What was to be a Dead Cartoonist

"Brad Anderson" strikes me as a pretty normal, run-of-the-mill sort of name.  The kind of normal name that Monty Python would use to humorous effect just because it was so ordinary, "Yeah, we get it, you're gluten-free, no one was going to force-feed you the cheesy bread, Brad!"

But don't let the name fool you, because that is the name of the cartoonist who produced a pretty mediocre comic called Marmaduke for over 50 years.  And the only reason that I say mediocre is because I am a pretentious snob.  And because I live within such a thick bubble of pretention I am looking for art and entertainment that cuts through my expectations, that informs, enlightens or subverts my expectations.  But that is not a job that Marmaduke was ever applying for.  At least not since the mid 50s.

I have to imagine that when he was introduced in 1954 the concept of a huge dog and how his size and personality would make every day events a little more humorous broke a kind of mold.  A mule had started talking a few years before, but horses wouldn't start talking for another decade and cats wouldn't start eating lasagna for another 20 years.  But Marmaduke never ever even spoke, except with his eyes and his tail. 

I can't imagine that Brad ever had writers block.  He could go anywhere or do anything and superimpose the idea of a giant Great Dane on the situation, draw it, and then go hit some golf balls or play with his kids.  He had a large following of readers who just wanted to see what the big dog was up to today.  There is little evidence that he ever had a crisis as an artist, that he ever felt that he needed to come up with something new and edgy; he was content to give a group of people what they wanted. 

I'm not sure if that's noble, or lazy; but it was certainly lucrative.  And as someone who has spent the last 10 years in publicly traded companies, there is also a part of me that years for that sort of contented zen of this cartoonist.  The demands to not only grow the revenue this quarter but to grow it by more than anyone could reasonably expect gets tiresome after a while.

Why can't it be enough to just do my job really well?  Why do I always have to be revolutionizing within a fail-fast paradigm?  Why not just be consistently successful with time-tested methodology? 

But the world moves too fast now for those kinds of sentiments.  So maybe it's nice that Marmaduke stays around, just being big and in the way and comforting in his stability.