duck gets a job giving etiquette advice on the radio –
for instance, to mine your walkway to keep out unappreciative neighbors. Rat
solves the energy crisis by harnessing the stupidity of people all around him.
Smiling dolphins, chosen by the crocs for a once-in-a-lifetime swimming
experience, devour the crocs but invite Zebra to “swim on our back while we
whistle Enya songs.” And of course Pastis presents his usual array of truly
awful puns – such as the one in which Pig calls his new friend melancholy and
the friend turns out to be a collie with melons. Even Mahatma Gandhi hates the
puns – he says so in a strip in which he suddenly appears for no reason except
to make just that statement. Pearls
Before Swine is so weird, so offbeat and so twisted that only weird,
offbeat, twisted people could possibly enjoy it. Luckily for Pastis, there seem
to be a lot of them out there.
A touch of the twisted is
apt for fans of Get Fuzzy, too. Darby
Conley has a tie-in of his own to Pearls
Before Swine, having once appropriated some of Pastis’ characters and story
lines and tried to pass them off as his own (not really, of course, but he
created strips that seemed like bad attempts to rip Pastis off). Unlike Pastis’
animal-filled strip, Conley’s Get Fuzzy
lies in a long tradition of talking-animal cartoons, for all that it is filled
with twisted logic, bizarre plot elements, and just the sort of craziness that would
be expected in a strip whose latest collection is called You Can’t Fight Crazy. Bucky Katt, one-fanged wonder and
self-proclaimed master of the universe, is as usual central to all the bizarre
happenings here. Bucky declares himself the highest-ranking member of Catsa,
the feline version of humans’ Mensa, and soon produces books such as his own unauthorized
autobiography and “The Book of Pain.” Meanwhile, naïve Satchel Pooch, so often
the victim of Bucky’s machinations, plugs in a “dog aroma diffuser” that
sickens not only Bucky but also Rob, the feckless human who goes into the
working world each day to bring home enough money to keep the household
more-or-less functioning (Satchel explains the horrible-smelling diffuser by
saying that he is “trying to get in touch with my heart’s sensitive side”). Rob
remains the weak point of Get Fuzzy,
functioning purely as a not-very-intelligent-or-aware straight man. In a
typical strip, Rob mentions that some of his friends are moving to Canada;
Bucky asks if they are in the witness relocation program or are just fugitives;
Rob asks if Bucky really cannot think of other reasons to move to Canada; and
Bucky replies, “High-yield snow farming?” There is not enough personality to
Rob to hold the strip together, but there is so much of it in the portrayals of
Bucky and Satchel that it scarcely matters. Unlike strips such as Dilbert and Pearls Before Swine, which rely on a large cast of characters, Get Fuzzy really focuses on only its
three central ones, although some of Conley’s bit players are a lot of fun –
such as, in the latest collection, a cat name Astral Bob, a horoscope reader
and fortune teller who uses a repurposed “Trouble” game board to cast Bucky’s
horoscope. There are also half a dozen characters who appear in the strip who
will never appear in the strip – that is, Conley creates a phony readers’ poll and
announces the results of voting for “the first openly simian member of
Congress” and an “unretriever” who is “the world’s most catlike dog.” Like
Pastis and Adams – and few others – Conley has carved out a niche for himself
in which readers can find new-but-familiar, almost-always-funny, reliably
recognizable characters and situations day after day. Whether the continuing
slow decay of newspapers will allow the entry of other cartoonists into the
rarefied field of humor creators on whom readers can always count is by no
means certain. Best to enjoy Dilbert,
Pearls Before Swine and Get Fuzzy,
whether in newspapers or in book form, while we can and for as long as
possible.
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