Baz and The Far Side
So Baz has been trying to work his way through a Far Side collection. It is an uphill battle for the following reasons:
1) Evidently, all the animals look like cows to him. I'm not saying it's a TERRIBLE assumption with Gary Larson, but it does make cartoons where alligators are staring hungrily at small children a little... baffling.
2) OMG, the cultural literacy required by this cartoon. I just can't even begin to describe it. For instance, there's one set outside a saloon. There was a row of horses tied up outside, and one unfortunate cowboy has knocked over the row. To parse that you have to know that in westerns, horses get tied up outside saloons, that motorcycles get parked outside bars, that tipping over motorcycles is unhealthy for the tipper.... It requires you to know both westerns and motorcycle movies, at least superficially.
I tried to explain to him that cartoons are like an iceberg (then we had to stop and explain the usefulness of icebergs as a metaphor). The 10 percent on top is not actually a story in itself, it is a REFERENCE to a story that lies "under the waterline". Obviously this varies by cartoon -- If Far Side is, say, an 8, Rhymes with Orange and Bizarrro are a 10, and Snoopy is a 4 (Red Baron, football, dark and stormy night), and, um, maybe Garfield is a 2. The comics that have long-running story lines, like Jump Start or Baby Blues tend to be easier to approach, and the extremely unique and almost wordless observational comics like Far Side are less accessible.
Baz really enjoys Calvin & Hobbes, but it's obvious to me that he is reading an entirely different comic than I am. LT theorizes that kids identify more with Calvin, and adults identify more with Hobbes, or the adults in the comic. That heartbreaking one where Calvin finds a baby raccoon and it dies? Is sad for both of us, but for me there is a lot more sadness-of-experience when I think about how I feel as an adult when a kid comes up against a hard reality of life. The way he relates to the comic has changed, too, now that he knows almost all the words, so if he doesn't understand a comic, he is sure that it must be a mismatch of ideas, and not vocabulary.
How about you? Which comics do you only get sometimes? How do you feel about that? I am personally only at 70% for XKCD (but the ones I get, I really enjoy). Questionable Content is sort of the midrange of literacy jokes. Do you remember not understanding comics?
1) Evidently, all the animals look like cows to him. I'm not saying it's a TERRIBLE assumption with Gary Larson, but it does make cartoons where alligators are staring hungrily at small children a little... baffling.
2) OMG, the cultural literacy required by this cartoon. I just can't even begin to describe it. For instance, there's one set outside a saloon. There was a row of horses tied up outside, and one unfortunate cowboy has knocked over the row. To parse that you have to know that in westerns, horses get tied up outside saloons, that motorcycles get parked outside bars, that tipping over motorcycles is unhealthy for the tipper.... It requires you to know both westerns and motorcycle movies, at least superficially.
I tried to explain to him that cartoons are like an iceberg (then we had to stop and explain the usefulness of icebergs as a metaphor). The 10 percent on top is not actually a story in itself, it is a REFERENCE to a story that lies "under the waterline". Obviously this varies by cartoon -- If Far Side is, say, an 8, Rhymes with Orange and Bizarrro are a 10, and Snoopy is a 4 (Red Baron, football, dark and stormy night), and, um, maybe Garfield is a 2. The comics that have long-running story lines, like Jump Start or Baby Blues tend to be easier to approach, and the extremely unique and almost wordless observational comics like Far Side are less accessible.
Baz really enjoys Calvin & Hobbes, but it's obvious to me that he is reading an entirely different comic than I am. LT theorizes that kids identify more with Calvin, and adults identify more with Hobbes, or the adults in the comic. That heartbreaking one where Calvin finds a baby raccoon and it dies? Is sad for both of us, but for me there is a lot more sadness-of-experience when I think about how I feel as an adult when a kid comes up against a hard reality of life. The way he relates to the comic has changed, too, now that he knows almost all the words, so if he doesn't understand a comic, he is sure that it must be a mismatch of ideas, and not vocabulary.
How about you? Which comics do you only get sometimes? How do you feel about that? I am personally only at 70% for XKCD (but the ones I get, I really enjoy). Questionable Content is sort of the midrange of literacy jokes. Do you remember not understanding comics?