From the Wikipedia Entry on Berke Breathed:
According to Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz, Al Capp poked fun at Peanuts in Li’l Abner, particularly the way the children and Snoopy act and talk nothing like little children. This would have been in the early 1960s, when Schulz was at the height of his early career, receiving various awards and magazine coverage.
Aw c’mon, let’s cut Tinsley some slack. He wants to be topical and edgy…but he can in no way say anything that reflects badly on conservatives in general or the Bush Administration in particular – which means he has practically zero material to work with. Having a Kennedy in a car crash was a godsend…otherwise he’d be reduced to creating another “Education Establishment” strawman and hitting it with a stick.
(I notice that it’s been several months since he drew one of his worshipful portraits of G.W. Bush gazing steadfastly into the future with flags and eagles in the background…for Tinsley, this absence amounts to a scathing condemnation.)
Chester Gould also made fun of Peanuts and the general Schulz style in Dick Tracy. He created a cartoonist character in the early sixties who drew a strip called Sawdust, which consisted of two little piles of schmutz having weighty conversations. Dick and all the other cops followed it religiously.
And Al Capp did “Fearless Fosdick,” which was pretty vicious about Dick Tracy.
Actually, Capp in his later years was a lot like Tinsdale: virulently conservative and unfunny – plus he repeated the joke all week.
“Pearls Before Swine” takes potshots at a lot of strips, but it’s less vitriolic. I have seen other strips (Jane’s World) shoot right back.
Al Capp’s and Chester Gould’s digs at Schulz were friendly.
The only one I can think of who’s taken real digs ( besides Breathed and Tinsley) - where the bitter seemed to outweigh the funny - was Frank Cho making fun of “Cathy.”
“Fearless Fosdick” never struck as real insults - but I’ve only read them in collections.
Get Fuzzy recently did a week of strips based on the premise that the art for Pearls was accidentally delivered to Darby Conley’s house. Several strips of GF that week consisted of that same day’s strip from Pearls with Satchel’s head superimposed on one of the characters.
True, but when the strip you’re making fun of is so obviously in on the joke, it’s a whole nother kettle. Pearls before Swine did a scathingstrip making fun of Cathy awhile ago–I think that the happy last panel had Cathy’s mouth duct-taped shut.
Daniel
Oh, absolutely. I actually had meant to note that it was obvious that both artists were in on the joke (since Pastis had to get the strips to Conley well before they were published).
True. Tinsley’s attack on Trudeau basically said, “‘Doonesbury’ is an irrelevant, rotting, and unfunny pile of left-wing suckitude that wastes valuable space on the comic page and is still running only because the liberals control the media.” I can’t think of another cartoonist (not even Breathed) who so harshly attacked another in his comic strip. (I also seem to recall some other strips were Tinsley went after Trudeau by way of his wife, Jane Pauley, but I could be wrong.)
In those words?!
Just because I’m apparently masochistic, I’ve been looking at some of the older MF strips. Someone here used to defend it by saying that Tinsley’s a great charicaturist, but he really does a terrible job of drawing Ray Nagin. His drawing of him looks like Tina from A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. It’s on the second to the bottom strip on this page.
Well, not those exact words but that was what he meant. (Actually, it would’ve been a lot funnier if he had phrased like that. Unfortunately, Tinsley isn’t that outrageous or clever.)
Even if MF had no obvious, tired political axe to grind, it still suffers from the fact that it isn’t even remotely funny.
Funny thing is, MF owes its syndication to Doonesbury, as near as I can tell. Only times I’ve seen MF in print was when it was right next to Doonesbury on the Editorial page, as if the editors figured that they needed to have balance in the comic-strip world. If Doonesbury ceased to exist, why on earth would anyone pay to keep MF in print?
Daniel
The existence of MF is indeed justified by the demand for “equal time” with the likes of Doonesbury, but I suspect that a lot of editors run it in order to make conservatives look bad by comparison.
So where are the good conservative-oriented comic strips they’re keeping from us, then?
I have a soft spot in my heart for Prickly City.