From: parghi@cs.uiuc.edu (Amit Parghi)
Subject: Re: NORB, the book
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 07:04:57 GMT

hoey@AIC.NRL.Navy.Mil (Dan Hoey) writes:
>But no one understood.  They just thought
>the strip was trying to make them feel stupid.  Daniel Pinkwater said,
>``The hate mail was extreme.  There was no positive mail at all except
>two letters, one each from Jules Feiffer and Chaim Potok.''

mcirvin@husc8.harvard.edu (Mcirvin) writes:
>Which means it's time to restate McIrvin's Law of Comic Strips:
>The easiest way to offend the public is to print something they don't get.

So true.

I taped "All Things Considered" (National Public Radio's news magazine
program) back some time in March (the 25th, I think), and Daniel Pinkwater
was on.  I've appended my home-made transcript -- it's worth reading.
(Since I'm not familiar with the strip, I've probably messed up the names
of the characters -- sorry.)

Amit
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Linda Wertheimer:
    The fickle nature of a readership came to haunt and hurt commentator
    Daniel Pinkwater.  He moped, he shrugged, he rationalized, he now
    comments.

Daniel Pinkwater:
    I keep hearing from people who loved NORB, the comic strip written by
    me and drawn by Tony Auth of the Philadelphia _Inquirer_.  In the year
    and a half since we pulled the plug, I've heard from so many people who
    remember it.  Some even made scrapbooks and saved the daily strips, as
    though they knew it wouldn't last.

    And it didn't.  NORB ran a year exactly.  Before that year was out,
    Tony and I had decided to kill it.  Newspapers were dropping it, and
    then there was the hate mail.  I'm not talking about a mixed response,
    I'm not talking about a few mildly negative letters, I mean *hate*
    mail.  We got a lot of it!  Also drawings of open graves, dripping
    daggers, and skulls and bones.

    And personal abuse!  The people who wrote to us hoped that we'd die a
    lingering death, or that the strip would be cancelled, preferably
    both.  What was more, our correspondents appeared to be aware of the
    practices and policies of newspapers and knew that a very few letters
    of complaint would get results.  Some of them predicted the demise of
    NORB, and they were mostly accurate as to the approximate date it would
    die.

    There was a sort of standard letter; it read something like this:
	    I hate NORB.  NORB makes me feel stupid.  I wrote
	    to the paper and told them to drop NORB.
    Well, it's clear we didn't know our audience.  Even though we'd worked
    on NORB for two years before publication, in our wildest dreams we
    would never have suspected that it wasn't dumb enough!

    Of course, it wasn't *near* dumb enough.  NORB featured a quick-
    thinking, white-bearded old scholar-adventurer who owned the last
    surviving wooly mammoth, Oigen.  In addition to Oigen, NORB's
    pals included Rat, a bright teenaged girl, and Jacobowitz, NORB's
    ex-con stooge and a bodyguard with a penchant for deep reading.  The
    adventures took place in such settings as a museum of antiquities, the
    club of the now superannuated and senile Sherlock Holmes, and the
    time-space continuum.

    Stuff like that is a red flag to the comics page reader catered to
    today:  a truculent mouth-breather, armed with a ball-point and a
    first-class postage stamp.

    There *are* a few comic strips aimed at adults who can also read things
    without pictures, but they're flagged as such -- most papers don't even
    run _Doonesbury_ on the same page as the regular comics.

    But Tony Auth and I weren't really interested in creating a hip strip
    reserved for superior types.  We remembered _Terry and the Pirates_,
    _Lil Abner_, _Pogo_, and _Barnaby_.  We judged that there were others
    like us who remembered or could imagine a day when the comics page
    gave scope to the imagination and presented humour that was not out of
    the can.

    And we were right!  Those are the people who've told us how they miss
    NORB.  But at the time, all the letters came from the other faction --
    the ones who hated it.

    We got a lot of pleasure from creating NORB while it lasted and could
    have gone on doing it -- if only somebody had said something *nice*!

Linda Wertheimer:
    Writer Daniel Pinkwater has asked us not to say where he lives, but we
    can say it is in the Lower 48.

Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.strips