Ballard Street
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ballard Street is a comic panel created by Jerry Van Amerongen and distributed by Creators Syndicate that has run since 1991. Along with Gary Larson's The Far Side, Ballard Street revolutionized the comic panel and continues to delight readers with its warped take on everyday life.
[edit] About the Comic
Cartoonist Jerry Van Amerongen pokes fun at the absurdity of the world around us and distills it into a daily cartoon panel whose artwork is just as funny as the captions that accompany it. On Ballard Street, dogs and cats have as much personality as their owners, and the unpredictable and offbeat become strangely normal. The Ballard Street world is fully of roly-poly women in large print dresses and rotund men in baggy trousers. It's a look at life through a warped but always hilarious prism. From cell phone etiquette to modern anxiety to the complicated relationships of our times, Ballard Street lasers in on the foibles of the human condition.
The panel features numerous characters; some recurring faces are Dottie and Will Farrington, the neighborhood skipping aficionados, Millie, who earnestly lectures the naughty person inside herself, and Scooter, the dog who loves to take baths, but only with his scuba gear.
That Van Amerongen spends much of his time just watching passersby is apparent in Ballard Street. While on the surface, most people conform to society's norms, it is their inner fantasies, what they do when they believe no one is watching, that truly defines their character. It is these moments that are the essence of Ballard Street.
[edit] Pre-Ballard Street: The Neighborhood
From 1980 to 1990, Jerry Van Amerongen’s zany revolutionary cartoon panel, The Neighborhood graced the comic pages of newspapers across the country. Along with Gary Larson’s The Far Side, it redefined the single panel gag cartoon with short doses of sophisticated and surreal humor. For creative reasons (and maybe a few contractual reasons as well), Van Amerongen discontinued The Neighborhood and began Ballard Street in 1991. It ran in strip form for nearly two years before returning to the single panel format, which seems to be a better vehicle for his humor.
In April of 2004, Jerry’s Giclee Prints and some original pieces were presented during a one-man show at the Every Picture Tells A Story Gallery in Santa Monica, CA. In May of 2006 Ballard Street was awarded the Best Newspaper Cartoon Panel Of The Year Award by the National Cartoonist Society. Ballard Street was awarded the same honor in 2004.
