Chris Baer

Richard’s Poor Almanac Now Online

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Richard Thompson, he of “Cul de Sac” fame, brings news that “Richard’s Poor Almanac” is now available online through comics portal GoComics.

Detail from Richard's Poor Almanac, https://www.gocomics.com/richards-poor-almanac/2012/12/03

“Richard’s Poor Almanac”, a series of observational sketch comics that ran weekly in the Washington Post for years, provides that same uniquely fussy drawing style we see in “Cul de Sac”, with the same wit and insight that never lets you look at the comic’s subject quite the same way again. Given that the collected print version of these comics routinely runs over $150 on the used market, to have access to them (albeit only one a week on Mondays!) is a great gift.

The presentation on GoComics leaves a little to be desired—the comics themselves are vertically oriented and far larger than the usual three-panel strip, so they appear in a reduced version on the screen. A simple click enlarges them, but these beauties deserve a custom presentation. Still, to have them available again is enough (although a reprint of the collected comics wouldn’t be amiss…)

Update: Looks like GoComics has made some changes, with a more frequent release cycle and, more importantly, a properly scaled presentation. Go and enjoy!

(Image detail from Richard’s Poor Almanac on GoComics.)

The Past Remade: Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition

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Baldur's Gate CDBack in 1998, a gargantuan computer game burst upon the scene, stored on five CDs and taxing the modest hard drives of the era with its multi-gig installation. That game, Baldur’s Gate, matched its digital size with an epic role playing story based on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset (second edition AD&D, more precisely).

Though it hid the complexities of its rules behind the screen, as it were, the game made no apologies for its complexity or its scope. This was gaming nirvana: hours and hours (and hours) of herding a party of adventurers through an intricate web of plots and quests and events, all told from an isometric perspective with pausible combat and the elaborate branching conversations that would become the hallmark of its developers, BioWare and Black Isle.

Baldur’s Gate spawned expansions and sequels and devoted fans, but eventually the isometric, text-heavy, detailed role-playing game would become the purview of independent developers like Spiderweb Software as the industry moved to shorter, more easily digestible (read: simpler, dumbed-down) games. BioWare would move on to more action-oriented role-playing games, but even in light of such successes as the Mass Effect franchise, they’ve never recaptured the glory of Baldur’s Gate.

Or perhaps I’m just seeing this game in a rosy, nostalgic light. Given that Baldur’s Gate has just been re-released in an “enhanced” edition, optimized for modern operating systems and generally cleaned up and given a polish, I’ll have the chance to see whether my fondness for the game stems from a general belief in the superiority of the ’90s to the ’00s or if the game actually is that good. It certainly was that good, but how it stands up to that proverbial test of time is a question I’m looking forward to answering.

Doctor Who Project: The Chase

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Barbara, could I, ah, have your cardigan?

Terry Nation and his Daleks return to Doctor Who in “The Chase” (Story Production Code R), with their own time machine, ready to pursue our heroes through time and space with one aim: to exterminate. The possibilities are endless, the potential locales and eras limitless. And we wind up on a desert planet populated by fish people. And also on Earth three times. And then on a jungle planet with hungry fungi and truculent robots. By the end of the story, one mourns not so much for the departure of Barbara and Ian as for what could have been.

Much like an earlier Nation effort, “The Keys of Marinus,” “The Chase” bounces around from place to place, episode to episode, and as a result, far too much screen time is devoted to establishing the when and what of where the Doctor and his companions have arrived. This influx of exposition overwhelms any sense of anxiety about the Daleks who pursue them just minutes behind in the time and space vortex. And, of course, the intrepid travellers must conspire to get themselves separated from one another in each and every episode. That takes effort, drawing away from any depth of plot.

The action, such as it is, starts on the heels of “The Space Museum,” with the Doctor tuning in various moments in history on the Time-Space Visualizer he insisted on liberating from that eponymous institution. The Time-Space Visualizer is curiously heliocentric, with the names of the solar system’s planets around it, and indeed the entire story resounds with references to the Doctor as human, though likely an unintentional rather than prescriptive description. Shakespeare makes his first appearance in Doctor Who on the Visualizer, and the United States is referenced for the first time as well, as Ian requests a peek at Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address.

