DAVID MURDOCK: On abiding joys (and sharing comic strips with a friend)

David Murdock
David Murdock
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There are several abiding joys in my life. Postcards, for example. Yesterday, a friend who travels quite often and who knows my love of postcards brought me several really beautiful ones from a recent trip. I always appreciate that she takes a moment out of her trips to visit a gift shop to purchase a few for me.

Movies are another one that I’ve made no secret of in this column over the years. Several of my friends who share this abiding joy of mine send emails or chat with me in person about movies.

Need I even mention books? So many friends give me book recommendations via the internet or in person that it’s difficult to keep track of them all — books and friends!

Just in those three examples, a trend should be obvious — I treasure my friends, who are all abiding joys of my life. No matter how long I’ve known them or how often we communicate, my friends are an abiding joy.

There is one abiding joy that I share with really only one friend in particular, though: comic strips.

I have loved comic strips — not comic books, but comic strips like those found on the comics page of this newspaper — since I have been old enough to read. When I was a kid, the comics page was the only part of the newspaper that I read. These days, I save the comics page for the end of my daily read through The Gadsden Times.

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In fact, I consume more comic strips than appear here in the newspaper. The internet enables access to a lot of information, and there are several “comic strip services” that — for a modest fee — will drop comic strips in my inbox every morning. For years now, I’ve subscribed to such a service.

Now, the friend in particular — he and I have known each other from our college days over 30 years ago. He and his family live in Indiana, so we rarely see each other in person. However, we have been in contact in some way or the other since college. At first, we corresponded via letters; the advent of email took that correspondence to a more frequent level. It’s a rare day that I don’t email him.

For years now, our daily emails have mostly taken the form of sharing comic strips. I send him whatever comic or comics that caught my attention that morning with my comments. He comments back on some (but not all) of them, sometimes with a single word and sometimes with extensive comments of his own.

We’ve noticed trends over the years. For example: If a comic strip alludes to a poet, it’s going to be Robert Frost. In fact, my guess is that Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” is the single most referenced poem in comic strip history. It’s as if all comic strip artists are required at some point in their careers to produce a strip referencing it. Yes, other writers are commonly referenced — Shakespeare is likely the next most popular — but all artists seem to think that all readers know that Frost poem inside and out.

Since comic strips combine words with artwork, it shouldn’t be surprising that comic artists have an excellent knowledge of “great art.” What has surprised my friend and me over the years is who the most frequently mentioned artist is. I would have guessed some really famous painter — Monet or Da Vinci or Van Gogh, maybe — but the most commonly referenced artist in comic strips seems to be the Belgian surrealist René Magritte.

My friend greatly enjoys Magritte, perhaps most famous for his humorous painting depicting a large tobacco pipe with the words, “This is not a pipe” written in French below the image. When one thinks about that statement, it’s true. It’s not a pipe; it’s a painting of a pipe.  The painting is titled “The Treachery of Images,” which makes it even funnier to me.

Magritte also painted another famous canvas depicting a man in a suit and a bowler hat with his face obscured by a free-floating green apple. That painting seems to be the most often referenced in comic strips. Since Magritte is not exactly a commonly-known artist, that’s a little surprising.

Another theme we’ve noticed in comics over the years is … well … themes. It’s quite surprising how often several different artists produce strips that closely resemble each other on the same day. For example, not long back two different, unrelated strips featured a joke about the Trojan Horse from Greek literature. My friend and I couldn’t figure out any connection between the two strips that might explain the similarity. Examples like that — similar gags on similar subjects on the same day — are fairly common.

A lot of the time, our comments on comic strips are nothing more than “Notice the artwork in panel No. 3” or something like that. Comic strip artists are underrated. Most of them are extremely talented and deserve more recognition for their work. Combining quick-witted quips and beautifully-rendered artwork every day is not easy at all.

My friend has helped me truly appreciate this fact by his comments over the years. Good friends help you see what you cannot. An abiding joy, that.

David Murdock is an English instructor at Gadsden State Community College. He can be contacted at murdockcolumn@yahoo.com. The opinions reflected are his own.

This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: David Murdock looks at life's abiding joys