Thursday, May 23, 2013
Demystifying Red Sox Ownership - What Do They Do? (WEEI)
(www.weei.com)
Read More...“I have [former Red Sox CEO] John Harrington’s old office. The day he turned over the reins, he was sitting at the desk and handed me his pen with a warm smile,” Henry wrote in an email.“I still have it. Red ink. I work more of my hours though in my home offices in Florida and in Brookline. But there is nothing like driving into Fenway Park to go to work. I am thankful every day that I get to do that. It’s one big reason why these rumors of a potential sale of the Red Sox are so ...
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< 1 2 3 4 >Also, Life in Hell, The Far Side.
And the 80's are popular again. Transformers, GI Joe, Miami Vice, and the music is popular again as well (see the Drive soundtrack and various artists that are taking a page from the 80's). Preppy fashion. so on and so on.
I'd like to just take the above out of context.
d'oh! ... no wonder he retired the strip so soon.
speaking of which ... i think 'the americans' is great fun. unfortunately, its ratings have tumbled since the premier. i hope it builds an audience, i really like it so far.
If this is going to become a cartoon thread, I want to give a shout-out to a single-panel comic that was fantastic for a few years: Bizarro. I don't know how many newspapers carried it, but the ones that didn't were missing out. The cartoonist had a slightly deranged genius that managed to produce excellence day in and day out... until, as is inevitable, he ran out of ideas a couple of years ago. But even if the career value isn't there, the peak value certainly is. For some reason, I haven't noticed very many good strips that have emerged recently to fill the void of all of these dead or dying ones. Retail was tremendous for a while, but it's fallen off as well.
Also, it may be heretical to say this, but... I was never very fond of Peanuts.
And then when Frazz came along, it was at first accused of being a ripoff of Calvin & Hobbes. Not to mention the countless number of bad imitations of Gary Larsen, which are too painful even to name.
I still think Tom The Dancing Bug is the best strip I've seen since Pogo was in its prime, both for the characters (GodMan, Hollingsworth Hound, etc.) he's created and his unbelievably perfect parodies of every political wingnut out there. Doonesbury's pretty good even if he gets too damn solemn sometimes, but Trudeau's just in a different category altogether and shouldn't be compared to anyone else. For non-political strips I'll go with Pearls Before Swine, Dilbert (whose dark view of humanity is often necessary) and a wordless strip called Lio, who lives in a world of monsters, aliens, and a clueless and unshaven Dad who wanders around the house in his boxers and undershirt. There's also a truly weird sensibility in a one-panel strip called Close To Home, which at its best is every bit as good as The Far Side.
And the absolute worst strips ever are "Mother Goose and Grimm" and "Barney and Clyde"---you can tell how lame they are just by their pathetic titles. Hopefully few readers outside of Washington have to suffer those two. They make the creators of Zits seem like Winsor McCay by comparison.
Peanuts and Pogo were the cult comic strips of their time when they first appeared in 1950. Pogo was more of a serious addiction (and was a LOT funnier at its best), and Peanuts started to get repetitious a bit too fast, but reading it in its WP reruns today it actually holds up pretty well. And in its beginnings it was quite original in its outlook.
Zits actually isn't the worst thing out there. I'd put it in the Comfort Food category along with For Better or For Worse (which Lio brutally parodied) and the later decades of Peanuts. Not bad, but not all that special. A great strip needs some real bite, and those three seldom deliver(ed) it.
I never did see the appeal of Lio, but I suppose I never made an earnest effort to really understand it. What about it do you find special?
I went to high school with Piraro's sister.
The First Triumverate of 80s comics was Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side, and Bloom County. Aside from the occasional dated 80s Bloom County reference, they all hold up well.
Also, I was damned proud to serve in the Canadian National Moose Mounties.
Of course the comic strip of my own high school days was Pogo.
The L.A. Times carries a pretty large assortment of assortment of comics, some good, some inane. The "gotta have something conservative to balance out Doonesbury" slot, currently held by Prickly City, can be just thuddingly awful. But one strip that has caught my attention is 9 Chickweed Lane. It's quite uneven, but there's a gift in there for occasionally making long-form narrative work in a daily strip.
zits is quite good, but has reached an awkward stage. its hard to keep a strip fresh when the characters are the same age, and the rebellious/normal teen thing is losing steam. he had an older brother in the early days, i think it would be interesting to bring him back to play off jeremy instead of the same old conflicts he's having with his mother. she is dangerously close to becoming too nutty. there was a time when jeremy was exactly like my son, so i have a lot of warm feelings for the strip. i suspect that might have a lot to do with its popularity.
