Safely Endangered Comics. By Chris McCoy. Andrews
McMeel. $14.99.
Oh No. By Alex Norris. Andrews McMeel. $14.99.
The Internet may interconnect nearly the
entire world, but it does not interconnect the world’s social norms. That means
that humor, among other things, does not always translate particularly well
across borders, even electronic ones. And there is a longstanding difficulty
between the United States and Great Britain when it comes to what is funny:
neither society tends to “get” what the other one does. This is why, for
example, British TV humor programs (or programmes) are generally adapted by
American TV producers instead of simply being brought “across the pond” in
their original form. There are certainly exceptions, such as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but those
tend to prove the rule, becoming cult favorites for those “in the know” rather
than sources of amusement for a more-general audience. So it is interesting
that some cartoonists from Great Britain, operating strictly online, have found ways to bridge the
British-American humor gap – the evidence coming in the form of their book
collections. While not every offering in Safely
Endangered Comics and Oh No will
be equally funny for Americans (or for Canadians, for that matter), most of the
content of both books arrives from the British side of the Atlantic with humor
unimpaired.
This works largely because Chris McCoy and
Alex Norris do “human-condition” comics, of the wry and sometimes sarcastic
sort, rather than satirical ones requiring readers to understand culturally
specific references to whatever is being satirized. The panels in McCoy’s Safely Endangered Comics have no
recurring characters and no predictability of topic – but McCoy manages, again
and again, to find amusement in things that transcend national boundaries. One
strip, set at “Passport Control,” has a skeptical officer looking at a passport
photo of a caterpillar and telling another officer, “I think this guy’s a
terrorist.” The final panel shows that the traveler is a butterfly, who is left
to protest that it is just an old picture. On another page, a character is seen
consuming numbers and lamenting that they never seem to end. The final panel
shows that he is in a pi (not pie) eating contest. That is subtle as well as
transnational. Then there is McCoy’s version of a happy dog fetching a thrown
ball: the dog’s thinking shows him promising to get the ball and lamenting that
“humans are so clumsy.” And there is a sequence in which a Godzilla-like
monster decides to do a “trust fall,” but there is no one to catch him, so he
collapses backward and crushes a building. Also, there is a genie-paradox page,
with a genie offering to grant the wishes of the person who rubs his lamp – who
promptly says, “I wish you can’t grant wishes.” That is an unexpected variation
on the old “I wish for more wishes” line. In fact, a great deal of Safely Endangered Comics is unexpected,
and that is why McCoy’s work amuse across borders. His drawings are nothing
special, but their simplicity of outline and careful use of detail to highlight
various elements of each comic work well – and fit the Internet origin of the
comics aptly, since the Internet is not known to reward subtlety of artistic
expression. It sometimes does, however, reward subtlety of verbal expression, and that is an area in which McCoy’s work stands
up well.
Norris’ Oh No has a far more limited palette and features even simpler
drawing that borders on the nondescript. It is a set of variations on a single
theme – many, many variations – and it is no surprise that the words Oh No have taken on something of a life
of their own online. This is a comic that is all about disappointments – big
ones, small ones, and every size in between. The featured character is barely a
character at all: it is a pink blob of varying shape with dots for eyes, a line
for a mouth, and no other features. And almost every three-panel comic ends
with the same punch line: the blob (or sometimes other, equally blobbish
characters) saying, “Oh no.” This sounds like a recipe for repetitiveness, and
it is, but that does not mean the same thing as boredom. The key here is the
many ways Norris uses the “Oh no” phrase and the many situations to which he
applies it. Each strip has a title reflecting its particular disappointing
situation. “Impossible” starts with the blob wanting to be successful. The
second panel shows success at the top of a hill labeled “effort.” The third
panel has the blob just standing there saying, “Oh no.” In “Experience,” the
blob checks a diary after commenting, “They say to write from real experiences.”
The diary, shown in the second panel, says “did nothing” on every day. The
third panel has the blob saying, inevitably, “Oh no.” The “genie” variant here
is called “Wish” and features a genie emerging from a lamp in the first panel;
in the second, the blob wishes the world were a better place; and in the third
there is a tombstone, showing that the blob is dead and buried – and saying,
from underground, “Oh no.” That is darker humor than the norm in Oh No, but really, there is no specific
“norm” here. Oh No is sometimes
self-referential and sometimes Internet-referential. A strip called “Social
Media” starts with a panel showing the blob smiling on a sunny beach, with the
label “#carefree.”” The second panel starts to widen out to show where the picture
has been cropped. The third panel is much wider, showing the pink blob
surrounded and almost buried by big purple blobs labeled “worry.” The pink blob
is, naturally, saying “Oh no,” and at the same time commenting on the way in
which always-edited social-media posts paint a false picture of people (and
blobs) and their world. In a similar vein, a trip called “Fad” starts with
three orange blobs telling the pink blob, “We are into this new thing,” while
each holds a rectangle labeled “Fad.” In the second panel, the pink blob
decides to join in and reaches for a similar rectangle. But in the third panel,
the three orange blobs are holding rectangles labeled “New Fad” and saying, “We
are into something else now,” leaving the pink blob to remark, of course, “Oh
no.” The over-simplification of Norris’ art often seems to reflect the
over-simplification of the Internet world and, by extension, the world away
from the Internet (yes, there is such a thing). It is precisely because the
world online crosses so many boundaries, national and otherwise, that books
such as Oh No and Safely Endangered Comics have the
opportunity to reach out well beyond their points of origin and find kindred
spirits, or kindred worriers, thousands of miles away.
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