Word: strip
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
FROM its title, Berke Breathed's new comic strip, "Outland," promises to take readers someplace unusual and distant every Sunday. But you've seen this before. In this case, familiarity breeds contempt...
Admittedly, there is a risk in reviewing a comic strip that has run fewer than a dozen times. Usually you wait for a cartoonist to find his rhythm and his own particular voice. But Breathed has been cartooning a widely popular strip for most of this decade, so I'm not inclined to give him the benefit of time. He has shown arrogance in flushing his successful "Bloom County" to begin this "Outland" strip. One naturally expects a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist to show us his best stuff early to quiet his critics...
...other two characters in the strip are Mort, a haggard Mickey Mouse imitation, and Tim, a ratty-looking rat. They may carry a few diseases, but they certainly don't carry the strip...
...easy to see the intellectualoid underpinnings of Breathed's strip. But they serve only to make "Outland" more irritating. Most of the strips so far have taken the reader through five panels of apparent meaningfulness and then dumped a Dan Quayle joke in the last panel. Either Breathed is a lazy sot or he is trying to prove that Dan Quayle is more of a travesty than even Johnny Carson imagines...
...only is Breathed recycling the same punchline every week, he apparently intends to depict the same event over and over. The plot of every strip so far has been the passage of Ronald Ann into this Outland. The first strip showed her walking through a door, and all the episodes since have retold that event in a new way. Last Sunday the mouse and the rat kidnapped Ronald Ann in between a gang war and a rabid alleycat. Breathed's attempt to show us the variation possible in any given even is certainly an attempt to deliver modern...