Media

Jack Thomas's comic obsession

by Dan Kennedy

Boston Globe ombudsman Jack Thomas hates the comics. How much? Enough to write essentially the same lame column twice over the past year and a half.

But don't take my word for the similarities between MUCH ADO ABOUT COMICS (May 24, 1999) and LET'S FACE IT: THE COMICS AREN'T FUNNY (November 13, 2000). See for yourself.

5/24/99: "More often than not, they are merely recycled vaudeville gags that were not funny the first time around. The comics do not make me laugh. They do not make me smile. They do not make me think."

11/13/00: " . . . I gave up on newspaper comics years ago because they were no longer funny, no longer clever, no longer relevant. . . . They are not only lacking in charm and devoid of social or political sensibility but also irritatingly and agonizingly unfunny."

5/24/99: "Last Monday . . . the Globe announced that the comic pages would be altered . . . The response was immediate, voluminous, angry, and much of it surprisingly childish and vastly out of proportion to what amounts to no more than a speck of dust in the galaxy of life."

11/13/00: "Whatever you do, warned a friendly editor, do not write anything negative about the comics. People are crazy about them, and they're crazy people -- period. They don't take kindly to criticism."

5/24/99: "The difference between New Yorker cartoons and newspaper comics is the difference between Jack Benny's cerebral irony and Ed Wynn getting a pie in the face."

11/13/00: "I love cartoons. I frame favorites from the New Yorker magazine. I have hung them in my home. . . . Compare any comic in the Globe with a classic in the New Yorker more than a decade ago."

In other words, Thomas found it necessary to tell us twice in one 18-month period that 1) the comics aren't funny; 2) readers who laugh at them are idiots; and 3) boy, those cartoons in the New Yorker sure are good.

Given that Thomas wrote only about 30 other columns between Cartoons I and Cartoons II, that comes damn close to qualifying as obsessive. Given that he could have chosen instead to write about the Globe's coverage of the presidential-election mess, it's also evidence of a curious sense of priorities, to say the least.