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Wednesday, January 27, 2010

That damned Manuscript

What's Mallard raving about today?

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Twilight.

Great, now I know Mallard's opinion of Twilight. Like I needed that information in my head.

28 comments:

GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre under a (male) pseudonym, and her publisher did not know her true identity. Looks like all that "research" paid off again for Tinsley. Maybe mangling the historical record like this would be okay if he was actually doing it in the service of a decent joke, but for something as lame as this?

exanonymous said...

Wow, trashy novels sell. Who knew?

200 years in the future, the greatest works of this century will be declared to be those ones about vampires and or the ones with the half naked guys holding girls with heaving cleavage.

Maybe we should censor it, like the dictionary! That will fix all our problems, when stuff we don't want to read (sparkling vampires, oral sex, etc.) is gone!

Tog said...

Dear Mr. Tinsley,

Your whinings and rantings are just what our syndicate needs to alternately mollify and agitate the segment of our readership which insists that fluoride in the drinking water is a plot to sterilize America.

However, may we suggest that your rambling, incoherent, apeshit text-walls might be more effective in a funny-animal strip? Research shows your natural audience will refuse to question the words of a talking duck.

Sincerely,
The Very Same "Liberal" Media You Hate So Much

Steve-o said...

Tinsley's opinion on literature is just as valid as his opinion on racism, which is to say, not valid at all.

Bill the Splut said...

Like this guy ever read "Jane Eye." Or anything, besides TV Guide and the occasional cocktail napkin.

He'll get an aneurysm if anyone tells him about "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies."

Rootbeer said...

At least he didn't start off the joke "Dear Mr. Stoker...".

Although I suppose in a week or so he could re-use this artwork, only next time the joke is that the publishing exec wants Mr. Stoker's characters to "sparkle more" and "spend more time with pop tarts"...

word veri: enesting. What the duck is doing when he slouches on his beanbag chair in front of the electronic entertainment box.

dlauthor said...

One day: "Down with elitists! Arugula! Latte-sipping Volvo-driving blarrrgh *vomit, pass out*"

Another day: "Down with popular fiction! Vampires! Bronte-hating trend-following blarrrgh *skids into telephone pole*"

I mean, seriously. With all the discordant opinions he spouts, it's like the traveling road company of A Beautiful Mind has been held over inside Tinshley's head.

Kip W said...

@exanonymous-

James T. Kirk: You mean the profanity?
Spock: Yes.
James T. Kirk: That's simply the way they talk here. Nobody pays any attention to you unless you swear every other word. You'll find it in all the literature of the period.
Spock: For example?
James T. Kirk: [thinks] Oh, the complete works of Jacqueline Susann, the novels of Harold Robbins....
Spock: Ah... The giants.

(Star Trek IV)

Factinista said...

It's for comics like this one that we need to remember that this is the same Mallard who supposedly believes that "average, hardworking Americans need a break instead of a lecture."

NickE said...

And we should take literature advice from the guy who thinks "Going Rogue" belongs in non-fiction?

Musical accompaniment: "Sparkly Vampires," the Twilight-inspired song from The RiffTones.

NickE said...

Hey, Tinsley is discussing vampirism! That must mean he's a vampire!!!

Jazzbumpa said...

This one actually comes close to being funny. He should have used Jane Austin, though.

Steve-O said...

This almost makes me like "Twilight".

rewinn said...

Rather than try to fake an interest in today's "comic", let me enthusiastically endorse "The Eyre Affair" by Jaspar Fforde ... yes, it is sort of about Jane Eyre (and therefore slightly relevant to today's "comic" ) but it's also funny, smart, readable and many other things Mallard Fillmore is not

dlauthor said...

Fforde is great. No doubt, though, Tinshley would see him as an affront to all the great Victorian literature that he pretended to read before he dropped out of high school.

MartyRotten said...

I have a lot of trouble believing that Tinsley has actually read Jane Eyre, unless he skimmed through the "Classics Illustrated" version of it. I'm no fan of Twilight either, for the record, but it seems Tinsley hates anything more popular than he is, which explains his jibes against Doonesbury, Harry Potter, Rock Music and.....well just about anything.
(P.S. The Illustrated Jane Eyre, with pictures by Dame Darcy, is well worth looking for.)

Bill the Splut said...

I said:
Like this guy ever read "Jane Eye."

THAT WAS NOT WRONG SHE WROTE ONE ABOUT A CYCLOPS!*

*(unreadable tiny text citing "BronteWasASocialistCyclops.com")

Here are the books of classic literature Tinny may have read, the published works of "Stone Cold" Jane Austin, as follows:

Pride and Extreme Prejudice

Panic in Mansfield Needle Park

Sense and Beaten into Insensibility

North-Anger Stabby

Persuasion...WITH MY MEATY FISTS!

Emma

WV: exitted; something I wish Bruce would do from the building

Erich said...

Funny, it was just ten days ago that Tinsley was gloating over the "best-seller" status of assorted conservative books...now he's sneering at popular literature.

Verification word: Hypticle. A kind of monocle that prevents the wearer from seeing his own hypocrisy.

Kaitlyn said...

Why does he hate America?

And 3rd the Fforde love!

Kaitlyn said...

Fforde is probably too liberal, or at least too foreign.

The Fourth Bear is an interesting look at racism and the "War on Drugs" and giant cucumbers.

Then there's the whole neanderthal thing...

Ducky is Right said...

Funny, this is the exact same strip that a witchalock would draw.

exanonymous said...

I imagine what happened there was that while he was sneering at a bestseller's list, someone wrote him an email about how Twilight also makes that list, and this is his desperate attempt to minimize it in his own mind so that Palin's book continues to be "great".

As for Jane Eyre, yeah, that book has "lit chick" written all over it. I very much doubt it was understood or liked, and if it was, were his high school teachers really so bad for choosing that over something by Karl Marx?

Kip W said...

You make a good point, folks. I should see if the library has any Fforde I haven't read yet.

Oh yeah, the duck. Boring, isn't he? I still wish there was a vote button for "ho hum."

Toots McGee said...

I guess I should check out this Fforde guy.

To ride off even further on this tangent, I was reading some comments somewhere about an author whose work I've been consuming much of at late, Phillip K. Dick. The gist of one reader' comments was that PKD wrote a few great books, but was largely a hack who had lots of great ideas. I wouldn't argue that Dick had many weaknesses in his plotting and characterizations, but I enjoy reading him nonetheless largely for the ideas he presented and that alone is enough to keep me interested.

So, why do I read Tinsley's quack trap? He's a hack and his ideas are shit (and I don't mean that they are ideas I don't agree with, I mean they spring from his ass).
To carry this disgusting metaphor even further, maybe Tinsley comics are more like farts: trite and offensive, but occasionally humorous in the lowest sense of the word.

Michael Foley said...

PKD short story collections are distilled greatness. Each Mallard Fillmore comic is like a public toilet that is clogged and hasn't been flushed in two days.

GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

I think I've read about a dozen PKD novels. My favorite is A Scanner Darkly, eff double-you eye double-you.

Kip W said...

Don't forget the brooding, visionary novels of a grinding dystopia where the wrong people are in power and we're going to hell in an alcohol-tinged handbasket, written by Phillip K. Duck.