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Brooks Peterson
Brooks Peterson's column is published Mondays. Brooks also sits on the Caller-Times editorial board and can be contacted at petersonb@caller.com
Monday, May 1, 2000
This little duck waddled off to 'toon Valhalla
Let's get something straight: While the NewsWretch here has indeed had to develop psychic armor to shield himself from the brickbats and spittoons hurled his way, that doesn't mean he's an uncaring heel.
Message: I care.
In fact, I feel the pain of some of you are experiencing after our latest changing of the guard on the comics pages.
In order to make room for some newcomers, two old stand-bys were, uh, terminated. "Frank and Ernest" went quietly. "Mallard Fillmore," however, has been another matter.
I should perhaps explain to the uninitiated that Mallard is a duck. A seriously right-wing duck, at that.
Some detractors have in fact gone so far as to suggest there is a touch of the goose step in Mallard's waddle, but I think that's a little tough. Mallard certainly tilts to starboard, but if he walks like a duck . . . Well, you know the tune.
The duck's dejected admirers saw in him a corrective to the liberal worldview embodied in Garry Trudeau's "Doones-bury" strip, which for decades has been beating up on conservatives.
Strictly speaking, that's a valid point. From my standpoint, though, the problem was that Mallard, bless his little webbed feet, tended to be a bit strident. His quack was more like a screech. This can turn off readers, which can send a comics character toddling off to cartoon Valhalla.
Obviously, though, Mallard does have his admirers. And not only do I sympathize with them; I share their sense of loss. Fact is, I, too, have been there.
It happened years ago: In an earlier reshuffling of the comics, Jeff MacNelly's infinitely wise, endlessly entertaining "Shoe" got the ax. You want to talk sense of loss? Man, I was stunned. Pole-axed.
Perhaps you don't remember "Shoe." It chronicles the lives and times of a gaggle of journalistic birds who put out a sheet called the Treetops Tatler.
The principals are Shoemaker, who appears to be some sort of crow or grackle, and The Perfesser, who has an owlish look about him, and whose duties appear to include writing the occasional editorial and struggling vainly to make some sense of the compost heap that is his desktop.
Shoemaker is your classic cigar-chomping city editor: Brusque, cynical, callous, brutally candid in assessing his colleagues' work. There is a certain vagueness and a distinct lack of organization to The Perfesser - which, of course, sets him and Shoemaker on a collision course. The humor is low-key, and perhaps not appealing to readers in search of red-meat fare - but to those who've spent any time with or around journalism, it's pure gold.
But. However. The readership wasn't there, so out went "Shoe." I whined. I groaned. I pounded desktops. I took it like the mature adult I am.
And, as some of you may have noticed, "Shoe" and the Treetops Tatler remain . . . gone.
What can I tell you? It's the way the game is played. Or, to resort to an ancient wheeze my children have heard from me a couple of million times:
Live is not fair.
But, after a decent interval, we must leave off the lamentations and the garment-rending. We must make our farewells. We must get on with the rest of our lives.
And, after all, it isn't as if all the news were bad. We've still got "Zits." Surely anyone who has ever shared his or her space with a male teen-ager will not only enjoy but cherish this strip: It's a bit like being in a foreign land and suddenly bumping into someone who not only speaks your language but comes from your hometown. Hostility, sullenness, slovenliness, defiance, sarcasm - it's all there: the Total Package.
So cheer up, woebegone Mallard fans. All is not lost. And who knows? Perhaps someday another right-wing duck - one whose mainspring is not so tightly wound - will migrate onto the comics page.
This is, after all, America, land of infinite possibilities for humans and water fowl alike.
Brooks Peterson
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