THERE'VE BEEN SOME RECENT CHANGES to the Seattle newspaper scene.
But, so far, they've one longtime tradition still standing.
The P-I still buries, back in the classifieds, a handful of comic strips that don't garner enough popularity (according to its market research) to get into the main comics pages, but still attract just enough readers (or enough support from the paper's sister company, King Features Syndicate) to avoid getting dropped altogether.
Among these is the strip King Features originally marketed as "the conservative Doonesbury," Bruce Tinsley's Mallard Fillmore.
The strip's premise, all its 14 or so years, is utterly simple. Mallard Fillmore is a cynical talking duck in an otherwise all-human world, a la Marvel's onetime Howard the Duck. Mallard's also an embittered right-wing newspaperman in Washington, D.C. Every day, he spurts a two-line rant against whatever Those Liberals are doing these days.
That's it.
During the Depression era, when FDR liberalism held the sway of popular opinion, several conservative-written comic strips (Little Orphan Annie, Li'l Abner) managed to achieve mass appeal while upholding traditional values--including the values of solid storytelling, fine draftsmanship, and portrayals of supportive personal relationships.
Mallard Fillmore has none of these.
There are no storylines and no character development. Mallard has no apparent family or personal life. There are a handful of semi-regular supporting characters (including a roly-poly little boy named Rush!), but they do nothing but provide set-up lines for Mallard's pithy remarks. (Bill Clinton appears in the strip more often than any of these.)
Despite the lack of any narrative element, the strip still imbues its title character with a personality. And it's perhaps the most unattractive personality of any daily-comics protagonist ever.
Mallard is depicted as an embittered loner, whose whole self-image revolves around defending and supporting people richer and more powerful than himself; as if to define himself as rightfully belonging with the rich and powerful. His politics, as a long-term reading of the strip will reveal, have almost nothing to do with any system of philosophy but with what some liberals call "identity politics." (More about that on Friday.)
But despite his personal identification with the political causes of America's power elite, he can't stop seeing himself as a disempowered victim of Those Bad Old P.C. Liberals.
Pecadillos and hypocrisies among Democratic politicians are skewered regularly in the duck's mini-rants. The same misdeeds, when performed by Republican politicians, are never mentioned. (The strip spent weeks bashing the "sensitivity training" sessions ordered to baseball pitcher John Rocker, while never discussing the racist interview remarks that got Rocker into trouble.)
If Mallard (or Tinsley) ever get disappointed by any of their conservative heroes, they never mention it. Indeed, the strip almost never advocates any conservative stances. It merely complains about liberal stances.
If Mallard didn't get much more prominent placement in certain conservative-advocacy papers such as the New York Post, a conspiracy theorist (which I'm not) might almost imagine the strip as a cunning liberal's project to depict conservatives as pathetic grumblers, ultimately ignored by the power structure they aggressively endorse and left lonely by their partisan separatism, unloved and unlovable.
Mallard Fillmore is still the worst strip in the papers. But as a (possibly inadvertant) PoMo deconstruction of both modern-day newspaper strips and pseudo-populist conservative politics, it continually fascinates.
TOMORROW: Where America no longer shops.
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