The Wacky Humor Of Drunk Drivers
In the comments on this post on the Unfunny Duck, Tukla In Iowa notes:
We’re having some fun with this over at Comics Curmudgeon because it happened to hit the news the same day one of his cartoons complained about alcohol-free eggnog:
It’s a hoot…go read it. It’s over at the Comics Curmudgeon, who says…
Now, I don’t usually — or ever, really — comment on Mallard Fillmore on this blog. Partly it’s because it inspires the sort of pointless vitriol amongst commentors that will get folks banished to the Cockpit. Partly it’s because I already have an outlet for my political commentary. But mostly it’s because my comments would just be as foaming, angry, and unfunny as Mallard Fillmore itself. Not only do I disagree with pretty much every political opinion expressed therein, but the strip itself is a sham of a comic strip. There are plenty of conservative-themed strips (Prickly City and the online Day By Day come to mind) that actually have sequential action in panels and recurring characters; Mallard Fillmore is just a standard-issue editorial cartoon that happens to be drawn in a box that’s the same dimensions as a comic strip so that it can be printed on the comics pages.
See, I’m doing it already.
I know the feeling pal. And…he’s right about the Unfunny Duck. It isn’t the political point of view, it’s that the strip simply reeks of being cranked out without any feeling whatever for the medium itself. And for that matter, any passion whatever for the political statements he’s trying to make. It isn’t funny, it has no feeling or passion, it’s just…there. It’s not good as a political cartoon, and it’s not good as a comic strip. I figure it’s being bought by newspaper editors who feel like they need to have something…anything…to "balance" Doonesbury.
But…Mallard Fillmore keeps me working hard in my own cartooning efforts. If a political cartoon I am working on starts getting as vapid and the expression in it as deathlessly rote as a Mallord Fillmore strip, I trash it.
See…I’m doing it too…
