Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Two quick follow-ups to my last post

—If you haven't already, be sure to check out Bully, The Little Stuffed Bull's Free Comic Book Day adventure. It is, like most of Bully's photographed adventures, darling. And, unlike my interminable FCBD post, it won't take you all day to read.

—In discussing Drawn and Quarterly's FCBD offering, an anthology of John Stanley kids comics, I wrote a bit about my favorite character within it, Little Lulu character Tubby Tompkins. Specifically, I wrote that "It might take me some deep thinking and some serious writing to determine and then properly communicate why I love Tubby so much."

In the time since I posted that, I found that I actually did try to communicate why I loved Tubby so much in a post I wrote about two years ago. And then I found, via Tom "The Comics Reporter" Spurgeon a wonderful post on that very subject.

Frank M. Young discusses John Stanley and Tubby at length in a post entitled "How John Stanley's Comedic Sense is Still Relevant", in which he mentions that so many of today's most popular (and, in my opinion, best) TV comedies center around, "the richly detailed eccentricities and shortcomings of their mega-flawed protagonists." Some of the examples Young cites are Curb Your Enthusiasm, Flight of the Concords, The Sarah Silverman Show and the Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant stuff, and he refers to the characters that star in them as "Tubby types."

It's a very insightful piece, and it ends by including two Tubby tales. The first of which, "Great Day," was the very story that made me realize that Tubby is awesome.

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