Comic "Stripped," Part Two: My Response

In my last blog entry, I reviewed Stripped a documentary on comic strips by cartoonist/film maker, Dave Kellett, and cinematographer, Fred Schroeder.

As I had mentioned previously, I’ve decided to write two responses to Stripped, a straightforward review, and a personal response. This is part two.

I have a lot of respect for Dave Kellett. His comic strip, Sheldon, was the first webcomic I ever followed (I believe I picked it up around 2005). So in 2011, when Dave announced that he would be making a documentary on comic strips, I was intrigued. I followed the project on twitter and threw in a few bucks for the Kickstarter campaign. I even shared the project on Facebook, Twitter, and on my blog (for whatever that was worth.)

As other followers and supporters of Stripped already know, the documentary was supposed to take only a year or two to complete. It was also supposed to be a much simpler project. But, as I’ve said before, sometimes the worst enemy to a good idea is a better idea. And as Dave and Fred gained more support, they quickly realized that they could surpass their original vision and build something truly remarkable. But it would take a lot more work and little more time. Being such good community builders, as well as conscientious businessmen, Dave and Fred promptly informed their followers that the projected deadline for Stripped’s release was being pushed back in order to make a better product. They were so professional and non-flaky about the delay that I can’t imagine anyone felt offended by the decision.

Personally, I am very grateful for the delay. Because while I was following the film’s progress in the abstract, cloudy realm of social media, I was also out in the real world, learning and having experiences. And these experiences would make Stripped much, much dearer to me.

First of all, while Stripped was being made, I learned a bit about filmmaking. Back in 2011, I was making a few animated shorts, partly to show my animation students and partly to satisfy my own artistic interests. I was also doing some film editing and archiving for my job as a technology assistant at a university. Of course, comparing my projects to an independent film is a bit like comparing a grocery list to a best-selling novel. But my own little experiences gave me an idea of how a cartoonist’s skill set and a filmmaker’s skill set could fit together.

Then my sister, Liz, got involved with an indy film in the area. I had very little to do with her job, aside from lending her some props and helping her dye a few costumes to the perfect shade of imitation filth. But from the few projects I assisted with, and mostly from Liz’s stories, I learned just how hard it is to make a movie, especially when you’re a small studio. When Stripped began I remember one of the directors tweeting this bit of trivia: only one in five indy film projects is ever completed. I was amazed that the number was so small. How could people start a project so labor intensive and not finish? How could they just waste whatever time, money, and passion they had already spent? But, by the time Liz’s job was over, and I had a better understanding of the process, I was amazed that as many as one in five films were finished. And my admiration of Stripped grew.

Also, while Stripped was still in progress, I got to meet a number of cartoonists who would be featured in the film. I met Stephan Pastis when he gave a lecture at the Pittsburgh Toonseum. I ran into Shaenon Garrity at a karaoke party the night before the 2013 Rueben Awards. Two days later, I talked to almost a dozen more Stripped cartoonists at the Pittsburgh Comic Arts Festival. (I still treasure that turtle Patrick McDonnell drew in honor of my Noko.) Many of these cartoonists even asked me about my own work. Some of them gave me autographs and sketches. One of them may have called me “sexy” (It was Dan Piraro and he probably says that to all the ladies. ...still…)

Aside from the artists I met in person over the years, I can’t even count the number of featured cartoonists who occasionally responded to me on twitter on in message boards.

I didn’t even notice how many of these little experiences – these brushes with famous people – I had accumulated until I saw Stripped. Suddenly, so many faces looked familiar. Instead of watching the interviews and thinking, “So that’s what that guy looks like.” I was thinking,“Hey, I remember that guy.” At this point I was feeling so involved, I was starting to feel like a part of the movie.

Then, quite unexpectedly, I was a part of the movie.

In Chapter Seven of Stripped, there’s a neat little discussion about how cartoonists use social media to interact with their audiences. To illustrate that concept, the documentary shows a screen capture of Brad Guigar’s twitter feed. And they just happened to have taken that image from a day when I responded to one of Brad’s tweets. So, in that screen cap, you can very clearly see my full name and the Lepus Studios logo (my twitter avatar) in the actual movie.

