Encapsulation in the Comics

A few days ago  I was crumpling some newspaper while getting ready to build a little fire in my workshop's heating stove, and suddenly, after having paid no attention to any comic pages since I don't know when, suddenly my eye snagged on a comic section.   It was just as if somehow I knew there was something in there that, for a change, I really needed to note.  And no sooner had I started what I thought was going to be just a quick, cursory scan, when I settled on the only strip that had no speech balloons.  It was the work of a man named Brian Basset, and it appeared in the 7 November 2010 issue of the Washington Post.

It showed a dog sitting on the ground and looking up at a small tree branch in full leaf.   The next panel showed a leaf or two falling.   And then in the next few panels more leaves fall, till finally the branch is bare.   Yet the dog still sits there, patiently waiting for something else to happen.   Finally the twig breaks off and it, too, falls to the ground.   The dog picks up the twig and trots off happily.

I stuffed that page into the stove while thinking, Wait a minute here!   Actually some people could take that to be the story of my life, couldn't they?  And with good reason.

And I pulled the crumpled sheet out of the stove, carefully straightened it, and added it to one of my several boxes of interesting newspaper clippings.

I wondered if there had been something else just as meaningful in those same comics, and I thought that maybe I should see.   But I long ago learned the dangers of being greedy, and instead I went ahead and started the fire -- though not a big one.   Every day it still gets a little nippy in my workshop..