foxtrot is excellent. amend has set up a cast that he keeps drawing interesting material from, i don't know how he does it because they haven't really changed in years.
oh dear.
i can see someone not being into it depending on when it was discovered ... i sometimes felt like i was following it out of habit for a while in the 90s, then it became apparent schulz was just getting sick. but his body of work is impossible to ignore for its brilliance.
i'm sorry, but there's no comparison. kelly was a master artist, calligrapher, and writer. a true master, old school.
pearls before swine is all kinds of awesome. i can't believe how dark it can be at times and still be hilarious. pastis is from santa rosa, still lives there i think ... i wish i had run into pastis when i lived there. for those not familiar with comic strips, santa rosa is where schulz lived for the last 40 yrs of his life, the peanuts museum is great. the skating rink he built is still there too.
i like lio! that is a strip with real whimsy.
The Far Side exhibit that was mounted at the California Academy of Sciences in the '80s was one of the more bizarre museum exhibits I've attended. In every gallery, there were bursts of laughter popping out intermittently all around the room. Before you even reached a panel, you had a pretty good idea of whether it was going to be a "good one," based on how much laughter you were hearing from that location.
agree. when i first moved here, the sunday comics were in two sections, now they've shrunk everything down and dumped a couple. a real bummer. the first thing i do on sunday morning after starting the coffee and making breakfast is to read the comics.
chickweed lane is beautifully rendered, and some of its humor is pretty nifty -- i think that's just the word mceldowney would like to hear, the strip is a modern version of a 30s screwball comedy. but i don't understand why the LA times doesn't run the sunday strip.
i used to really like funky winkerbean back in the day, but now it sucks unbelievably bad. tom batiuk has turned that strip into a complete train wreck of phony characterizations, trite plot lines and lame attempts at humor. its the one strip i can think of that started really well and just turned to sh-t. the main focus of the strip, les moore, has turned into an insufferable dweeb. i also fault batiuk for taking the character of cara, who started out as a black woman with pronounced african american features, an afro and then dreadlocks, and gradually started drawing her more and more as a white woman with dark skin. this coincided with her becoming les' love interest. i find it really unbearable as a development.
one of my favorites these days is sally forth. the family at the center of the strip is seriously dysfunctional, yet marculiano manages to make them endearing most of the time, though the father is really kind of a moron. even his brothers think so (check out the christmas visit to his old neighborhood arc.)
Yuppie scum did all right, if I recall correctly.
It was a weird time. America's poisoned soul, its fast buck, shit in the well, fuck anything id was in full, freakish flower. We thought we'd scraped Nixon, the original zombie pol, off the bottom of our collective shoe and rid ourselves of his verminous ilk, but here was Ronnie Reagan, the shambling, grinning monster from California, daddy to all the vicious, soulless hucksters now selling out the country from the halls of Congress. In 1989, too senile to impeach, Reagan left us a steaming turd of deregulation on the Oval Office carpet--his legacy--fertilizing the political soil for capitalism's permanent gangster class.
.
An iconic decade for genre moviemaking, love it or hate it.
Very nice use of Terry Gilliam.
Transformers was mildly popular, although seemingly more so by 30-somethings trying to recapture their childhood, than actual kids. GI Joe and Miami Vice were studio driven productions, that massively flopped. Not seeing much 80s in the current fashion, and the next mullet I see on somebody under 40 will be the first.
His ever-maniacal cackle; his endearing and clueless old man; his occasional parodies of other strips; and his child's imagination in general. It's not the greatest strip out there, but it's in the top 10%.
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I still think Tom The Dancing Bug is the best strip I've seen since Pogo was in its prime
i'm sorry, but there's no comparison. kelly was a master artist, calligrapher, and writer. a true master, old school.
I dunno. Quiet as it's kept, Pogo wasn't nearly as good in his later years as he was in his first decade. You can especially see this if you compare his first and last collections, but after about 1960 or so there's a perceptible decline. At its best there's never been a better strip, but in today's context, Tom the Dancing Bug can't be topped for originality and pure bite. I've never seen another artist/writer who can be as savage as Bolling is, while at the same time maintaining the high level of wit. Unlike Doonesbury, you'll never see any overly earnest speechifying in Tom the Dancing Bug. He's a mix of serious commentary with anarchism, surrealism, and The Onion thrown in. It's as fresh today as it ever was, which is something only the tiniest handful of comic strips can ever say.