You can spot this at exactly 56 minutes into the film.

When I first saw my own name and artwork on the screen, it didn’t quite sink in right away. A part of my brain was saying “It’s a tweet from you on a screen. You see this all the time.” But then, another part of my brain was saying, “No, this time it’s different and it's more important. Wake up and figure out why is this is different.” Then it sunk in. I was a part of Stripped. I don’t want to get too egotistical about my accidental inclusion. It’s a bit like being an extra in a movie. It’s cool to see yourself there, but you have no delusions about being a star. Still, this documentary is monumental and I am honored to have been included in some small way.

Over the years, it was very cool to watch the making of Stripped and to have been given the opportunity to watch it's journey along side my own journeys as a cartoonist. For me, one of the most inspiring moments of the film was when Bill Watterson points out that an audience doesn’t need to give an artist it’s time, so the artist must reward it’s audience for whatever time is given.

Between 2011 and now, plus the time spent actually watching the film, any time I gave Stripped was time well spent.

-Marjorie Rishel
  www.lepusstudios.com

Comic "Stripped," Part One: The Review

Last week, I finally saw Stripped, a documentary on comic strips by cartoonist/film maker, Dave Kellett, and cinematographer, Fred Schroeder.

While drafting this blog, I discovered that I have too much to say for a single blog entry, so I’m splitting my response to Stripped into two parts: My review of the film and my personal response. This is part one. Look for part two later this week.

The Review

Like many of you, I had been looking forward to Stripped for a long time. Some of you may even remember the “signal boosting” blog I wrote for the film back in 2011, when it was still crowdsourcing on Kickstarter.

I’m pleased to tell you that Stripped has been worth the wait and worth the hype. The self-proclaimed “love letter to comics” has something for everyone from die-hard comic fans to casual readers.

If you’re worried that this will be a dry documentary, cast those fears aside. Not counting the credit reel, the film runs about an hour and fifteen minutes - not too long and not too short. And all the while, it keeps viewers engaged and entertained with music, graphics and animations.

Stripped tells the story of comic strips: what they have been, what they are, and where they might be going. Along they way, famous creators like Jim Davis, Cathy Guisewite, Jeff Keane, Greg Evans, Stephan Pastis, Scott Kurtz and even Bill Watterson tell their stories.

Organizing this movie must have been a challenge. Obviously, it makes sense to tell the story of comics in chronological order, but some topics fit more neatly into the timeline than others. Ultimately, the directors settled on breaking the documentary into eight parts.

The Opening: A light-hearted beginning that describes comics and their significance.

Everybody Loves Comics: The introduction leads very naturally into this second segment, in which many of the featured cartoonists reminisce about their earliest memories of reading and sharing comics.

The Golden Age of Comics: Soon, we get into comic strip history. We learn about the great popularity of comics in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s.

Picking up the Pencil: A few personal stories about how some cartoonists started drawing and how they broke into the business. Plus we get to learn a little about how the newspaper biz and syndication work.

The Creative Process: The challenges of staying creative and turning daily comics into a long-term career.

The Crisis: What happens to comics as newspaper sales dwindle?

The Digital Revolution: New technology creates new opportunities. We look at the emergence of webcomics, learn about the webcomic business model, and discuss the pros and cons of web publishing vs. print publishing.

The Future: No one knows what the future will bring but we have some ideas. All of them include comics.

The structure of the film is deceptively simple. But, just like a comic strip can fit a lot of creativity and depth into a couple of panels, Kellett and Schroeder fit a lot of valuable content into those eight parts. Bill Watterson’s advice to cartoonists is invaluable. Darrin Bell tells a story about selling and African-American comic to old-fashioned syndicates that surprised me more than it should have. Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik tell tales of starting webcomics during/after the “dot-com” boom that take me right back to the 90’s.

And all the while, the film masterfully manages to look sharp, polished, credible and completely professional, while still looking fun, engaging and a bit laid-back. The little sketches, title cards for chapters, and little notes and jokes in the DVD menus and credits are so distinctly Dave Kellett’s style, yet they fit the universality of the film so well.

