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.

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.