“Dustin comic makes daily debut in The Reporter on Monday” |
| Dustin comic makes daily debut in The Reporter on Monday Posted: 03 Oct 2010 07:30 AM PDT Three years ago, political cartoonists Steve Kelley and Jeff Parker were certain they wanted to create a daily comic strip. What they weren't certain about was whether a comic strip revolving around an unmarried 23-year-old college graduate with no job would be their ticket to success. "Dustin," a Kelley/Parker creation which debuts in The Reporter on Monday, focuses on the dynamics of a modern family with a "boomerang kid" — one who moves in and out of his or her parents' home like a boomerang that keeps coming back. It replaces "Cathy." That comic's creator, Cathy Guisewite, 59, decided to end the strip after 34 years to spend more time with her 18-year-old daughter and aging parents. Dustin is the jobless, non-married Dustin Kudlick, who is also the obvious star of the strip. Dustin spends his days job-searching, picking up temp work, sparingly dating and relaxing, all in the comfort of his parents' home. And his life status seems to bother him very little, if at all. "I think to some degree that because it's so difficult to find a job now and to hold onto a career, that people are just deciding, 'Well that's not as important to me as it was to my parents,'" Kelley says. "They say, 'I'm just going to lower my expectations about my life in material terms and I'll be a lot happier as an individual.' I certainly think that a lot of these 20-somethings, they walk around with a smile on their face all the time. They're not under the same stress and duress that their parents are. I think they like that. And certainly Dustin does." Dustin's dad, a stoic lawyer named Ed, had a very different upbringing than his son, while his mother, Helen, is a fashion conscious semi-celebrity who adores her son's resiliency to a cubicle. The family rounds out with Dustin's younger sister, the disciplined and goal-oriented Megan, who is quite the opposite of her happy-go-lucky brother. "I'd love to be Dustin. Wouldn't you?" asks Parker, before a quick chuckle. "He's a dreamer. He just doesn't want to settle on a cubicle and I don't blame him in the least. But Steve and I have worked really hard to make sure he's not portrayed as lazy as much as just not wanting to settle on life in a cubicle. … I sympathize with people who have to live at home, especially with their parents, and I know what a difficult thing that it is for both the kid and the parents. I'm sure I drove my parents right up a tree." And though Dustin's struggles closely mirror the struggles of other 20-somethings, both cartoonists claim the strip's accessibility lies within the conflict between all of the characters, not just Dustin. "Dustin" is meant to portray experiences that newspaper readers deal with everyday of their lives — annoying telemarketers, gaining weight, not having enough money and other intergenerational topics. Perhaps it's that accessibility that helped "Dustin" catch on. It's been picked up by more than 250 newspapers since its national debut on Jan. 4. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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