The Necessity Of Change

While Keeping It The Same

I like a story with a beginning, middle, and end. It's a simple request, but one that seems to be beyond the scope of a lot of franchises. Why is that? Money, of course. If you end a story, you can't really make money on a new one, can you? So that perfect ending to a perfect movie that made a perfect amount of money will never equal perfect storytelling. They're going to cash in with some more stuff.

Oftentimes, you check on a character that's been around for decades to discover they have no resemblance to the personality that attracted you to them in the first place. Is this a character arc? No. Different writers. It's kind of sad, really. Writers should be able to create their own characters and conclude their stories so that new writers can create their characters and conclude their stories and so on, but that's not how it works. I'm sure there will be new Harry Potter stories once it's in the public domain the same way we got new Sherlock Holmes stories.

Harry Potter is going to be a tough one. That story actually had a beginning, middle, and end. The guy peaked in high school. I mean, we've heard about other people peaking in high school in real life. “Bob the insurance guy? Yeah, you should've known him back in the day. Bob had all of the girls after him, was so popular on the football team, and was the most popular guy in school. That was his peak!” Well, bob was nothing compared to Harry Potter. He defeated pure evil then....got married and had kids, apparently. Which is great! Good for Harry. Family is important.

Maybe future novels about Harry can be a situation comedy. I Love Ginny. Featuring, of course, Harry Potter the husband.

I digress.

Comics are different. There's something comforting about checking in on, say, Peter Parker, 30 years after you last checked in on him, finding him still there, still young, and still woefully problematic despite having powers that make him extraordinary. It's comfort food and occasionally great storytelling. That's the arena where most comic strip characters perform. Forever the same age, they put up with life's struggles without appreciating the fact that they appear to be immortal. I kind of think that's how humans would actually be if the comic universe existed. We'd be complaining about the gas bill at age 123 without ever pausing to say, “Yeah, it's crazy expensive, but my skin looks amazing.”

However, in real life, some basic things don't change. For instance, every so often you'll see someone post what the philosopher Plato wrote about kids: “What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?” Oh, Plato. You make Steve Ditko’s Peter Parker's seem modern.

So family, work, kids, love, and romance are evergreen. We can write about them until the cows come home (which means a pretty long time, I'm guessing, I'm not a rancher) and not much is going to change. I could be writing about a grocery store in 1975 and I doubt there would be much difference (note to self: Penny time travels to 1975).

With long-running characters in an evergreen setting, what changes? Well, the characters, for one thing. My strip is inspired from real life, and you can't have the same characters working in a store forever, because the staff changes more often than Berle changes his underwear. It's retail, for god's sake. We know that the technology always changes. That's always fun and annoyingly time consuming. Even corporate stooges come and go. Some evil muckety muck will eventually leave to go be an evil muckety muck for slightly more pay elsewhere. Can you wait out their reign? That's the fun part.

Here are comics that were directly inspired by real life. I'm going back several years. Now, the pandemic isn't evergreen. Jokes about wearing masks really don't hit home like they used to, huh? Trust me, the mask stuff will kill during the next pandemic. Still, the basic setting and customer interactions have not changed.

This always happens. Customers want to talk about politics. I don’t know if they are frustrated public speaker wannabes or just needing to vent to every stranger they run across, but it’s annoying. We’re not at a rally and we are not old buddies. Keep it civil. But I did, indeed, say it was corporate policy not to talk about politics just to get out of the conversation. I’m pretty sure I would’ve been backed up by a muckety muck.

This didn’t happen, but it could’ve. I always wanted to test this out. If more than one person asks you if you had your break and you take them up on that offer, could you get two breaks? The answer is probably yes, but we all know what the actual consequences would be. That’s where Berle comes in. He’s a wish fulfillment character.

I haven’t looked at this one in years, so I confused myself while reading it at first. The customers who look directly at you and have an unseen conversation is something I will never understand. If I’m having a conversation on the phone, I’m not going to walk up to somebody else without at least pantomiming that I’m on the phone. But I get that we’re all different, like flowers, and all of that. I just think some flowers are inconsiderate idiots. Yes, I did help somebody behind the person who was not responding to a word I said because they were on the phone. This comic generated one of those “this would never happen” comments. You’d be surprised at what actually happens. In fact, it happened more than once. I recall only one person getting angry that I didn’t help them as they were ignoring me.

These people are usually very nice. They’re opening with a conversation starter that isn’t about the weather. It’s easy to forget that some professions don’t have the traditional weekend and it allows us to give them some insight into our lousy schedule.

This type of conversation also allowed me to tell a couple of customers that one of the higher ups recorded his segment of the “we’re all in this together” video from his boat. I don’t know anything about boats. Perhaps it was a ship. Or a yacht. Whatever it was, I wanted it to sink.

This happened every day during the pandemic. Say what you want about the science behind social distancing, I liked the rule of not getting in my face. It had nothing to do with science. I just don’t need you close enough to, if the urge maliciously popped into your head, unexpectedly kiss me. In fact, that should be the social distancing rule, pandemic or no pandemic: Never stand so close to somebody that you could surprise them with a kiss. Get back. Why are some people standing so close, anyway? People are like flowers. Stupid, stupid flowers.