Comic Connections
Comic Connections
By David Stoddard
Remember those commercials with the crash test dummies who would always manage to survive crashes by wearing their seatbelts. They would have some sort of Laurel and Hardy moment to keep things humorous but yet teach the viewer something. Then the voiceover would always say “You can learn a lot from a dummy.”
To me, I feel you can also learn a lot from comic strips (or at least they can make you think about things a bit differently).
I’ve always been a fan of strips like Marmaduke, The Family Circus, and Garfield. They’re simple moments which we can relate to in some way. They sometimes let us see things in our lives which we may overlook in the course of a given day.
But Peanuts was the first strip which did more for me.
There was a whole cast of characters who were much more mature in many respects for their ages. While they all meant something, I must say that Snoopy and Linus were my favorites.
Snoopy was the dreamer and also the one who lived a life of adventure. Linus, was the philosopher. He was always explaining things to Charlie Brown about pretty much everything.
It’s been a while since I’ve thought about the whole idea of comic strips being able to make us think about our own lives. Lately, I’ve been more to just reading them to take a short break from things.
But last week, Ziggy got my attention. And no, it’s not because it’s a single panel comic which makes me feel that I will have a lot more time left for other things after reading it (as opposed to the 3-panel comics like Dilbert and Blondie).
In it, Ziggy is standing on top of a hill with nothing else around him but the clouds, smiling. Like Linus before him, Ziggy Philosophizes a simple but important idea.
“It’s not how far we get in life that matters. It’s the way we get there that really counts when we arrive.”
I imagine many of us are not where we would like to be at the moment. Yet we see people all around us who seem to have gotten ahead or into situations where we would like to be someday. Many of these folks deserve what they have and where they are. They truly have worked their way there and earned it.
But we all probably know of at least someone who has gotten further along it life by other means than truly earning it. Like Ziggy says, it’s the way they got there that matters.
Have they taken advantage of the generosity of others to get to where they are? Have they sucked up to those who could help them out? Have they then turned their back on these same people? How many have they walked on to get here? Have they been more interested in what they can get than what they can give?
Truth is, I don’t care how they got there. I want to know more about what I am going to do to get to where I’m heading and what I refuse to do to get there. In short, I want to know my own way.
Now for my question to you…
What have you done to get to where you are? How have you gotten here? What things are you proud of with regard to the way you’ve gotten to this stage?