A thousand channels and he winds up on the History Channel

But then, in a fortuitous bit of channel surfing, the Daleks appear, chanting “TARDIS, TARDIS, TARDIS!” as they roll one after the other into their own time machine, ready to chase the Doctor and chums through time and space as revenge for the foiled invasion of Earth. They don’t seem overly concerned about the Doctor’s seeming destruction of their species on Skaro way back when, just the whole Earth thing. Because turning the Earth into a hollow spaceship to fly it around the galaxy was totally going to work.

Of course, our time travellers can’t just leave, because the party is split up on the desert planet Aridius, adding yet another lazy planet name to the Doctor Who canon. The fishy Aridians, whose planet was once water covered and who live in fear of octopus-like Mire Beasts, don’t seem at all surprised by the sudden appearance of the Doctor or the Daleks, who threaten to destroy the Aridian civilization if the Doctor and his companions are not handed over.

Fish men. In a desert.

Thankfully, a Mire Beast breaks through a wall and eats an Aridian, allowing Vicki, Barbara, and the Doctor to escape and meet up with Ian, who has passed out from the first of two head-beatings in this story.

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A Sky Lined with Cheese: Cincinnati Five-Way at Skyline Chili

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Travel has taught me to eat like a local whenever possible. Journeying to some far-flung destination only to chow down on a standardized, same-as-in-Peoria burger can only be justified in the direst of circumstances—say, an overdose of shepherd’s pie in Dublin or a surfeit of souvlaki in Athens.

Thus, armed with a desire to get to know my surroundings on a quite literal gut level, I convinced my boon traveling companion to stop in an exotic locale during a recent road trip: a fast-food strip just off the I-70/I-75 intersection in Dayton, Ohio, where the highway overpass stanchions are festooned with carvings of soaring jet fighters. All for a Cincinnati Five-Way from regional chain Skyline Chili.

Finely ground meat with a savory/sweet spice mix in a tomato-y sauce characterizes Cincinnati chili, though given the fierce regional rivalries between types of chili, a rivalry almost on par with those of barbecue aficionados, there are some who claim that it’s not chili at all. There’s meat, there’s spice, there’s a thickish sauce—close enough for me.

Traditionally, Cincinnati chili is served atop thick spaghetti with an accompaniment of oyster crackers and then garnished in some number of “ways” corresponding to the number of ingredients: three-way is your basic chili, spaghetti, and cheddar cheese; four-way adds either beans or diced onions; and five-way (which is the only true way) combines it all.

Many midwestern fast-food/casual restaurants serve either the full five-way or a stripped down Chili Mac version (just chili and spaghetti) as a menu staple, and I’ve sampled it over the years from more than a few, but never from Skyline Chili.

So, a plate of Cincinnati Five-Way was duly ordered and came out from the kitchen in a matter of moments, piled high, oh so high, with thinly grated cheddar cheese, making for a towering first impression:

Cincinnati Five-Way Chili at Skyline Chili

I’m not certain if they grate their own cheese on premises, but it lacked that usual fast-food bagged cheese taste, and it melted nicely into the hot chili beneath, an important consideration given that a Cincinnati five-way is purely an experience of all the parts at once. No solo players here—one simply does not sample a bit of spaghetti then a bit of chili.

The chili itself, the first amongst equals in this gustatory assemblage, had a decidedly sweet taste, with far more cinnamon than I’m used to in Cincinnati chili. The overall impression was savory, but the sweet bite lingered, perhaps accounting for the squeeze bottles of hot sauce at every table. The onions had a nice dice to them, allowing for good coverage of the dish, while the beans I found lacking in quantity, making the overall dish closer to a four-and-a-half-way.

As is the bane of most fast-order pasta, the thick spaghetti was on the overcooked side, but not terribly so. I imagine that if we had gone during the lunch rush we’d have fared better with the spaghetti. The pasta was well drained, though, so that the bowl was not awash in pasta water, a perennial challenge for this dish. One wants the oyster crackers to soak up the remaining chili sauce, not water.

Overall, the experience was satisfying for fast-food chili. As my traveling companion put it, not a food one would crave to an extent that an eight-hour road trip would be undertaken for it, but definitely worth stopping for on the way to something else. Not every meal can be life-altering.

