Big Nate Does the Right Thing

Like I said in my brief bio on the right side of this blog, I like many different things. I probably won't ever increase my readership by consistently delivering news and notes on a single topic, but that's OK with me. This is my platform, and I'm going to use it as I see fit.

Last week, Lincoln Peirce, the author and creator of one of the daily cartoons that I follow, Big Nate, set up its protagonist to be either the goat or the hero in a big soccer match. The storyline extended beyond these four strips, but these were the ones that captured the relevant action from the soccer match:




The third strip in this series was the Friday strip, which meant going online on Saturday with the express purpose of finding out whether or not Nate made the save. (I read my daily comics on Yahoo!, by the way. Who needs to subscribe to a daily newspaper that just clutters up the house and forces you to recycle it anymore? Ah, but that's a post for another time.)

At any rate, you can see that Nate made the save, thereby winning the game for his team and his school against a soccer powerhouse that was trying to keep its four-year winning streak intact.

Good on him!











I was especially happy to see that Peirce decided his protagonist, who is otherwise an annoying, wisecracking kid, should be the hero this one time. It made me think of Charlie Brown for obvious reasons, and of how Charles Schulz always made his protagonist be the goat:




Alas, for all of Charlie Brown's otherwise exemplary qualities (celebrated in the play, "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown!"), he tended to not enjoy success on the ball field. Lucy always yanked the football away, and I think there was just the one celebrated instance where Schulz allowed Charlie Brown to get the game-winning hit in baseball.

That one game-winning hit meant that Charlie Brown was not ALWAYS the goat, but that was maybe one time in one hundred for the poor fellow. My family and I have always pulled for the underdog, and perhaps that was partly due to being from Ohio. In my own history, I do remember the incredible Big Red Machine teams of the Cincinnati Reds in the '70s, and of course seeing the Reds sweep the heavily favored Oakland A's in the 1990 World Series is one of my all-time favorite memories.

Sadly, the Browns and Bengals have been lovable losers for most of my years of fandom, perhaps reaching the AFC Championship game or even the Super Bowl (twice for the Bengals!), only to fall just short of true glory.

Regardless of how or why we tended to root for the underdogs, it was just something I natively understood while growing up. Perhaps that was due to Charlie Brown's example. We always wished he could kick that ball before Lucy could pull it away. In the case of Big Nate above, I was happy to see that Nate could enjoy being the hero for his team, and that he wouldn't be stuck in that Charlie Brown loop of goathood.

Of course, as an artist, Peirce probably came to the conclusion of whether or not Nate saved the goal by different means. If Nate missed the shot and had to be the goat, well, it's been done before. I'm finding out that expression has been co-opted into many different meanings these days, like anything else. But I always think of the episode of "Northern Exposure" where Chris, the artist, wanted to throw a cow with his trebuchet, and they stopped him from doing so because, well, it's been done.