Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Bambi, Jasmine, Tawny, Cherie.
Hilariously topical and important news flash today: Bill Clinton is a womanizer.
More important that today's content however, are the following questions:
- Grammatically-speaking, why are Jasmine and Tawny in quotes, but Bambi and Cherie are not?
- Why, as commenter John recently pointed out, do almost all of the peple who appear in Mallard's panels have their eyes closed.
As for the second, I suspect that he is forced to draw them closed, lest their cold dead stares haunt his barren lonely existence and slowly drive him mad until he kidnaps Walter Williams and holds him in his basement until Mr. Williams promises to run for Emperor of the Universe and take Mallard as his love slave. But that is just a guess.
12 comments:
Also, as pointed out on this other Tinsley-refuting blog, Mallard's gone from saying that Hillary rode in on Bill's coattails to calling Bill the "baggage" holding her back. Which one is it, Bruce?
Serious question here: Is Bill's womanizing just a trite rehash of an old story, or has he kept that up since Monica? I know what the supermarket tabloids say, but you can't really call that a reliable source. I'd really like to know if this is just Mallard (and Jay Leno, and everyone else who thinks he's funny) going after the easy comedy target, or if it's still at all relevant.
If it's true, does it matter?
Does he still hold any office?
Did he seriously try to rhyme "Cherie" with "married to me"?
I don't know why Tinsley has given a free pass to the indiscretions of Grover Cleveland and Warren G. Harding. Aren't they just as topical as Bill and Monica? Couldn't we please have a 2 week-long poem about the Teapot Dome Scandal or perhaps Free Silver?
That last stanza's an even bigger mess than usual. "You've got enough baggage just by being"? Holly crap. That "by" doesn't belong there at all. Or the "'ve" doesn't belong there. They shouldn't both be there. And yeah, he tries to rhyme "Cherie" and "married to me". Did Happy Hour start early in Indiana on Feb. 1, or something?
Also, as someone pointed out on the Curmudgeon, it is just downright Cronenberg-demented that Mallard, a BIRD, is depicted with little cherub-wings stitched on his back, while still retaining his regular arms, which should be wings. Agh.
Lastly: look! Clinton got him a big pointy chin! Just like he ... um ... doesn't really have. You could actually improve Tinsley's caricatures a lot by taking off the enormo-chins and drawing them with their eyes open. I mean, they'd still suck, but at least they'd look somewhat closer to who they're supposed to resemble.
Holy crap. Not holly. I'd take heat for the typo, while criticizing Tinshley's use of English, but I don't get paid by a syndicate to comment on blogs.
I like the speculation in the main post about why the eyes are always closed, but I suspect it's a bit simpler than that: the eyes are the window to the soul. And they're hard to draw right. And Tinsley doesn't really have any talent.
PS - Wheeeeee, I'm famous!
I just had another thought: would it be wrong for me, ethically, to pretend to be a right-wing hack, so that I can get my crappy cartoon syndicated? 'Cause you couldn't get to the top being that untalented unless you're on wingnut welfare. It would be so easy to be better than THIS, though.
Would it be wrong if I did that, then came out and said: "I don't actually believe any of this. I was just using you people for the money. And do you SEE how easy it was for me?!"
There are a lot of problems with Mallard Fillmore, but the quotation marks, this one time, aren't among them. It's the use/mention distinction; when in the context of "someone named 'Jasmine' or 'Tawny'" the quotation marks signal that he's referring to the name, not the person it represents. I'm not sure that's the standard usage, but it's not completely out of left field.
There's no good explanation for all the ellipses, though.
dlauthor - oh God, I knew there was something bothering me about that image, but I couldn't place it (besides the fact that his cherub wings start at his neck). It's like something out of the Book of Revelations. It's even worse with his huge black head the same size as his body. *shudder*
I can't get over the fact that the Valentine's Day strip had Mallard being lonely. This implies that Tinsley KNOWS his creation is horrid and unlovable. And yet he won't stop.
As an artist, and aspiring comic creator, I'd like to say that Mallard Fillmore Sucks.
More specifically, I'd like Tinsley to just stop pretending he's doing anything new: Mallard Fillmore should consist of...
1) Mallard looking smug
2) Pointy-chinned, squinty-eyed, generic political caricature
3) The Words: "The left is smelly, Right rulez 4eva!
4) [Insert generic conservative demand here]
That's it, everyday. He's half-way there already, just go for broke.
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