In Reality, I'm a Bitter Partisan Hack.

I don't arrive at my hackiness too easily. I take the time to study an issue from several angles to come to my own opinion. However, I am not so embittered that I can't change my mind. If new facts, or old facts surface, life experiences, or maybe I just made a mistake to begin with can make me reevaluate my opinion.

One of the things I had to change was tone of the partisanship in the comic. In 2004 I made the decision to go from making comics for just me to publicly displaying them. I had to decide on whether to continue doing current event politically themed stuff like I had been doing back in the 90's, or to try and to get as wide a spectrum of audience as possible.

I made the decision to keep political leanings to myself.  No shouting about how I'm a conservative Republican because that would drive away all the liberal in the audience. No shouting that I'm a progressive Democrat because that would drive away all the...the... hmmm. Okay, seriously doubt there's a whole lot of Republicans reading a comic strip about a guy trying to hook his wife up with another woman. (There's several names I could drop as a joke, but hey, by the time this is posted, who will remember?)

Several things made up my mind to be non-partisan and to avoid commentary on current events with the comic. If you look back through the blog there is a lengthy article about how politically themed comics quickly become irrelevant. People come and go so quick that everybody tends to forget about them. I don't want people reading though the archive to have to click on Google to find out what it is I am talking about. (I do realize that in the Army Comics I used a lot of jargon, and I'm thinking of adding a quick reference dictionary to some pages so people will know the difference between a M9, M16, and a M916. (I also realize that in most cases Google can't even help figure out what it is I'm saying.))

There are two comic strips I occasionally read: Doonesbury and Mallard Fillmore. Both of these are fine comics, though I do like Doonesbury better. Both of these comics are published in the Op/Ed section of my local paper. That right there tells me everything I need to know about them. (Take a wild guess as to which side of the page each is printed on.) There is more you need to know. While both come from opposite ends of the political spectrum, they share several faults.

The first most obvious fault: the almost relying on current events for story fodder. While poignant at the exact moment in time, it can really bite you in the ass in short order. That happened to Doonesbury a couple of years ago. A series of comics were published about how a soldier was chaptered out of the Army for being gay. A short while later Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed. Nice timing.

This next one is mostly Doonesbury and not Mallard, and only because Mallard has one main character. Most, if not all, of the permanent characters tend to share the same opinions as the cartoonist. While Doonesbury has very well thought out and developed characters; and massively well scripted story lines; I just find it odd that soldiers in Iraq watching a Don Rumsfeld press conference are reacting to it the same way Michael Doonesbury would.

My memory is of only one soldier I knew running on and on about Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.The rest of us were rolling our eyes and thinking: "Quit your bitching. It's a 130 degrees, we're in full battle rattle, and the incoming mortar alarm has just gone off. You're not doing anything to help the situation. How about complaining about those two trailers out there? You know, the one that has a couple of flat tires and the other has blown hub seal and no flat tire?"

This one fault is shared by both in boatloads: characters that have a point of view that disagrees with the cartoonist are stereotypical caricatures of the real people and their opinions. It's like, “Instead of going and getting the information from the person first hand, let's just copy/paste what other people say about them.”

I look at this and try and to figure out how to avoid it. Do I succeed? Once in awhile. I try to interweave my personal opinions into my characters without it seeming like I'm making a blatant political statement. I try to instil some complexity by adding some opinions that I may disagree with, but not be stereotypical about it.

An example of this will be coming up in a another month or so. A character of mine will be saying some things that are rather not good about anime. While writing it out I thought about conversations I've with people who didn't like anime. Why didn't they like anime? What was it that turned them off. What was the stuff that I saw that I didn't like? I tried to mix it all into to a character that had only seen an episode or two. (Those episodes had to be Dragon Ball.)

I try my best, I admit that I often don't succeed. I have a lot going on inside my head that I never get a chance to fully explore in the comic. Often as I'm pasting together a comic I'll have a dozen other ideas and I have to decide which ones are worth doing. I often choose the wrong ones. If I don't write it down I'll forget. (I have a voice recorder that I use for my ideas. I can now remember all the good ones, I also now remember all the bad ones.) This will lead to many inconsistencies bordering on in coherent. But hey, life is inconsistent and incoherent.

I have to admit that I desperately need to write up a character bible. I can't rely on what's inside my head. That would solve about 99% of all my problems. I know I really, really need to get to the point much sooner than I do. Jeeze, the time frame of the comic is still the week before the 2009 Daytona 500; and I need to get to the big reveal of the rather odd marriage arrangement between the staunch Irish Catholic David Bell and the rock-ribbed Southern Baptist Penny Bell.

Is it me or did the temperature just go up a degree or twelve?