Remember Carl Giles?

Of course, we all do.

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Picture source

Cartoons, comics and such like

I’ve said a little about my attraction towards cartoons and caricature: using a few lines to say a great deal. Well, one of the best expressions of this is the comic strip. The Americans are great with comic strips. They’ve got it down to an art-form. Some of the most well-known titles in this country, such as Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes (still popular) and Peanuts (featuring Snoopy the beagle), are indeed from across the pond. And here is one of my favourites:

Foxtrot on the Matrix movie

picture from

This picture is deliberately small because cartoonists and their syndicates tend to be a little sensitive about publishing matters; go to the website of the cartoonist for more. The joke is evident. Little Jason and his friend will even eat jelly beans in a special way.

I find the comic-strip engaging because it is based on a family (and therefore the family unit), the ups and downs of family life, concentrating especially on the children and the youngest child, Jason, who in his general appreciation of computer games, fantasy film, wargaming, making life unbearable for his sister and alternatively enabling/baiting his brother, is the expression of the author/cartoonist’s own character. Indeed, in his interviews, Mr. Amend seems to find joy in being called a nerd or a geek or something similar, and explaining how he has lived his life through this one character. The best series, I think, are the ones which feature the relationship which this small boy has with his sweetheart Eileen, whom for the longest time he couldn’t bring himself to be seen with for the sake of his girl-hating reputation. Eileen too happens to be the sort of character who will dress up as characters and stand in line at the movie theatre.

And then there are the suffering parents, especially the mother, who manage to hold things together and manage their own careers at the same time. The relationship between the five Foxtrots and their experiences in their tiny cartoon world make the whole story convincingly real, if real had bug-eyes. Unfortunately, Amend recently retired the cartoon from daily publication and it is now available only as a colour Sunday comic strip. Nevertheless, the full series from the late eighties is available as books, parts of which can even be read online at Google Books. And then there is the merchandising. Amend has a Twitter account.