Edge City Down the Tubes

Nooooooooooooooooooooooo. . . . Tell me it ain't so! Doonesbury has dwindled down to a hit-or-miss Sunday strip, Luann flounders with an unsteady footing in college, and now Edge City is retiring.

What is Fiorella to do?  The comics are the main reason she still subscribes to a newspaper.  Well, that and the anagrams.

Dear God--are the anagrams next?

Lines

If you want to learn how to draw, check out the newspaper comic strips.

Because their canvases are limited, the artists have to pare down to basics.  You'll notice that the characters' faces are usually caricatures, but their bodies must be recognizably normal.  Fiorella is especially--uh--drawn to the graceful line portrayals of the dogs in Red and Rover and Pickles.  She also warms at the figure drawings in Blondie, Pickles, Jump Start, and Luann.  Yes, literally warms.  Fiorella's eyes will trace the shoulder line, the turn of the arm, the grace of the hands, the adjustment of the hips, the dips and swells down the legs to the ankle, the positioning of the feet.

Pant. Pant.  Sorry,but this is the sort of  experience that turns on Fiorella's artistic core.

Luann Revisited?

Hang on, Luann, and Fio will love you again.  The past couple of days, the strips have been sorta fun, like the good old days.  Fiorella got a kick out of everybody getting together in that old building, and especially yesterday, when TJ was obviously looking it over as an investment property.  Hey, author--let's get some redemption going for TJ, and maybe a sweetie too.  And let's see more of the other characters--Ox, Leslie, Miss Phelps and Mr. What's His Name, for instance--and whatever happened to that soldier brother of Bernice's that Luann was corresponding with?

Like Yesterday's News

It used to be that Fio read Google News as a subsidiary to the Austin American-Statesman.  Now she reads the newspaper as a subsidiary to Google News.  In fact, with the change in the crossword puzzle, Doonesbury being in hiatus, and Luann's familiar gang breaking up, she doesn't see that much value in keeping up her subscription to the Statesman any longer.

Newspapers may be going the way of the hoop skirt and the blunderbuss.

Catching Up with Fio

The relationship in the comic strip Luann between Luann and Quill is too good to last.  Fiorella is steeling herself for his plane to crash into the ocean, for the whole adventure to have been an Australian reality show in which Quill was challenged to make a "Yank" fall in love with him, or for everything to have been a dream sequence, with Luann waking up as a high school freshman again.
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Back on the farm in her own life, Fiorella had her first physical therapy session for kyphosis and everything looks good to go.  Her neck has not been irreparably ruined by hunching over her laptop for the past several years after all, and she still retains the ability to stand up STRAIGHT, although the necessary muscles need strengthening.  What a relief--her grandmother had such a bad case of kyphosis that the family said she could see around corners.
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On the literary front, Fiorella's agent has suggested she write more stories set in Bosque Bend.  Fiorella was at a total loss for about two days as her ever-fertile brain mulled over the challenge.  Then, yesterday morning, Fio's pop-up toaster function spat out three different scenarios.  Yes, your Fio seems fixated by trilogies.

Updating Luann

Fiorella is happy about how things are developing in Luann.  After Toni Daytona turned down Luann's brother, Brad, when he proposed to her on last year's April Fool's Day, Toni proposed to him on this year's April Fool's Day.  He, of course, accepted and even shed a tear.  And so did Fiorella. 

How does a comic strip engage readers like Fio?  By presenting interesting , consistent characters with intertwining stories. Fio was confident that Toni's old BF, Dirk, would reappear at some time, just as she knows Ann Eiffel will re-emerge to tangle with TJ again.  

And the art's good too! 

Comics Revue

Now is the time for all good comics readers to come to the aid of their strips, no double entendre intended.

First of all comes the woodshed, where Fio wants to haul Dagwood off to.  Or maybe to the mausoleum.  This strip is so old that it's into its second writer/artist and has folded back on itself and frozen in time so Cookie and Alexander are teenagers again and Daisy--does she even appear anymore?-- has no pups.  Its situations and punch lines are tired and banal, usually centering around Dagwood's love for food and his laziness at work, not exactly the sort of things modern readers relate to.  The final straw for Fio came a couple of days ago when the reader was supposed to laugh uproariously at the artist's ugly and insulting depiction of D&B in their seventies.  Baby boomers of the world unite and KILL this comic strip!

Another woodshed item is the venerable Prince Valiant, which Fiorella has been reading since she could read, and whose artwork she soaked up like a sponge.  Alas, its time has passed.  Please toss the sword back to the lady in the lake again.  She knows there has been a bevy of artists through the years, but the current one is the worst.  He's attempted to ape the beloved old-time style, but can't seem to master the basics--the characters look like they've been drawn from poses forced on a reticulated art doll, and Valiant is beginning to resemble Bruce Jenner.

Next comes the award of excellence--to Luann, Doonesbury, and Pooch Cafe, with also-ran acknowledgements of Pearls before Swine, Edge City, Jump Start, Pickle,. and Baby Blues.  (Notice how Fio prefers strips with continuing stories?)

No award program would be complete without acknowledgment of Cul-de-sac, one of Fio's favorites, which died recently before its time.

And, of course, the second Fio closes this blog off, she'll think of all the other comics she should have acknowledged one way or another.   There's always tomorrow.

Funnies

Been wondering if comic strip cartoonists have a Yahoo loop going to coordinate their themes because last Sunday, characters in Doonesbury, Luann, and Sally Forth all indicated an awareness of their existences being fictional and on public  view.  Doonesbury was the most direct, talking to readers about the strip centering more on Alex and her agemates in the future.  To tell the truth, Fio will be sad if that's the case.  She wants to keep up with the, uhm, oldsters too. 

Fiorella couldn't start her day without reading the funnies, as she's done all her life, but, sadly, her children couldn't care less, which means her comic strip friends may soon be going the way of the dodo bird.  What a loss when all the world will be playing video games in which they kill each other  rather than enjoying a clever ten minutes with the comics page .

TJ Make-over

Remember a while back when Fiorella suggested that since Brad in the Luann comic strip had been hunk-ized, his friend TJ deserved a make-over? Well, apparently he's getting it. Fio's sharp eye noticed TJ's face has filed out a little and his curly hair is less of a tangle. His body is more proportioned too, not just a quick stick figure.

Fio has a theory. She thinks TJ's gonna end up with Ann Eiffel the Awful, the mean manager of Wienie World--a Taming of the Shrew sort of thing.

Wait and watch, Grasshopper.

It's A New Day! Hooray!

Brad has his job back! All's right with the world and there's hope for the rest of us.

Fiorella is a faithful follower of Luann, the popular newspaper comic strip, and she's been quite downhearted about Luann's brother, Brad, losing his firefighter job, then his fast food job. But if Brad can get his firefighter job back, with an even better relationship with his girlfriend as lagniappe, that means Younger Son will find work, Older Son's knee operation will proceed satisfactorily, and Fio's romances will get published.

And Obama will be re-elected.

Brad's Chin

Fio is a fan of Luann, the comic strip. The art fascinates her. The characters are well-drawn, their bodies at least. The heads tend to be comic-strippy stereotyped, although they do change. The evolution of Brad, Luann's older brother, has been especially interesting. From a pudgy, snub-nosed kid, he has matured into a well-built, nice-looking young man. His head first lost the odd dent in the back. Then his hair settled down a little, and his jowls receded. He developed a neck and his eyebrows thinned. Last week he had a definite ninety-degree angle to his chin. And I think his nose was a little less tilted.

Yes, our Brad is becoming a stud, a fitting mate for the lovely Toni Daytona.