NEW STRIP: DEFLOCKED

Deflocked by Jeff Corriveau is both visually interesting and comedically surprising. A King Features offering, Deflocked throws together four unlikely “outcasts” to see how they will fare. Two of them are dogs: Rupert, whose heart of gold and “raw naivete” reminds me of Darby Conley’s Satchel, and his older and wiser brother, Cobb, the moral and intellectual anchor of this band of outcasts. Tucker is a small boy, “who they are raising as their own.” But the strip belongs to Mamet, “the most derelict, self-absorbed sheep” in captivity, who plots against the rest of the household — not to mention the entire world — with a cranky misanthropy that approaches but does not equal or surpass Bucky the Katt’s. “There are no words to describe Mamet that haven’t already been used in court depositions,” reads the syndicate’s press release. “Armed with the lethal combination of ignorance and arrogance, Mamet is forever seeking universal adoration — or a quick, dirty buck — whichever is easiest.”

Corriveau began adult life as a comedy writer for the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” The Late, Late Show,” “Saturday Night Live,” and “Talk Soup.” But his success at funny words without funny pictures seemed hollow. “It was while penning a string of celebrity-centric cable specials that Corriveau began to question his lot in life,” reads the press release; “as Jeff put it: ‘I simply couldn’t write another Paris Hilton sex joke.’” So he began noodling around ideas for a comic strip. At first, he toyed with a strip based upon “iconic sitcoms.” But when he considered Charles Schulz’s Peanuts and its life-affirming emphasis, he reimagined his strip as relationship epic, fraught with “fragile hopes and moral-less victories.”

His drawing style is in most aspects wholly undistinguished. His line, while not the dead and static strand of Ollie and Quentin or Arctic Circle, often waxes thick without reason: it doesn’t define volume, say, or set foreground figures apart from background details. It simply flexes, now thin, now thick. Irrational though it seems, Corriveau’s line gives his pictures visual variety and, hence, some measure of eye appeal. The pictures are also a perhaps unintended satiric attack on the newspaper practice of publishing comic strips as small as possible. All Corriveau’s characters have giant heads and almost no bodies: it is literally a “talking heads” strip, the only sort of comic strip that present newspaper comic strip space allocation policies permit. And thanks to the irascible twist of Mamet’s so-called mind, we can never quite predict where the first two panels of a strip is going to take us.

Comments

[Generic Viagra]

jajajajaja what a good joke the first one, "luckily, the entire female race already made that decision for you", jajajaja there's other way to say "anyway you're a loser with ladies", is cruel and the same time is totally true.

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This is one of the cutest cartoons I have ever seen in my entire life! So cute and lovely!