As near as I can tell from the sections I looked at--specifically from 02/14/00, the first strip, to 04/29/00, then from 10/28/00 to 11/29/00, from 04/28/01 to 07/04/01, 12/04/01 to 01/22/02, 10/22/02 to 10/29/02, a scattered selection of 2003 and 2004 strips that I noted on a piece of paper that I seem to have mislayed, then all the strips since 02/28/05, the start of the Daily Grind contest--Greystone Inn is a perfectly fine and well-drawn comic strip with humorous characters and situations. To be honest, I can't understand why this isn't appearing in my newspaper every morning.
Now--and I can't believe that I feel the need to clarify this--this is not a "slam" on Brad Guigar and his comic. A lot of internet cartoonists seem to feel newspaper comics are akin to the devil, but I read the comics in the Los Angeles Times every morning, and I enjoy most of them; heck, a couple--9 Chickweed Lane, for instance, and Mr. Boffo--I find genuinely amusing and/or interesting on a pretty consistent basis.
Thinking about it, though, I find that I regard newspaper comics as something of a utility--like water or electricity. I open the paper while gnawing away at my bowl of All-Bran, and there they are. I don't expect them to be explosive or challenging: I just expect them to be delivered to my front doorstep every morning. This makes them very much unlike internet comics where I hafta go into the spare bedroom, turn on the computer, connect to the internet, open my browser, and wait for some site or other to load up if I wanna read them.
What can I say? I'm neither technophile nor technophobe, though not owning a cell phone makes me feel more outdated every day. Computers are tools to me, no more elements of my lifestyle than the wire cutters I use when I'm changing my guitar strings. And I find them just about as difficult to use as I find most tools. They're pretty darn handy to have around, though, so I struggle on, do my best, and usually don't cut myself while turning on the monitor.
Anyway, because of all that, I seem to expect more from internet comics than I do from newspaper comics. Internet comics are hard for me to get to, so they'd better be worth the effort. Newspaper comics are easy, are right there on the page, and are relatively free--I mean, I'd be reading the newspaper for the news of the day anyway, and as an added bonus, hey, kids, comics! So content-wise, newspaper comics get a pretty free ride from me. If they give me a chuckle or two during breakfast, I feel that they've done their job.
Which is exactly how Greystone Inn strikes me: nice, light entertainment in the Berke Breathed vein. Guigar gets high marks from me for completely pulling the rug out from under his characters a couple months back after following his "comic about the making of a comic" premise for five years, but all in all, this is a perfect newpaper comic in my eyes. I would love to open the paper every morning and read it there.
But taking the time and the trouble to go onto the web every day and read it, there just isn't interesting enough stuff going on in the comic for me to do all that. It might fall into the category of checking once a week, but for now, I think I'm gonna hafta say it's just Not For Me.
I'm not exactly sure whether all the comics on Galey's site are ones he's done for the Daily Grind or not--the only pages that seem to have dates are the parts of what I guess is his journal comic, "Lower-Middle Class." To make it even more confusing, he has a LiveJournal, too, where he appears to have different comics that also may or may not be part of the Grind.
Now, I'm pretty easily confused to begin with, so this sort of jumbled-up archive just leaves me scratching my head. Of course, an archive all dated and filed one page after the other is really only helpful to someone like me who's both fairly anal and who's trying to do a very specific sort of "let's-read-every-comic-in-order" survey. Galey's main I Am Jamie site has links to both his journal comics and to his fiction comics, and that's all any sane person really needs to read his stuff.
So, going on the assumption that just about everything on his sites is related to the Grind in some way, I hafta say that I like the stories better than the journal. A journal comic, as I've said in these essays before, is about the hardest thing I can imagine trying to do. Maybe it's just that I'm a boring person, but I sincerely doubt that I could find two panels worth of interesting incident in my own life every day to draw up, and as a reader, that's what I'm looking for: "interesting incident."
And Galey, I mean, he makes some observations, he walks around the house naked, he has a girlfriend who's something of a character, but none of it really struck a chord with me. Compared to the three Grind journal comics that I looked at in my Third Essay, Galey doesn't quite have the same ear for boiling down a real incident into something that could make an interesting comic.
"Pillow Talk" and "Angelfeather," though, the two incomplete story comics on his site, those are very fine indeed. They're filled with interesting characters doing interesting things in interesting ways, and I can't help but wish Galey would devote his energies to them rather than to the journal. Of course, I prefer fiction to real life in general, so I may not be the best person to consult on this subject. But Galey has a real gift for storytelling, a gift that I'd like to see him get out and use more often.
So, "Lower-Middle Class" ends up on the Not For Me list while Galey's story comics make me very happy indeed. So I guess I'll check in on the site now and then to see if anything new's happening to that poor ol' pillow...
Eric Poole, on the other hand, does a very nice job mixing a journal comic with a story comic in his Darkside Bluezz: most of the characters are named after Poole and his friends, for instance--he even has a couple photos of them all here and there--but, well, Poole also has comics about visiting Slag the Barbarian, the guy who lives in the apartment next door...
Now, of course, maybe Poole really does have a Conan-esque warrior for a neighbor. Maybe he did turn the front room of his apartment into an ice rink for penguins. Maybe he did go to Hollywood to learn the horrible truth behind The Simpsons.
How true his "journal comic" is, though, that doesn't much matter to me. The important thing is: whether he's fighting off demonic masks or going on vacation, he makes it all darn entertaining, makes it into something worth struggling with the various computers in my life so i can take a look at it.
As far as comparisons go--and now that I've got a little back-log of essays, I might as well start using it--Poole's stuff isn't as self-conscious as Yirmumah!, isn't trying so hard to be outrageous most of the time, and isn't as angst-filled as Modern Heiroglyphics. That leaves Poole a lot of ground he can cover that those other two comics probably wouldn't be interested in, and I'm looking forward to seeing what he does with it.
So this essay ends up with one-and-a-half Not for Mes and one-and-a-half comics I'll be happily reading from now on at least a weekly basis. More next week as we plunge past the half-way point of comics still participating in the Grind--unless more drop out, of course.
Which brings me to the "update" section of this week's essay. Because the first comic I wrote about in my First Essay has withdrawn from the contest--Scott Kurtz apparently always turns his PvP comic over to a guest artist during the week of the Comic-Con International in San Diego, and since he did so again this year, he broke the "must post a new comic every weekday" rule.
I wasn't reading the comic anyway, but I did want to note its passing here.
I'd also like to note that Todd and Penguin, another of the comics I wrote about in that First Essay, has cut back to 3 days a week. In order to keep up his end of the contest, though, David Wright will be posting non-penguin-related comics to his I Draw Comics blog on Tuedays and Thursdays.
Of course, this will slow down the already too-leisurely-for-me pace of Todd & Penguin, so I may just drop it back to checking at the end of every month. We'll see...
You can go back to the Fifth Essay from here, on to the Seventh Essay, or perhaps return to the Book Reports main page. And of course, there's always my Comic's Main Page as well.