As a Christmas present, my dad got me a Non-Sequitur page-a-day calendar. I don’t really like Non-Sequitur, but my job is boring, so I’ve been flipping through the pages of the calendar for amusement. I’ve noticed something: Wiley (the guy who draws the strip) is obsessed with people getting eaten by bears. I’ve found five different strips with that theme, plus another strip with people getten eaten by lions. All the strips are from the same year, 2008, so it’s not like he’s just recycling a concept every few years. It’s kinda creepy.
Has anybody else noticed that certain comics seem to keep returning the same (unusual) subject?
Maybe Wiley just personally finds people being eaten by bears funny? Webcomic PvP has a long-running gag about character Brent being attacked by a panda everytime he says the word “panda”. Even the Bible has a comedy* bear-attack bit. Maybe there’s a whole sub-genre of bear-attack humor we don’t know about.
I doubt it’s an obsession, simply a common side-effect of having to come up with a steady supply of gags. Ever tried coming up with jokes to order? I have – it’s hard graft.
Different cartoonists have different techniques for coming up with jokes – most probably use several – but a common one is to think of a list of topics, and see how many gags you can build around each one. I expect that one day Wiley sat down with such a list, and said “Okay, what’s funny about… bear attacks? Result: half a dozen or so gags on the same subject.
I remember noting in the mid-eighties that comics written by John Byrne would sooner or later have a female character screaming “NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO…”
“Brewster Rockitt; Space Guy” inevitably has Winky (the young spaceship crew member that has all the misfortunes befall him) crying “AAhhhh! My spleen!”
I have to agree with Gyrate. That sounds a lot more like a running gag than an obsession.
And yeah, Bryan Elkers is right: if you want a comic book artist with “odd” fetishes towards the female characters he draws, John Byrne is your man. He’s done a ton of comic books with girls being mind-controlled by villains. Also, the guy who created Wonder Woman. How many excuses can you come up with to make a girl end tied up?
Don’t think it counts as an obsession but "Overboard"was mostly about the crew. The cartoonist added an on board mouse colony about a year or two ago, and since then at least 80% of the strips are about the ship dog “Louie” or the mice.
Well a running gag should be more than the gag itself, but unfortunately today’s writers have lost that idea.
Yeah Gary Lawson had a lot of cows in “The Far Side,” but the cows weren’t always doing the same thing.
A running gag should always be part of a greater gag. For instance, Frank Nelson on the “Jack Benny Show,” was known for his “Yessssssssss.” Everytime Jac k went some place, no matter the place, the clerk was always Nelson, with his trademark “Yessssss” (“The Simpsons” have a parody of this)
But the gag didn’t end there. That running gag was merely the set up to a different joke. But the “Yessss” part always got a laugh as well. I think too many writers of running gags forget the second part of the joke.
Nelson’s yes was more like “YEEEEEEeeesss.”