CSotD: Kvetching and Komix

I’m in the mood to pick nits and perhaps fights this morning, and Drew Litton has the misfortune to serve up a slow, underhand ball with what is a frequent complaint: “Outrageous Player Salaries.”

My usual response when football fans rant about this is to suggest they check with the 67,042 people who pay to watch them clean the fryer hoods each week.

Whether you’re Tom Brady or Meryl Streep or Eric Clapton, when you can do something better than anyone else and it’s something that brings in huge amounts of money, you’re entitled to a cut.

I’m not a baseball fan, but the NFL Players Association collective bargaining agreement calls for player salaries to amount to just under half of total revenues, though it’s more complex than that.

But, as that link notes, Wal-Mart takes in more money in five hours than your average NFL team makes in a year. I don’t know if their employees get 48.5% of revenues, but it seems a better focus for outrage.

And if baseball pays more than half its revenues out in player salaries, they should probably fix that. Ditto basketball, ditto hockey, ditto beanbag.

The players aren’t the ones jacking up the prices.

 

Juxtaposition of the Ridiculous

(Speed Bump)

(Argyle Sweater)

I may be nit picking, but I’m not in a bad mood, and here are a pair of puns that got a giggle. And some nit picking.

I wish Dave Coverly had dropped that gag yesterday when I was addressing carpal tunnel, but I’m pleased enough that he nailed “carpe diem,” which people say and then put off for later.

And here’s my “carpe diem” rant: If those boys had to bribe the rector’s dog with biscuits so they could sneak out of the dorm and meet for their secret poetry sessions, how the hell were they able to get back in undetected?

I won’t repeat my recent plot hole rant, but, damn, come on, folks.

 

Meanwhile, New Yorkers in their early 40s will remember when “Algebra Hiss” really did strike: The New York Post, having learned that a number of kids had stolen the state chemistry final, went ahead and published the answers so that all the students in the state would have an equal chance.

I doubt that Alger Hiss was on that year’s American History Regents, but their grandparents got a laugh today and they got a memory, so wotthehell.

 

Glad I laughed early

So word has come down from Those Who Declare Such Things that we’re not supposed to laugh about Robert Kraft being busted in a massage parlor because the young women there were sex trafficked.

But Clay Jones managed to get some very grim gallows humor by tying it in with the Great Nike Shoe Scandal, which turned up in so many editorial cartoons that I have to remember to start watching basketball before the next AAEC Convention because I had to Google it to find out what they were all talking about.

Anyway, Jones makes the point that the street is not a friendly place for a poor girl from the Third World, and, yeah, she’d probably get fired from the Nike factory before the people exploiting her on this side of the Pacific were ever called to answer for it.

Jones even festoons the massage parlor with a flurry of signs listing many ways in which rich men’s shit does not stink.

And, BTW, anybody who doesn’t know that those girls are basically slaves is too naive to be allowed out alone. You don’t have to be street-smart or smart at all to know it: Cop shows on TV have featured it for years.

And, ‘scuse me, but some billionaire getting busted in what his BFF would call a “shithole” is indeed ha-ha funny because it’s so damn pathetic.

However, I’ll be a good boy and then next time some arrogant fatcat gets hit in the face with a pie, I’ll think about the starving children it could have fed.

 

Kid Stuff

I had an annoyed thought running around my brain this morning, and, since Macanudo is a relatively new strip, it’s more or less at the end of the line of my syndicated strips and so well positioned to touch things off.

Yes, I’ve seen some of the things they publish and it had just occurred to me that we sure have a lot of hostile comics about young people.

Not so much the little guys — Frazz and Big Nate and Agnes and Heart of the City and others portray young kids as sometimes silly but often sweet and curious and adventurous.

Granted, they’re destructive, quarrelsome pains in the ass in strips that are about their parents, but — with the exception of Luann — once they hit their teens, their only purpose is to be lazy, entitled, shiftless bums.

Which made me think of Freckles and His Friends, which, when he became a teenager, had a kid-friendly approach.

Freckles himself was kind of a Wally Cleaver — intelligent, well-grounded and good-looking. But even his buddy Lard, who tended to bumble into things, was nowhere near as hapless as Lumpy Rutherford.

So, to see if I was imagining it, I dropped back to this week, 60 years ago:

Even Thursday’s strip about the car is an affectionate burn and not the grumbling of a fed up father over a lazy bum of a kid.

These were gag-a-days, probably filling in between two story arcs, so I jumped up to June and, sure enough, there was an extended story brewing:

Note that, while Lard is sure to get in over his head, Alice is a bright girl, as were most of the girls in the strip, even if everyone was a little obsessed with who was going steady with whom.

Of course, kids were reading these strips in a different media landscape, but why would kids want to read strips that invariably show them as lazy, sloppy and annoying?

 

Not that picking on teens is anything new