quote:

Charlotte dominates any scenario where you have to lean on a table and simultaneously berate several laggards. I feel like she would excel with a series of Youtube videos on just such a subject.

quote:

SWOT analysis finally makes it to Bad Machinery, just before the the curtain falls. Ghostbusters 2 isn't a particularly good film, but for some reason I must have thought about it almost every week since I originally saw it.

Transmodiar posted:

Modesty Blaise in The Killing Distance

Rick Norwood posted:

It is proverbial that if someone with resources wants to kill a person badly enough, they will succeed. As I write these words, the president of the United States has had a potentialy bad week. First, a disturbed man with a pocket knife jumped the White House fence and made it inside before he was stopped. Then, on a trip to Atlanta, the president rode in an elevator with an armed man who had a criminal record. In the first case, someone came very close to getting within killing distance of the president, who had left the White House shortly before.In the second case, a person was within killing distance. Fortunately, neither of these men was trying to kill the president. But it is sobering to reslize just how hard a job the Secret Service has.

In The Killing Distance, retired Russian agent Ivan Btrodsky, now a millionaire (with a little help from that ever popular source of dubious motives, the C.I.A.), has decided to kill Sir Gerald Tarrant. Of course, the obvious way to thwart a killer is to kill him first, but Modesty and Willie have always tried to avoid killing if they can possible help it. They do kill, but only when the threat is immediate and no other response is possible.

Modesty and Willie respect human life. Most action heroes don't. It has always bothered me when the hero kills with only the slightest excuse. How often do we see someone who is supposed to be a good guy kill dozens of henchmen, often people who have done nothing worse than accept a job with the wrong boss? Even more problematic are the cases where the hero could kill the main villain with one well-placed bullet, but kills a large number of his flunkies instead. The situation is even worse in video games, when even the most benign hero kills hundred of more or less innocent people.

One of the many reasons I enjoy the fiction of Peter O'Donnell is that he took moral considerations seriously.

The_Other posted:

quote:

Modesty and Willie respect human life. Most action heroes don't. It has always bothered me when the hero kills with only the slightest excuse. How often do we see someone who is supposed to be a good guy kill dozens of henchmen, often people who have done nothing worse than accept a job with the wrong boss? Even more problematic are the cases where the hero could kill the main villain with one well-placed bullet, but kills a large number of his flunkies instead. The situation is even worse in video games, when even the most benign hero kills hundred of more or less innocent people.

One of the many reasons I enjoy the fiction of Peter O'Donnell is that he took moral considerations seriously.

Evil Mastermind posted:

Working Daze is...wait, is this how they're showing off a new look?

Haifisch posted:

Extreme tl;dr:
Last thread, Vargo made fun of Jame Sallen for using clip art. This made Jam Eseallen very mad, and also confused because he's an old man who doesn't understand twitter or how username tagging works/etc.

Jamesal Len responded by writing Mr. Social Media Diabetes as a Vargo insert of a sort. He also started drawing more non-clipart but this is supposedly because he was on vacation and using a tablet. The actual twitter slapfight stopped before this arc started, fyi.

EasyEW posted:

FrumpleOrz posted:

FrumpleOrz posted:

FrumpleOrz posted:

Tiggum posted:

If anyone wants the longer version, I documented the whole series of Twitter interactions.

Strontium posted:

Intelligent Life

Medenmath posted:

The Many Merry Murders of Vintage Valiant (Sep. 25, 1937)

Pastry of the Year posted:

Arlo and Janis

Tiggum posted:

If anyone wants the longer version, I documented the whole series of Twitter interactions.

Vargo posted:

https://twitter.com/SchneidRemarks/status/1176167609059958793?s=20

My Lovely Horse posted:

He looks actually good in this. Like a slightly more detailed Tintin character, and I realize that's against the point of Tintin.

Can someone quote the Morning Call article for us poor Europeans who are being locked out?

The Morning Call posted:

The Morning Call
SUBSCRIBE
OPINION
Mark Trail is off the rails
By BILL WHITE
OF THE MORNING CALL
AUG 22, 2018 | 6:30 PM


The turning point in the Mark Trail comic may have been the interminable Six Months in a Cave story line in 2016.

When you’ve been writing a column as long as I have, you should be able to point to some good things that happened because of what you wrote.

One I’ve always felt good about was my role in rescuing the comic strip Mark Trail from the results of reader polls and newspaper trends.

In light of some of the letters to the editor we’ve seen recently, many of the private comments I’ve been receiving and my own growing disillusionment, that achievement is looking less and less laudable. But before I get to where we are today, let’s take a walk down Mark Trail memory lane.

If you had access to our archives, you would find that I’ve been defending Mark for 25 years.

