Jan Eliot has been celebrating the 40th anniversary of Title IX and also having some interesting character-expanding fun with Alix lately, and the combination is one of those moments when Stone Soup rises so far above the norm that I shouldn't have taken this long to point it out.
But I'm glad I did, because today's strip is beyond price.
You should go to Jan's blog for her thoughts on it all. When I interviewed her a decade ago, I felt like I'd found someone who gets it on a level that works -- that is, it's not just a matter of having good political leanings, or of making certain consumer choices.
It's more day-to-day than that, an attitude like the way you carry a tray of soup bowls -- you don't stare at and fret over each bowl or they'll slop over, but, rather, keep your eyes on the place you're headed, knowing that the soup will not only be fine but, in fact, will do better for it.
One of the hallmarks of good writing is knowing more about the subject than you put on paper. There's a structure that supports and improves a story even though it is invisible, and storytelling improves the more the writer is able to integrate this knowledge into that hidden skeleton.
The best example I can think of is pretty far afield (or afloat) from Stone Soup, and that is the contrast between CS Forester's Hornblower books and Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Matin series. Aside from some elements that are either "homage" or "ripoff," depending on your loyalties -- Hornblower is tone deaf, while Aubrey is a great musician -- there is the matter of making readers comfortable with early-19th century warships.
Forester manages to instruct the reader seamlessly, within the storyline, while O'Brian uses a type of overt exposition that breaks the flow as he tells you what a "trunnion" is or how a particular sail functions, in a manner that suggests he looked it up and is now reporting to the class.
Eliot takes the Forester approach, incorporating things she knows about her characters into the storyline without necessarily telling you everything. And yet those things come through and you do understand them.
In today's strip, Val is remembering her late husband. She is widowed, not divorced, and there is a profound difference. Widows have a sense of uncompleted life and of a type of regret very, very different from the regret of a divorced person, the difference between a wistful "what if ...?" and a bitter, "What was I thinking?"
No, Alix doesn't remember going fishing with her father. She wasn't old enough, when he died, to remember her father at all. That is one of the "what ifs" that continues to haunt Val.
And yet she knows the names of the fish, because, at a pre-conscious level, she does remember. (This is not a fictional phenomenon, BTW.)
Comics aficionados have a term, "the reset button," for times when a strip simply abandons various changes and growth in order to preserve the original settings.
Practically speaking, this allows a teenaged character to remain forever in high school. Fair enough.
As a fault, it puts a character through what should be a major awakening only to drop them back into their normal, ditzy, unenlightened place at the end of the story arc. The "reset button" critique is a sneer at an artist who depicts changes in a character during the arc, but then isn't willing to live with them when the story line is over.
There's no reset button in "Stone Soup."
I don't know where this is going, but I trust Jan Eliot enough to know that Alix will continue to be a brat as needed. Yet, just as little Max is beginning to say a word or two, I trust Alix will show some signs, as the strip goes forward, of the things we're seeing in her throughout this extended storyline: a bright, curious nature that belies her age.
If you aren't reading this strip, you should be. It only looks fluffy -- there's quite an impressive skeleton hidden underneath.
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