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March 25, 2006
Teeter Totter
I'm really happy that today's strip happened when it did. It's a nice representation of everything that's wrong with Prickly City.
Yesterday Scott Stantis held a chat on the Washington Post website (as if they don't have enough problems with the whole Ben Domenech fiasco - next time guys, run a little background check. Try entering the words "conservative blogger" and "plagiarist" and see what comes up.) He addressed a several issues, trying to be funny while offering hard hitting answers to questions like whether Winslow is a fox or a coyote.
The chat is a really good look into the way Stantis's mind works - or doesn't work, depending on how you look at things. That's why I'm so happy with today's strip. After a week of rehashing trends that are months or years old, Winslow accuses Carmen of being a Socialist because she doesn't want people to buy so many things and to show some personal responsibility. Winslow calls her delusional, and that's our punchline.
How incredibly wrong is this on so many levels? It goes to show how Stantis doesn't seem to understand how a comic strip works.
Winslow is a liberal. Most people consider it to be the first step towards Socialism, which then leads to Communism. So why in the world would Winslow condemn Carmen for having the same basic beliefs (everyone works together for the benefit of the group) that he's supposed to hold dear? Carmen, she of the party of huge deficits, talks about people spending less. Huh? It makes my head hurt.
Reading the strip this week, and reading through his online chat, I started to ask myself why I take time out of my weekend to comment on Prickly City. I don't hate Scott Stantis. I'm not a fan, but there are worst people or unfunnier people on the planet (I'm looking at you, Sacki. That's what you get for calling me a fat city boy). But reading his strip, I realize: this guy gets paid for this. He supports his family on this strip, along with his one-off editorials. We're not talking about some guy running his own little strip on a blog somewhere - Prickly City appears in newspapers across the country, despite not being funny and not making sense half the time. And why is that? All fingers point to it being a conservative comic strip, while most other strips that are somewhat political tend to be more liberal.
That's why it was so appropriate that Stantis appeared on the Washington Post website to do his chat. To sum up the Ben Domenech blogger controversy, Ben was a 24-year-old blogger who started the conservative RedState blog. Since many people consider the WaPo Washington reporter Dan Froomkin to be left-leaning in his columns, the editors felt the need (and the heavy pressure from the righties) to bring in someone who represents the right. So they chose a kid with little training in journalism whose biggest claim to fame is that both he and his daddy were...wait for it...George W. Bush political supporters. Well it turns out that Ben not only loves writing - he loves the writing of others, and had a bad habit of simply cutting and pasting the work of others and trying to pass it off as his own. Heck, the kid even plagiarized the Washington Post! After a week of blogging, the lefty bloggers on the web gathered up a ton of evidence to show that Ben might not be the best choice, and he resigned before he could be fired.
And what was Ben's best - scratch that - ONLY qualification? He was seen as a conservative by a paper that felt it needed something to "balance" more liberal thinking. It's the same reason Stantis has been handed a primo spot on the comics page - and that's no reason to give someone a job.
Tomorrow I'll try to take a closer look at Scooter's meeting with the people, especially his interaction with a kid hailing from the state of UR in the city AHACK.
