Word: comics
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Allison Cole's "Never Ending Summer" (Alternative Comics; 48 pp.; $11.95), just released, marks her graphic novel debut. As is the DIY style, the author focuses on her own life and relationships, putting it onto paper with a beguiling simplicity. Set during a summer between semesters in Providence, Rhode Island, Allison works at a comic store and collects LPs. Asher, her boyfriend, has left for a two-week trip. Suddenly she gets a phone call. He wants to go back to Australia for the rest of the summer - where his old girlfriend lives. Uh oh. The rest of the book...
...after his death in 2000 she worked with an editor at Fantagraphics to pull the collection together. "Unlike Sparky, the rest of his family loves those old strips," she says (apparently everybody called Schulz Sparky). "To me, what's happening here is we're getting back to the comic strip--the simplicity, the black and whiteness of it. For some people, the animation is more real than the comic strip, but the comic is what is truly him." She's right. To read The Complete Peanuts is to forget that Snoopy ever did a MetLife commercial...
This is a delightful observation, if a bit confusing. Is he disdaining Allen's deadpan intellectual angst or celebrating Woody's early comic flights into the existential absurd? No matter. Any Woody Allen reference is a nice surprise from a President who affects a militant lack of sophistication. More important, the story reveals that Bush has an acute awareness of the impression he makes in the world. His policies may be haphazard, but his public appearances aren't. He is not a simpleton. He just plays one--wittingly, it seems--on TV. "He has a stratospheric EQ," a Senator once...
...Mercedes-Benz has learned, comic glamour is deceptively difficult to execute. It must be sophisticated yet have a self-deprecating wit. Mercedes, a brand with impeccably aristocratic roots, has stumbled frequently in its attempts at humor, most recently in TV spots featuring a race to the airport and a genie in a bottle. On the other hand, Whirlpool introduced a Benz-like washing machine in a brilliant onetime use of comic glamour when it debuted its Calypso model with psychedelics and a deadpan sense of humor...
Pier 1 Imports and others strive for comic glamour to make their mark. With actress Kirstie Alley, Pier 1 walked the razor's edge of parody. The company, with $1.8 billion in sales for 2003, apparently felt it could gamble on Alley's fairy-godmother-in-an-evening-gown routine. It has now moved on to Thom Filicia, a member of the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy cast, who strengthens Pier 1's connection to individual style while injecting a trendy dose of male glamour...