Down the line you'll see the shine from Oregon to Caroline

[austin_dern]

Back to comics: Berkely Breathed's Opus ran its final strip on Sunday, coming as a considerable surprise to everyone who hadn't heard that it had started its first strip. I think Breathed kind of wore everyone out with Outland, which started out as a lot of well-intended but obvious mistakes. First, it attempted to run a strip Sunday-only when that's not nearly enough time to build stories and characters. Second, it attempted to build the strip around Ronald-Ann, a late Bloom County character who by a tragic quirk of fate had no discernable personality or interesting features. Third, and this may sound contrary, it gave up on any new characters and just dragged back Bloom County characters after we'd noticed we didn't really need them after all.

Opus on the other hand started with a whole different set of mistakes: again with the Sunday-only publication, and bringing back characters we'd all let fade into a nostalgic haze which remembers how great ``Meadow Rock'' was and forgot that unfortunate alien trans-reversal ray incident, not to mention a weird hissy fit where Breathed refused to let his strip go online and demanded a half-page in the Sunday newspapers. More space for the comics would be a good thing for newspapers, but since newspapers hate their comic strip readers the only thing that tack was going to produce was angry letters to the editor.

Anyway, Opus came out with its final panel, and in an amusing twist it's distributed online only. It's also extremely well-drawn: considering Breathed's long-ago fears that he just drew lousy the technical quality of his artwork has been growing steadily for three decades and even if I didn't like the strips at all I'd like looking at them.

What baffles me is seeing online discussions in which people pronoune the last panel means that Opus The Penguin Is Dead. I don't get this at all. While the last few months of the strip were very clearly about The Coming End Of The Strip, and Where Does Opus Want To Spend The After-Strip, the ending is ... well, Opus is mystically transported somehow into Goodnight, Moon, yes, but that's not death by a long sight. What's going on that people are reading it as death?

Trivia: With the first 3,398,745 votes reported for the presidential election of 1952, CBS's UNIVAC predicted Eisenhower beating Stevenson by 32,915,049 votes to 28,986,436, winning 43 states (438 electoral votes) to five (93 electoral votes), with odds of greater than 99 to 1 that its prediction would be correct. CBS and Remington Rand refused to believe such a landslide prediction, and created a much less imbalanced projection. In fact, Eisenhower won 442 electoral votes to Stevenson's 89. Source: Eniac, Scott McCartney.

Currently Reading: To Rule The Waves: How The British Navy Shaped The Modern World, Arthur Herman.

Comments

[gafennec.livejournal.com]

Because in a previous Sunday comic he took the place of a dog in the humane society's death row.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but ... the Animal Shelter guy had told Steve Dallas that Opus had gone to ``a good place, familiar, warm'', and that ``he chose well''. A good place might be a plausible euphemism, but familiar or warm or ``he chose well'' would be odd to say.

[gafennec.livejournal.com]

Perhaps; I was having trouble keeping up with a weekly comic. :)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

And that's another problem with a weekly comic: it's hard to build up a story when there's 167 hours 59 minutes between installments. With a daily comic you have the time to tell a story, and build up characters.

[gafennec.livejournal.com]

True. Very, very true.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

As Bigears said; Though I think it's more that Opus turned down the Tahitian option presented to live in his own space, especially given http://www.berkeleybreathed.com/opus-letter.html and the message from Mr. Breathed.

Also, since the ending of The Sopranos..

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

But then we also see the empty cell and, well, Opus there in the book.

Also, really, there's the extracurricular knowledge that he's going to bring Opus back for his next strip in a couple of years.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

And that's where it, indeed, seems to fail. There is clearly the notion that Opus sacrificed *something* for that poor pupdog to have his escape; it seems quite clearly to me, though, that it's his life-in-the-strip, not his life entire.. though that's obviously the conceit Mr. Breathed was setting up, and then, switched away from.

[kevinjdog.livejournal.com]

Boy, I couldn't have put it any better than that. That's pretty much word-for-word how I feel about it.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, thank you. I do take your and Rain's opinions about comic strips rather seriously.

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

This happens when one goes meta with a comic. The characters were made aware that the end of their narrative was nigh, and naturally, they acted a little weird. It's not death, per se, but when you realise that your active existence relies on being entertainment taken in by some group of ineffable higher beings, just how can you react to that? Furthermore, how can those higher beings react to their entertainment's awareness of them?

I do a lot of exploration of this with my self-as-character in City of Heroes, and some of the results have been incredibly odd. Said character ended up panicking about reaching her highest level because she was afraid that she'd be forgotten and would essentially never live an interesting life ever again! I actually did end up feeling like I would somehow be killing her if I stopped playing her. This was after only a year and a half of playing her, and how long has Berkeley been writing the character of Opus?

However it's interpreted, it's a tear-jerker of an ending.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I may be acclimated to the idea of characters-as-actors facing the threatened end of their fictional universes--- look at the pioneering work It's Garry Shandling's Show did on making life as a TV show as life so sensible, and then when you consider I was the guy watching Hi Honey! I'm Home you can see I fully expect cartoon characters to interact with their cartoonists.

I wouldn't think it odd that your City Of Heroes character worried about the end of her interesting history. I get to feeling that way about the nations I create in grand strategy games, and at least your character was, you know, a character instead of an alternate-history England that annexed France except for Burgundy at the end of the Hundred Years War. It's silly to feel sad about that history being put away to rarely be thought of again, and yet, I do.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Ah, so you were the other person who watched Hi Honey! I'm Home.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

And, really, isn't that show about due to be made into a movie and spinoff half-web, half-cable-TV series?

[xiaobaitu.livejournal.com]

"...forgot that unfortunate alien trans-reversal ray incident...."

I for one liked the new Steve.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I liked the New Steve a lot as a person. It's just as a plotline the abduction was pretty strained, and it went along with a weird trend the last couple years of the strip to try bringing out new comedy by reversing important traits of the major characters. The effect came across as Breathed not knowing what to do with the strip or the characters and so trying to tear them down instead.