Recent Comments

1. almost 5 years ago on The Norm Classics

   #1, let’s be different!

2. about 10 years ago on Phoebe and Her Unicorn

   Dana, is there any chance you’ll be doing a Heavenly Nostrils calendar for 2015? I’ve been reusing the O&M 2012 calendar, but it would be great to have something different…. hint, hint… :-)

3. over 16 years ago on Dick Tracy

   The downward spiral continues. I have the greatest respect for Mr. Locher’s talents and love his political cartoons, but his bleeep Tracy plotlines are stunningly inept. bleeep Tracy ‘rescued’ from a big, bad ‘haunted’ house by workers on BULLDOZERS? And now, good and bad guys alike saved from slavering dogs by piping on little teeny tiny WHISTLES, for God’s sake? I can practically hear the Comics Curmudgeon warming up to put the strip on the level of shudder Mary Worth and Mark Trail. Why has it come to this?

   I guess I’m just spoiled, but the Gould-Fletcher-Collins years were so rich and satisfying in every way that all else pales by comparison. Even the ‘moon phase’ Gould had a certain goofy charm, and he knew how to move a story along. You could hardly wait for the Sunday comics, because important plot developments were sure to happen and you usually got a good cliffhanger to boost you into the next week.

   The glacial pacing of the current strip is sad and unnecessary. It’s almost as if the current creator is deliberately stalling for time, the same way a writer for a fiction magazine might ‘pad’ his or her story because the writer is getting paid 5 cents per word instead of being paid for the end result. G-F-C would have produced two full stories in the same time that the current author uses to tell one.

   I respectfully suggest that Mr. Locher might benefit from a good writer’s input. A little pacing would do wonders. Even if the Golden and Silver Ages of ‘bleeep Tracy’ are behind us, Mr. Locher is fully capable of doing more.