Here’s the website again, for those of you who missed it the first time: http://www.strippedfilm.com/

I would recommend Stripped to anyone who likes comics. And to anyone who loves comics, I would probably have to recommend it twice.

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

How I Met Your Series Finale

Last night, I watched the much-anticipated series finale to How I Met Your Mother. (For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, I’ll warn you before I start the spoiler filled part of the blog.)

I write a lot about cartoons, comics, and occasionally movies. So me writing about romantic comedy sitcom may seem a little unexpected. I actually got into How I Met Your Mother through webcomics. As some of you know, HIMYM writer/co-producer Gloria Calderon Kellet is the wife of popular webcartoonist Dave Kellet, who creates the comics Sheldon and Drive. Sheldon was the first webcomic I ever followed and Dave’s blog endorsed his wife’s work often enough that I decided to give it a chance.

By the way, Dave Kellet just finished a major project of his own, a documentary on comic strips titled Stripped. (I am still waiting for my DVD to arrive, but once I see the documentary, I promise to review it in excruciating detail and geek out appropriately.) Anyway, with both the husband and wife both completing and promoting major projects at roughly the same time, I do not understand how the Kellet household has not imploded. Everyone in that family has earned my respect for getting through this situation with so much class.

How I Met Your Mother  actually used a lot of the same devices as comic strips. The same types of jokes, running gags, and visual humor made the comic/cartoon influences look pretty clear to me. There are even some rewards for people who follow both Dave's and Gloria's work. For example, in HIMYM, did you ever notice that every time a male extra needed a name, he would inevitable be called “Arthur,” (the same name as Sheldon’s pet duck?) This also explains why ducks won the “Ducks vs. Rabbits” debate, when everyone knows that rabbits are better. Sometimes, stories from HIMYM some suspiciously like real-life anecdotes I previously read on cartoonist blogs. For example, the episode where Marshall’s obnoxious co-workers tease him when they find a love note from his wife sounds suspiciously like that real-life story from Scott Kurtz’s blog, where Scott teased Dave for taking a Skype call from his wife and daughter while attending a comic con. Sure, most sitcom writers borrow funny incidents from their real lives, but thanks to the internet, we’re interconnected enough to hear these tales from more than one of the people involved. My sister, Emily once joked, “So, you’re watching one of the most popular sitcoms on television to selectively stalk a small group of people?” I’m not really as creepy as it sounds (maybe 30% that creepy, tops.) I just have a weird memory for certain details and I have one of those brains that locks on patterns. I’ll get back to that in a bit.

SPOILER ALERT: I’m about to get into detail about How I Met Your Mother, the series and the finale, so if you haven’t watched it yet, go away and don’t come back until you do.

You’re still here? You either saw the whole series or you don’t really care about spoilers. Well, listen up, everything about this show tells us that the whole thing builds to the last episode, so if you haven’t seen it yet, you better be CERTAIN that you won’t ever want to watch it before you keep reading beyond this point.

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The How I Met Your Mother series finale has met with some mixed reviews. The biggest disappointment was that the main character, Ted and his long sought wife, Tracy, did NOT get to live happily ever after. Part of the twist ending was that they only had about a decade together before Tracy became terminally ill. Ted explains to his children that his long search to find their mother was necessary, because it made him cherish every moment of their time together. This was unexpectedly bittersweet for such an upbeat sitcom. We wanted to see Ted and Tracy live happily ever after. That was the ending we wanted.

But not the ending we deserved.

At a glance, this ending may seem like something the writers could have come up with at any time, but on examination, this was clearly the ending they were building to right from the start. Come on, every scene with Ted’s kids was filmed back when the series began in 2005 (how else could those kids have stayed teenagers for all these years?).

But there’s another indication that this ending was planned from the beginning, and this is where the writing is at it most brilliant. I mentioned earlier that my brain wants to find patterns in things and there is a strong pattern in way this series was written. The first episode is a map of the entire series, specifically Ted and Robin’s relationship.

Let’s recap the series so we can examine this pattern.

