Scott Kurtz tackles the thorny issue that’s being debated in the US by the horns but doesn’t seem to balance it too well in tomorrow’s stip.
There’s a backlash against the ubiquity of the phrase “Happy Holidays” in the US. Obviously it’s a non-christian non-demoninational means of saying “Happy Christmas” and it has some merits.
It allows you to embrace Chanukah and other religious holidays (or horribly contrived ones like Kwanza - sorry guys, I think it’s dumb) in the same single-use sentence.
However, people aren’t celebrating Chanukah - they’re largely celebrating Christmas. Even if you don’t believe in Jesus’ divinity the name of the holiday is still pretty obvious. The UK is becoming less and less devout but we still call Christmas, Christmas.
Every year people complain that Christmas is getting too commercialized, I submit that Christmas has every bit of its former integrity - ‘December Holiday’ sold out long ago. After all, if you refuse to call it Christmas and celebrate the birth of Christ then what are you actually celebrating? Seems to me the answer to that is “fuck all” or at the most “Shopping” - there’s nothing to sell out because there’s nothing there to begin with.
The character Brent Sienna is an avatar for the part of Scott Kurtz that likes to make inflammatory and inappropriate comments but here he just comes across as a jerk. Having Christ ‘shoved down the throats’ of non-Christians seems a slightly ridiculous interpretation of the situation - if you don’t want to celebrate Christmas don’t celebrate Christmas, but don’t pretend that it’s something it’s not. You want the tree, the presents and the carols? It’s Christmas dude, just accept it.
Kurtz hasn’t been on great form as of late in all honesty, Wednesday’s strip seemed a little fan-fic’ish, as if it had been produced by a guest cartoonist. The lines weren’t great and rather than going for the standard “shocked looking face of intruder” frame, Kurtz chooses to show Brent and Jade getting it on - again, I get the feeling he just drew this to solicit opinion (grats dude, I evidently cared enough to write about it) and honestly it detracts from the joke and makes the strip a little less family friendly without providing a lot in return.
Perhaps it’s just that Jade’s boobs in that Miss Santa costume seem to totally ignore any sort of styleguide that existed for the normally meticulously-uniform, PvP Online cast. Yet overall, I don’t think Kurtz has really been on top of his game this December. Jade’s irritation with Brent’s sudden and uncharacteristic enthusiasm for Christmas has seemed contrived and unfounded. At the very least it’s ill explained.
If he wanted the PvP Online staff to transmogrify into anthropomorphic rabbits he could go ahead and I’d read as long as he gave a good enough reason for it - he’s the creator. Yet Kurtz’s humour for the past few years has been (brilliantly) generated almost entirely from interactions between the memorable characters he’s created so he’s now judged on how well they play to their roles (or grow with them). When you have such great characters it really sticks out like a sore thumb when one of them is acting out of character and Jade has been off-key all month (in my opinion). Kurtz is a victim of his own brilliance.
PvP Online’s Christmas strips have traditionally been blinders; excellent and hilarious. It’s a shame to see this year’s arch still struggling to get anywhere interesting or particularly funny.
I hope Kurtz pulls something special out of the bag to salvage the month. Knowing him it’ll be so good that I’ll instantly forgive him for the lackluster strips he’s issued thus far.
Later
John
Posted by John Swaine at December 16, 2005 01:19 AM