Plus, they have a drive through window. I don’t quite comprehend how one would go about eating a Cincinnati five-way on the road, but the mere fact of that window’s existence makes me happy to live in this country…

Dr. No: A Brief Appreciation

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With the James Bond movie franchise celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Dr. No, it behooves us to look back at that first (sort of) film adaptation of Ian Fleming’s super-spy in light of the twenty-odd films that follow.

If the Bond films are anything, they are predictable insofar as they hit certain marks, like a stage actor giving her hundred-and-thirty-fifth Wednesday matinee performance. Viewing a Bond film, one expects to see the opening pre-title shot when Bond turns and fires at the gun muzzle camera, the moment when Bond says, “Bond, James Bond,” the shaken-not-stirred martini, the super-villain’s overly elaborate lair, the love interest with the risqué name, the repartee with Moneypenny, and the end shot of Bond and whatever damsel survived drifting off together in space/at sea/what have you.

Little to the left . . .

In looking at Dr. No, it’s striking how many of these benchmark moments are established from the very first film. The film starts with a decidedly off-centered Bond whirling to shoot the camera, and after you suffer through a title sequence of flashing and blinking circles (reminiscent of a computer panel display), Maurice Binder brings out sixty-eight seconds of his soon-to-be-trademark dancing silhouettes.

Trademark Binder

The pre-title action vignette does not make an appearance in Dr. No, and indeed, the film does not introduce Sean Connery as Bond until roughly seven minutes in.

The introduction remains, however, the finest “Bond, James Bond” moment in the entire series. Never has a cigarette dangled more insouciantly from curiously dispassionate lips. And, of course, no changing of chemin de fer to poker as in Casino Royale.

Bond, James Bond

Most notable about Dr. No, though, in light of the films that follow, is not the combination of humor and seriousness (which frankly surprised me, as I remembered Dr. No as a mostly serious-toned film), but rather the signal lack of gadgets. Bond uses no gadget more exotic than a geiger counter. No suitcase gyrocopters or souped-up Aston Martins for this Bond.

Indeed, the film features very little of what a modern audience might call action—a perfunctory fight in Dr. No’s nuclear reactor lair (the first of many Ken Adam’s lair designs), a car chase, a few punch-ups, some dismal pistol shots at a flamethrowing tank, a murder in cold blood (by Bond), a mob scene when the lair explodes, and an icky spider. There’s no huge climactic action set-piece as one finds in later films. Dr. No simply gets thwacked and falls into the nuclear reactor at the end without so much as a grandiose retort.

Absent the gadgets and elaborate action sequences, though, Dr. No provides the cinematic framework for all the Bonds to follow, a framework that has endured for fifty years.

Paint by Letters: The Lettering of Cul de Sac

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As we near the point where Richard Thompson will close his daily comic strip “Cul de Sac,” I wanted to look at one of my favorite aspects of the strip: the lettering.

Excerpt from Sepember 14, 2010 Cul de Sac via gocomics.com

Take, for instance, this excerpt from the September 14, 2010 strip, part of the pangolin arc.

The expressive range of Thompson’s lettering conveys much of the emotional impact of the strip while still remaining secondary to the words themselves, integral to the content though not overwhelming it. Without the contrasting lettering in this particular strip—normal to start, then thick and shouty, then the light, all-caps conclusion underlined with, yes, plaintive squiggles—the joke falls not flat but, rather, unremarkable. But with that lettering, it all comes together as a whole. Even the slightly oversized question mark plays a role, helping the reader see Alice as a small, quite anxious, probably disturbed pangolin. That third panel is utterly plaintive and quite brilliant.

Thompson himself speaks to the notion of variable lettering in his Cul de Sac Golden Treasury, noting:

Emphasizing the right words is a tricky business. Like too many exclamation points, too much emphasis loses impact and everything turns into a shouting match. Choosing the right form of emphasis is tricky, too, as there are many of them and each marks a different change of tone. You’ve got the simple underline, the double and multiple underline, the wiggly underling, the boldface, the drop shadow block caps, and on and on. (188)

Ever since I read that note in the Treasury—and it’s full of insight on the strip and Thompson’s creative process—I’ve paid particular attention to his lettering and that of other cartoonists as well. Other strips use similar variable lettering techniques, but in combination with Thompson’s unique line style and frequent cross-hatching, the overall effect of the lettering in “Cul de Sac” makes the strip a delight to read again and again.

It will be missed. So hurry up and get the next Treasury out!