Cheesebo

I always see weird things when driving back from funerals. Maybe it’s because I’m in a contemplative state of mind and I’m just looking at the world in a different way, but I don’t think so. People die and I see weird things. The day my father died I had to stop the car because an ostrich was crossing the road.

This isn’t as bad as that, but it did make me just stare in wonderment.

Is that a good plug? Ok, the kids tell me I shouldn’t use the word “stupid”, but the title of the book is BookSmarts. If you’re smart, you’ll click here and immediately plop down 20 bucks before they’re gone.

Tom Racine has put together a collection of his comics and I’m just as excited to have it as any other highly anticipated book. True, I can’t purchase much these days. I have to really weigh what I buy and save my money for the things that are truly keepers.

This is one of the best strips I’ve read all year. I like simple gags as much as anybody, but Tom takes it a step further and actually makes you delve into whatever knowledge you have about fairy tales, movies, literature and more to truly appreciate the joke. In short, it’s smart humor.

I don’t want to give away jokes, but the secret behind Arthur removing the sword from the stone, Alice’s trips to places other than Wonderland, Edgar Allan Poe’s other career attempts, and fairly accurate portrayals of George Lucas’ state of mind literally had me howling with laughter.

I usually don’t howl, folks. No, what I did with these strips was read, pause, laugh, and then reread. The really great comics make me do that.

The only troubling part is that Tom describes himself as a mediocre cartoonist. If that’s true, then I’m in real trouble. In fact, a lot of us are in real trouble. Because it’s rare that great drawings are combined with such funny material. Usually a strip is lacking in one area or the other. This has it all.

If I seem like I’m giving too much praise, it’s because I get frustrated. I feel like it’s my duty to yell from the mountain top about good books. I visit a lot of bookstores, and the lousy quality of many items that manage to find themselves on a shelf for the casual browser can be depressing. Meanwhile, something as clever and well made as BookSmarts can go unnoticed.

Tom’s too busy and has too many diverse skills to make more cartoons, so this may be it for him. The competitive side of me should be happy, because I can’t compete with this, but I’ve never been able to be competitive when it comes to something I love. These are great, smart comics and I hope they stick around forever. I hope Tom’s the Herman Melville of comics and becomes assigned reading in college.

Thank you, Tom. A publisher could make a tidy profit by giving this wider distribution. Publishing something yourself is pretty time consuming and I’m very glad you did this.

Remember the old “Hooked On Phonics” commercial? “People judge you by the words you speak!” Well, I think I judge by adjectives.

Take “humdinger”. Wow, you really don’t hear that one anymore unless you’re watching old Andy Griffith reruns. But I like that word. “Man, you missed a humdinger of a time last night!” You just know the person is talking about an event where people had fun in a family friendly kind of way. It wasn’t the drunk and naked kind of fun. Nobody has a humdinger of a time at the Ozzy Osbourne concert, not even Andy Griffith.

Umptedoo. That doesn’t even show up in a Google search. How do you even spell umptedoo? “We haven’t seen her in umpteedo years!” I made the mistake of using that word in an office setting once. They all stared at me until somebody said, “Wow, you sound like my grandmother!”

Then there’s the other end of the spectrum. There’s the person who did go to the Ozzy Osbourne concert. They have about five adjectives and all of them are curse words. Those words are used to describe anything from a pink dress they’re purchasing for their daughter to the act of getting punched in the stomach.

I have no problem with curse words. Let’s demystify them. No biggie. However, you can immediately judge a person who meets you for the first time and uses a string of cussing. They obviously don’t care who you are. You could be deeply religious, a teacher who avoids cursing, or a person like me who saves the cursing for the people I love the most (kind of funny how that works).

I come from the school of thought that you kind of have to figure out who you’re talking to before you unleash the hounds, but there are many who have no perception of social boundaries. We make “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” signs for them or get them jobs in Hollywood. The Andy Griffith show has been off the air for a long time.

Of course, you can immediately peg a comic book geek by his adjectives. Maybe it depends on the era of the comic book geek. My era was filled with “Super”, “Spectacular”,  “Amazing” and pretty much anything Spider-Man did. Later on, post-Stephen if you will, “Awesome” was used until it was banned in some cities.

But more than the obvious hyperbole, I think comic book readers have better adjectives all around. They’re just more descriptive people. I could say the same about people who regularly read books, but comics go the extra mile to punch up language.

That’s why I firmly believe that if you’re quick enough you can think of a good insult without using average, everyday, “No Shirt, No Service” curse words. One of my favorites casts me in a bad light, but I’ll let it be known.

Years ago, my long-time girlfriend Candy (not my wife) was doing something that I thought was disgusting. It’s not worth mentioning what it was, because it might seem stupid to you and it was just a way she was eating her food. I blurted out that she was a “feces-eating dog”.

Her response was classic. “What??? What am I??” I, of course, backpedaled right through the wall. It quickly became a funny joke between us. So when we were dining with a group of people we didn’t know that well, she decided to tell the charming story of how Stephen called her a feces-eating dog.

The happy table was immediately soundless. Their heads just kind of fell into a shocked, blank slate and they turned to me at the same time. Candy was laughing. We never really hung out with them after that.

I guess that means that you can come up with insults without using curse words that are still impolite to use unless you know the people you’re around. Personally, I consider that a challenge.