Ziggy and Pearls Before Swine: Ziggy, it seems we've been recieving complaints from the other comic strips about your lack of pants!

I mock Ziggy a lot here, largely because it's terrible in almost every conceivable way. On the other hand, my taste runs more toward Pearls Before Swine, with its caustic, cynical satire. So I'm really not at all in Ziggy's target demographic, which I presume is composed almost entirely of greeting card executives and old ladies who collect fairy figurines. And, you know, they have different standards than me. That said, I still think Ziggy sucks as a piece of art, but it is undeniably a very successful product, and I blame Tom Wilson not one whit for making the most of it.

The other point I want to make is that even though cartoonists like Wilson make crappy comics, they're still probably pretty funny people. I base this on the theory that you can't make it in a funny business without being a funny person, even if the product you end up producing turns out to be not all that funny. This is to say, I'm pretty sure that if I went out to lunch with Tom Wilson or Jeff Keane, they would prove to be pretty witty conversationalists.* So it never surprises me to see the sort of thing we find in today's comics section, in which Wilson appears to take all of Stephan Pastis' ribbing in good fun.***

*Until they murdered me in cold blood, of course.**

**Ha ha! I'm just kidding! They have wonderful senses of humor! They would find my blog delightful!

***Pastis actually writes about this here and here.