Aw, come on, Doonesbury...
*facepalm*
This is the problem with liking cartoonists who are older than your parents. Eventually they get kind of stuffy.
:/ Yes, the flashbacks to the Rick and Joanie dating of mutual stumbly/sweet/sensual and the accompanying Ginny and Clyde during Ginny's university/campaign days just kind of pointed up for me all the problems with the current strip.
Melissa and Cora and the rest of the folks at the VA are lovely, but man. I just don't know. Seriously, seriously, the old stuff hasn't lost its charm at all ("I meant him and me, dammit!" "So you gotta tell it to the WORLD?") but I feel like the VA people barely exist outside the VA, and there's no sense of drive and wide ranging ambition in the young people, and Zipper's just a slacker - he lacks Zonker's gleeful eccentricity and awareness of life outside his own head (although Zonker frequently confused this with the life going on inside his head so, to be fair, did everyone else, and that life was always far more interesting than whatever is going on in Zipper's head) - and, and, and...
I dunno. I just feel like it was a better strip even ten years ago. I miss the surreality, I feel like the characters aren't as well sustained, the treatment of the youthful characters annoys the heck out of me, and, and, and -
I don't know. I just feel like it's not as good, and that makes me sad, even as I suppose it's to be expected. It's a forty year old strip, after all, and the cast has gotten totally, impossibly huge. It has to be hard to sustain that. (Never mind that some of the youth jokes annoy the hell out of me because they're so totally self righteous baby boomer who hasn't actually talked to young people lately. As a twenty something who grew up reading this strip's backstories and has had her sense of humor formatively shaped by it... So unfair. So friggin' unfair. Give us some narrative respect, please.)
It's hard to articulate my issues. I just... I've been feeling it, lately.
This is the problem with liking cartoonists who are older than your parents. Eventually they get kind of stuffy.
:/ Yes, the flashbacks to the Rick and Joanie dating of mutual stumbly/sweet/sensual and the accompanying Ginny and Clyde during Ginny's university/campaign days just kind of pointed up for me all the problems with the current strip.
Melissa and Cora and the rest of the folks at the VA are lovely, but man. I just don't know. Seriously, seriously, the old stuff hasn't lost its charm at all ("I meant him and me, dammit!" "So you gotta tell it to the WORLD?") but I feel like the VA people barely exist outside the VA, and there's no sense of drive and wide ranging ambition in the young people, and Zipper's just a slacker - he lacks Zonker's gleeful eccentricity and awareness of life outside his own head (although Zonker frequently confused this with the life going on inside his head so, to be fair, did everyone else, and that life was always far more interesting than whatever is going on in Zipper's head) - and, and, and...
I dunno. I just feel like it was a better strip even ten years ago. I miss the surreality, I feel like the characters aren't as well sustained, the treatment of the youthful characters annoys the heck out of me, and, and, and -
I don't know. I just feel like it's not as good, and that makes me sad, even as I suppose it's to be expected. It's a forty year old strip, after all, and the cast has gotten totally, impossibly huge. It has to be hard to sustain that. (Never mind that some of the youth jokes annoy the hell out of me because they're so totally self righteous baby boomer who hasn't actually talked to young people lately. As a twenty something who grew up reading this strip's backstories and has had her sense of humor formatively shaped by it... So unfair. So friggin' unfair. Give us some narrative respect, please.)
It's hard to articulate my issues. I just... I've been feeling it, lately.