I proclaimed it my favorite comic strip in a 1993 column that was a satirical defense of a gay story line in “For Better or For Worse.” The emergence of a gay character had prompted numerous attacks and defenses in our letters to the editor, and I wrote:

“If you can believe it, the cartoonist actually tried to preach understanding and tolerance on the funny pages! Next thing you know, they'll be trying to foist these kinds of destructive values off on our kids in school.”


Setting aside my prescience about what would happen 25 years later in the East Penn School District, I’ll note that this column prompted an anonymous poison pen letter from one of my fellow employees, who thought I was attacking gay people but didn’t have the guts to confront me.

Then again, if he/she had, I’d have told him/her that he/she was a numskull for misreading the column. So maybe it’s just as well.

Back to the column, I went on to satirically point out the destructive values embodied in our other 30-some comic strips. Here’s what I said about Mark Trail:

“Even Mark, portrayed on the surface as an animal-loving, environment-protecting straight arrow, has his dark side.

“He has been living for at least 30 years in Lost Forest with his so-called ‘fiancee,’ Cherry, and her father, Doc, and there's been nary a suggestion that wedding bells might be in the offing. In recent years, they've taken in a waif named Rusty to complete an arrangement that can only be described as bizarre.

“Why won't Mark make an honest woman of Cherry? Why doesn't Doc put his foot down? What kind of family values are we preaching here?”

Perhaps not coincidentally, Mark finally married Cherry months later. And after I interviewed Northampton County President Judge Robert Freedberg about a Mark Trail story line in which Mark’s dog, Andy, was put on trial for murder, then-cartoonist Jack Elrod sent me one of his original drawings of Andy on trial.

Framed and hanging in our house, it remains one of my most prized possessions.

A few years later, when Mark Trail finished very poorly in one of our comic strip polls, I did a scientific analysis of the results to conclude that it actually was one of our most popular strips. I interpreted the results through what I called the Passion Ranking and the Approval Ranking, because I felt that strips that inspire passion, even negative passion, should rank higher.

I concluded, “As for Mark Trail, only a lunatic would drop our eighth most popular comic strip.”

So it survived this and subsequent polls, including one of my own in which a reader wrote that Mark Trail should be beheaded. I’m convinced that without my advocacy, many years of Mark’s interesting life as a hard-punching environmental writer would have been lost to the Lehigh Valley’s readers.

King Syndicate should be paying me royalties.

If anything, my investment in the strip increased when Elrod retired and was replaced by protegee James Allen. I’ve spoken to Allen several times about his ideas for improving and modernizing Mark Trail, including scarier animals, more action and a greater focus on the relationship between a more buff Mark and a much sexier Cherry, who suddenly was shown lounging around in bikinis.

I was on board with hot Cherry and Allen’s other ideas about ramping up the strip’s excitement level. But as time went by, I became increasingly alarmed by its … weirdness.

Mind you, Mark Trail always was weird, in a stodgy kind of way. But its weirdness was predictable and oddly comforting. I likened my fascination to people gawking at a car wreck.

Now, the wreck was a multicar disaster with toxic waste spillage.

The turning point, I think, was Allen’s interminable Six Months in a Cave story line, where Mark was trapped below ground forever after he and two naturalists were chased into a Mexican cave by machine-gun toting drug runners.

Allen told me it all happened in 48 hours of real time, but for the rest of us, it was six months of tepid subterranean peril, lame comedy and relentlessly spouted nature facts. By the time the plot abruptly ended, many of the few remaining Mark Trail fans were grumbling or in open revolt.

It hasn’t gotten better. This latest plot, which has something to do with Mexican archaeological artifacts, has been meandering aimlessly for months, although it finally seems to be taking shape.

During the endless lead-in, there were circus animals loose in Lost Forest as a result of a train derailment, which seemed really stupid until this gave way to the local sheriff’s even stupider tale about the clowns on the train. They were left wandering the countryside, in full makeup and costume, emerging from a cemetery to terrorize children at a bonfire. One clown, the Great Wilhelm, was shot in the buttocks with rock salt. Oh, and he hasn’t talked for 65 years.

Believe it or not, it was worse than that sounds.

Still another unresolved plot, about a one-eyed big game hunter, named “Dirty,” who apparently wants to kill Mark, popped up in the background before disappearing again. I would imagine Dirty will return at some point. Maybe dressed as a clown.

It has begun to remind me of T-shirts with variations on, “I’ve been told I have ADHD, but I don’t think — hey look, a squirrel!”

I’m finding it increasingly difficult to mount a defense when people come up to me and say, “What is going on with Mark Trail?” So if James Allen is reading out there, consider this an intervention.

By all means, put Cherry in skimpy outfits, showcase Mark’s abs and blow things up. But if you persist in plots that move at the pace of continental drift and with the coherence of malarial fever dreams, I won’t be able to save you the next time your comic strip is on the chopping block.

I may not even try.