Episode One begins in the year 2030 and fifty-two year-old Ted sits down with his two teenage children and asks, “Did I ever tell you the story about how I met your mother?” Ted proceeds to tell the story, starting in 2005, on the day his two best friends got engaged. The engagement prompts Ted to think seriously about love and marriage for the first time in his life. Later, Ted meets a woman named Robin. He thinks she could be the love of his life. They go on a sweet-but-awkward first date. Ted later decides that the date ended too abruptly, so he goes back to her apartment to make a big romantic gesture, which Robin considers sweet but overwhelming. After all, they haven’t known each other long enough for Ted to declare his love for her. The episode ends with fifty-two year-old Ted telling his children, “And that was how I met your Aunt Robin … Hang on, kids, it’s a long story.” This was the first plot twist. The story leads us to believe Robin and Ted will end up together, then reveals that Ted will actually marry someone else.

The next eight years of the series show how Robin joins Ted’s group of best friends and we watch them navigate life. Marshall and Lily deal with marriage and family. Barney stay a confirmed bachelor and philanderer, but gradually considers settling down. Ted and Robin mostly remain friends, but sort of have some on-again, off-again relationships. But Ted and Robin want different things out of life: Ted wants a family and Robin wants a career in journalism. Can they make a relationship work despite their differences, or is their imperfect love for each other holding them back from finding their real love and happiness? Because of the first episode, the audience knows the answer, or at least, it thinks it does. In the final season, Robin does not choose Ted, but marries Barney instead. Then, Ted meets his wife-to-be, Tracy, at Barney and Robin’s wedding, leading the viewers to believe that the purpose of Ted and Robin’s relationship was to guide Ted to the real love of his life.

The final episode compresses the next seventeen years into a relatively short one-hour show. Ted and Tracy enjoy a perfect relationship. Robin and Barney are happily married for a while, but end up separating after three years. Robin leaves the circle of friends, partly because work keeps her busy, partly because she doesn’t want to hang around her ex-husband, and partly because being around Ted makes Robin wonder if she should have chosen him when she had the chance. Ted’s wife passes away in 2024 and Ted concludes telling the tale to his son and daughter. 

BUT THEN, Ted’s children don’t believe that the story was only about their mother. Instead, they suspect that their father has been telling this story to explain why he’s in love with Robin. His children urge him to find Robin and be happy. The series ends with Ted outside Robin’s apartment recreating a moment from their first date, back in Episode One.

Do you see the pattern that the pilot episode sets up for us? The first episode leads us to believe that Ted and Robin will end up together, then the last minute tells us, no - Ted will end up with someone else. Then the entire rest of the series recreates that trick for the next nine years, as we are kept believing that Ted and Robin will never be together, until the last five minutes of the entire series flips our expectations. Again.

Heck, Ted and Robin’s first date is a road map to their whole relationship. They go out, and have a good time with some ups and downs. This part of the evening represents the bulk of the series - their eight years together. Then Ted goes home too soon, representing the years Robin spent distancing herself from her old friends. Finally, Ted comes back to declare his love and win Robin’s heart, which obviously represents the same event Ted recreates in the series finale. When Ted made that gesture in 2005, everyone told him it was “too soon.” While everyone meat “it’s too soon in the relationship to get so personal,” it’s actually “too soon” in Ted and Robin’s lives. They have to wait twenty-five years until they’ve accomplished all their conflicting dreams before they can be together.

“But what about Tracy? I liked Tracy. Why should she be sacrificed so we could have this ending?” I haven’t read too many responses to the series finale, but these seem to be the most common complaints. Of course we liked Tracy. We had to like Tracy. If Tracy wasn’t Ted’s true love, then all the time he spent waiting for Robin would just seem like a waste. Ted had two great loves in his life. And, just to keep it fair, Ted was already the second great love of Tracy’s life. She once had a perfect boyfriend named Max, who would probably have been her husband if he hadn’t died in an accident eight years earlier.

Sure, a “they all lived happily ever after” ending probably would have made me happier, but it would never have been as good. It’s impossible to look back without seeing that this is the way the story was meant to end. And the fact that they implied the whole thing right from the start is crazy genius. I think a lot of people didn’t get it simply because they just weren’t expecting this kind of cleverness from a TV sitcom.

Farewell to another good TV show. A series that well planned is certainly a rare thing indeed.

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com