The Cliché Character

[VonDondu]

The bottom line is that consumers want the same thing over and over. Look at the film industry. The "blockbusters" are always full of cliches, while the films with original ideas aren't very popular. Film producers ask themselves what made previous movies popular and then do their best to reproduce the results; that's how they make money. They don't argue with public opinion.

The same is true of morning comic strips. The typical reader wants to read the same type of cartoons over and over again. Garfield and Peanuts never fail to meet people's expectations, and that's why they're so successful. Jim Davis doesn't even write the comic strip anymore--he has a corporate staff for that--and Charles Schulz is dead, but their comic strips are more popular than ever. Berke Breathed, who wrote Bloom County back in the 80s, which is my favorite comic strip of all time, is very bitter about the fact that the standards for morning comics are so low. But he needs to understand what people want to see in the comics: predictable, comfortable fluff that gives them a smile as they start their day. I'm afraid that Breathed is no longer capable of creating great cartoons anymore because he's so hung up on the idea that comics need to be brilliant, original, and earthshaking or they're not worth creating, and as a result, he hasn't created anything worth reading lately. Meanwhile, Garfield plugs on, and it delivers more smiles in the morning than ever.

[Chimaera182]

Personally, my favorite comics are Dilbert, Boondocks, Non Sequiter, and sometimes Zits. Garfield doesn't do it for me anymore; Peanuts almost never did it for me. Zits is kinda cliche, though, just a typical teenager suffering under his parents. Dilbert, I suppose, is kinda cliche given that he's a lowly worker suffering under a stupid boss, but since he's supposed to represent the common working person, that's probably a given (and I love Alice, she kicks butt). Boondocks... is about a cynical black kid who doesn't seem to like what is considered "black culture."

[Huey watching news on TV]
TV: President Bush said today that with the struggling economy, the North Korean threat, the chaos in Liberia and the deteriorating situation in Baghdad, the American people must stay focused on what's really important...

...The Kobe Bryant trial.

And Non Sequiter tends to be rather dark sometimes, and dark's always fun.

Father: So, what'd you learn from reading the newspaper this week, Danae?
Danae: Hmmm... that politicians talk a lot, but don't really say anything, and that people are stupid enough to blindly follow them.
[silence]
Danae: Um... did I say something wrong?
Father: Unfortunately, no...

But I suppose I'm more in the minority, into the kinds of comics that probably won't last. I used to love Crabby Road, but it vanished from the papers down here... damn hippies. But, again, the fact is people will shell out what they know is proven to get them money. -sigh- We live in a world where we reward copying other people instead of ingenuity.

[fable]

Not to get off-topic, but the only comic I've ever really, really loved was Krazy Kat. And given its surrealistic visuals and often bizarre language--back in the 1920s and 1930s, yet--it never had a very large following. (Berke Breathed loves it, though.) A dog cop devoted to protecting a gender-shifting cat from the bricks thrown by a cynical mouse; a zen hobo bumblebee; a setting of strange New Mexican landscapes that shifted in every panel whether the characters in front moved, or not: I'm still amazed the thing was ever published, much less published for as long as it was.

You know, I think there would be a very good RPG possible in confounding as many AD&D cliches as could be handled. But I'm afraid that, like Krazy Kat, it would only appeal to a few people who were willing to think outside the box, and enjoy doing so.