I liked it as an adult. But then again, I liked Bloom County, so there's that. I thought the writing in Sherman's Lagoon was quite good. It may still be, I haven't caught in a long while.
As far as Pearls Before Swine, I'll have to give it another look due to the consistent accolades here but whenever I've read it in the past it was clever animal insulting dumb animal and I just never saw the charm.
That's kind of dirty pool, complaining that a daily strip isn't able to match a weekly. You think Wattterson might have been able to up his game a bit if he'd had six more days to work on every comic? Not to mention that by the '80s, nobody had the same sort of freedom with panel sizes that McKay enjoyed.
Of course, among McKay's stuff, I prefer Rarebit Fiend to Little Nemo, so what do I know?
Breathed was taking potshots at Donald Trump before anyone in the nation knew that doing so was the real reason Trump existed.
Vote Meadow.
I don't get the comparison of C&H to Little Nemo. Sure, there are similarities, but that's like saying that Kershaw is the new Glavine because they're both left handed pitchers.
My main point in bringing up the comparison was that it sounded familiar to me listening to people rag on Bloom County, and in retrospect I could grap the outline of the point. I found Calvin and Hobbes as awesome as anyone and was stunned to hear this girl speaking so poorly of it, but in retrospect years later I found some of the Sunday strip comparisons and fantasy element familiarity criticisms worthy of note.
I have enough self-realization to accept that I was a little defensive in bringing it up as well.
As a final aside, I found Calvin's father to be my favorite character in that strip, and way funnier than Calvin.
It was so much better than the awful, self-impressed Doonesbury that a comparison insults the achievement of Bloom County.
I'm glad Esoteric and I can still disagree. :-)
Doonesbury is an amazing achievement. Right up there with Peanuts, Pogo, Krazy Kat, Little Nemo, and Calvin and Hobbes. It works because it has a great cast of characters with real depth, and isn't just a political cartoon.
He still turns out a strip every couple of months. Sometimes on his site, and sometimes on a different one. Usually announces them on the PBF Facebook page.
New one came out last night, in fact.
And Calvin talking through his dad's poll numbers.
I'm actually reading through the entire series now- just received the boxed set as a gift. It really holds up; in fact I'd say it's much better as an adult than as a kid. I'll agree with Lassus a little in that the Sunday Spaceman Spiff stuff doesn't do it for me, but I'm not sure I ever liked those as a kid, either.
Very funny, but super, super NSFW, so caveat emptor.
Two of the many things I love about Pearls Before Swine.
---Pastis is the ONLY comic strip artist/writer I've ever seen who uses puns on a regular basis with any degree of wit. Puns in the hands of hacks like Gene Weingarten or Mike Peters are like machine guns in the hands of a spastic maniac, but Pastis actually does the work to set them up, which the hacks are always too lazy to do.
---He's also the only artist I can recall who inserts himself into the strip to good comic effect.
As a final aside, I found Calvin's father to be my favorite character in that strip, and way funnier than Calvin.
Of course he was, and that's because his deadpan commentary was used sparingly, rather than in rote fashion. Contrast that to the godawful Barney and Clyde, where every character puns and / or deadpans in practically every panel, and then just sits around admiring themselves for their perceived wit.
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Of course, among McKay's stuff, I prefer Rarebit Fiend to Little Nemo, so what do I know?
I've always thought that Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend at its best (which isn't always) is right up there on the all-time list with Krazy Kat and Pogo. Little Nemo has the more elaborate artwork, but not quite the far out humor. One problem with DOTRF is that unless you want to spring for the fancy Ulrich Merkl edition (which is worth the price, but isn't cheap), it's hard to find in collected form, whereas Little Nemo has been reprinted many times over the past 40 years.
And to echo what many people have noted, the biggest problem with strips these days is the lack of space that newspapers give to them.** Anyone who's ever seen the full-sized reproduction books published by Sunday Press will know what I mean by this.
**Strips whose humor relies on lots of words are totally destroyed by this. Before the W-Post dropped it a few years ago, you'd need a magnifying glass to read Tank McNamara.
Yes. Agreed with Matt about indie rock -- R.E.M., The Replacements, Husker Du, The Smiths, X, They Might Be Giants, Robyn Hitchcock, Katrina and the Waves, XTC, and The Cramps (among others) released some of their best work during this decade.
And the absolute worst strips ever are "Mother Goose and Grimm" and "Barney and Clyde"
Er, no -- that would be "Mallard Fillmore."
I had to look the strip up, cause I wasn't sure which one it was.
Heh. Yup, that's funny.
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