Rational Comics

[syrakusos]

Roger Bissel made mention of Dilbert and that is a good start. Scott Adams' Dilbert had been running in the daily newspapers for a couple of years when I was working on an automation project in 1994. Not being a regular newspaper reader and not being a regular for the comics, I had not seen the strip. The guys there gave me a Dilbert book for Christmas, explaining carefully that while many people think that he is a computer programmer, he is really, like them, an engineer. Adams's work, of course, continued to gain popularity. His influence in popular culture as a reflector of popular culture probably peaked with Highly Defective People, a play on Stephen Covey's title. Dilbert, of course, is the rational man in an irrational world. He also has his own (painfully obvious) limitations. (One of my favorite shows Dilbert in his living room recliner. An organ-looking thing pops out of his chest. "My god! What are you?" I'm your Ego, man, and you're killing me. "Don't you belong inside?" I'm going to try out for a play or something.... (walks off panel). What I liked was the nuance that the ego would be saved by at least trying.)

Matt Groening's The Simpsons have become cultural icons. Fifteen or twenty years ago, we saw a trailer at an animation festival and I was pleasantly surprised when The Simpsons became a television show. Then, the schools attempted to ban Bart Simpson t-shirts. That was before Columbine. Groening is prolific. In addition to The Simpsons, he also created Life in Hell and Omar and Akbar.

As with Dilbert (or for that matter Peanuts or Superman) the success of the work reflects the artist's ability to show us to ourselves in ways that we are willing to see. So, comics -- like the medieval fool at court -- are able to say things that would be harsh or cruel if spoken plainly.

My desktop includes a daily New Yorker cartoon. The New Yorker has its preferred coterie and the running sum reflects what is happening at the moment in The City. Some of the allusions are lost on me, of course, because I live in the hinterlands. Others partially explain other allusions I have come across. You can find anthologies of New Yorker cartoons in the bookstores. Two friends of mine each gave me the compendium of Money cartoons, a nod to numismatics, rather than Objectivism.

This raises a curious issue. We (we here) emphasize academic philosophy and formal literature. A hundred or a thousand years in the future, Scott Adams may be remembered, while Stephen Covey is a footnote to explain the point. In other words, considering that millions of people engage this medium, does it deeply reflect (or perhaps drive) the common culture? By 1900, the world had changed enough that "literature" had expanded beyond Homer and Virgil and included Dickens and Austen. Earlier than that, however, the works we regard today as "important" simply were not. While book literature continues, we cannot ignore new media ... though we do, considering them at best guilty pleasures. Tell someone that you have a degree in English literature and that you majored in 18th Century Poetry and you get a nod. Tell them that your degree is in animated cartoons and you get a wink.

Edited December 12, 2007 by Michael E. Marotta

[Chris Grieb]

Michael;

In Nathaniel Branden's Basic course he told a story about a man he had talked to on a flight. The man spouted a bunch of bromides. Branden gave the usual list of the villains in modern philosophy ending with the editorial writers and comic strip writers who in Branden's words taught it to this gentleman.

Miss Rand said that the triumph of Objectivism would be when comic strips had Objectivism in them.