CSotD: Let’s Face The Comics and Dance

I’m sure Tony Carrillo drew today’s F-Minus (AMS) some time ago, but it sure couldn’t have dropped at a better time.

For my part, three days of analyzing Alito leaves me eager to be uninformed for at least a little while, and, BTW, it’s Free Comic Book Day at your local comics shop, which ought to help lighten things up.

Or, if today’s headline planted an earworm, you can take four minutes and 13 seconds to scratch it here.

In the meantime, I’ll go back to this blog’s original intent of pointing out that funny comics are funny for a reason, by which I mean the best humor strikes a chord in your own experience, for better or worse, but somewhere between laughing out loud and responding with a wry shrug of recognition.

And often a little bit of “wait a minute …”

 

F’rinstance, I chuckled over this Rhymes With Orange (KFS), because, yes, it’s so much nicer to be able to work from home, a common theme in cartoons as the pandemic becomes manageable and we reluctantly begin to return to the office.

But wait a minute. While I used to buy paper in cases, today, a ream now lasts more than a year, because everything happens on the computer, which also means I switched from an ink-jet printer to a laser printer because I used it so rarely that the ink kept drying up and screwing up the jets, and …

… and also I work in sweats. I haven’t owned a pair of pyjamas in several decades. Separate issue, but still.

So it began with a chuckle and then branched out into a whole lot of recollections and reflections, including the days back in the 90s when we laughed at predictions of the “paperless office” because we did things on the computer and then printed out a copy.  Sometimes several copies.

I seem to recall that it made sense at the time, which may be the funniest part of the whole thing.

 

Matt Pritchett’s work-from-home gag also made me laugh, but hit a touchier nerve.

The gag would have been perfect if he’d dropped the “y” and said “Our hunter-gathering,” but it still cracked me up. You couldn’t do much of either without leaving the cave, no.

But there was a division of labor in these societies. The men, for the most part, were the hunters while the women were the gatherers, which had major implications for how their communities were organized and governed.

While the men were out hunting and occasionally battling with other tribes, the women were not just gathering but developing agriculture, which made them more long-lived in many cases, which in turn is likely why so many of those societies are matrilineal if not matriarchal.

And my reading suggests that even the hunter/gatherer societies that were not matriarchal were still strongly influenced by the gatherers.

In Iroquois society — then and now — major decisions have to be formally ratified by the clan mothers, but even where that is not the case, as on the Northern Plains, there isn’t a whole lot that moves forward if the women aren’t on board with the decision.

And so jokes about cavemen clubbing women and dragging them off by the hair are both deeply misogynistic and totally ignorant.

They need to be filed with cartoons of executives chasing their secretaries around the desk, under “Y” for “Yuck.”

 

Frazz (AMS) taps a less fraught connection, because there was a cairn terrier on our corner who would go into an absolute barking frenzy when I’d walk by with my ridgeback, racing up and down his cast iron fence and, to my human senses, acting like he wanted to bust out and kill us both.

But my ridgeback at first tried to extend a friendly nose but then began to ignore him. He understood that it was just excitement, not hostility, but he seemingly couldn’t grasp why the little fellow didn’t mellow out and exchange sniffs.

So he just walked on past as if it weren’t happening.

Etiquette Tip: Less ballistic greetings will get you a smile and a wave back.

 

I don’t think Earl quite has this puzzling distinction nailed down in Pickles (AMS), but I, too, have to stop each time I use either word.

When I was a reporter, our managing editor would bring in a journalism professor for workshops on various grammatical issues, but the session on “further” and “farther” didn’t get anywhere because he was from Georgia and his soft Southern accent made it impossible to tell which he was saying.

And we didn’t get donuts at these things, either, so the hour was further wasted.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Agnes – AMS)

 

(Candorville – AMS)

While we were debating politics, both these strips addressed issues of creativity.

Tony Cochrane took some hilarious and brutal swipes at not-so-wonderful comic strips, which had me laughing but thinking he may have to buy his own drinks at the next NCS convention. The story arc begins here and is a hoot.

Meanwhile, Darrin Bell explored the issue of whether bad people can produce good art, specifically the uproar over JK Rowling’s snide and deeply intolerant commentary about transgender people.

That one begins here and, by week’s end, Lemont is on the verge of admitting that Susan was right, but the arc takes some dipsy-doodles, suggesting that nothing is quite that simple.

I’ll agree that it’s complicated. Given Rowling’s outrageous defensiveness about her stance, it would be hard to read her books without remembering who wrote them, though the stories themselves are innocent enough.

She’s a bit like Byron, who, in his own lifetime was described, accurately, as “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” And yet we read, praise and teach his poetry.

Meanwhile, Laura Ingalls Wilder has been stricken from the canon because she wrote, in her autobiographical novels, that her mother didn’t like Indians, though her father was much more tolerant.

Apparently, sweet little politically correct TV Laura was more acceptable than historically accurate real-life Laura.

 

Well, nobody — certainly not Liza Donnelly or Mort Gerberg — has anything bad to say about George Booth, who keeps cartooning at 95 better than most do at any age.

Here’s a spell-binding video portrait of him: