With My Cage,
which launched in May 2007, King Features makes a painfully
overt appeal to the “younger generation” — manga fans, most obviously, but also
“multi-platform techno-savvy readers.” The strip is clearly engineered rather
than inspired: it is a carefully constructed, deliberate effort by the
syndicate to give newspaper editors something they all imagine will magnetize
their publication for a generation that no longer reads newspapers. Its name
parodies the omniscient website “My Space.”
Drawn by Melissa DeJesus, “a well-known and highly respected manga graphic
novelist,” saith King’s press release, and written by Ed Power, the strip features a cast of anthropomorphic animals. Its
star is Norman, “a 20-something platypus who wants to be a world-famous writer
but has found himself stuck in a less than fulfilling middle-management job
that pays the bills but eats away a little more of his soul each day” — a
circumstance, no doubt, that has its roots in Power’s own life. At the King
website, Power describes My Cage as
“a comic strip for everyone who gets up earlier than they want to, puts on
clothes they wouldn’t normally wear, and drives in traffic to a place they
don’t want to be five days a week so they can have the money to do the things
they enjoy the remaining two days (provided they’re not too tired).”
I keep
running into this situation: too many new comic strips are about frustrated
writers or artists. Or so it seems. But the backgrounds of these characters,
like that of the writer-designer heroine of Terri Liebenson’s Pajama
Diaries, serve mostly to give syndicate publicity writers something to
write in press releases: the strip’s action has almost nothing to do with the
character’s vocational frustrations. In most of the My Cage strips I’ve seen, Norm is dealing with “relationship
issues,” not wearing uncomfortable clothes or struggling through traffic to get
to a work place he despises. Norm has a girlfriend, but the relationships he
monitors seem to be mostly those among his fellow office workers. He also has a
pet — an amoeba named Squishy, who presents another of those completely boring
visual experiences like Quentin.
Power
thinks manga art is “beautiful ... fluid with a lot of energy ... so different
than other artwork on the comics page right now. It will really catch the eye
of newspaper readers. ... Melissa’s art is ... really something pretty to look
at once readers are drawn in.” Pretty, yes; different, yes. There’s more
drawing in any panel of My Cage than
in a week’s worth of Ollie and Quentin or Arctic Circle.
But DeJesus often repeats a composition from one panel to the next, so there is
a measure of visual repetition that can get boring. Presenting static pictures
in succession is one way of dealing with a script that is almost always
entirely verbal: Power uses the comic strip form to time his characters’
speeches; in his comedy, pictures seldom, if ever, function as punchlines. And
Power telegraphs the jokes in the setup panels: the punchlines are usually entirely predictable. Ordinary humor coupled to
visual monotony.
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