Japes for Owre Tymes

Tomorrow, We All Crawl Back into the Swamp

2009-05-29T16:24:00.001-07:00

From this day forward, when I am weeping my way through the comics page and trying to decide whether Crock or Hagar the Horrible is a greater affront to my gender, I shall have a standard against which to compare them. I shall simply turn to today's Mary Worth and attempt to discover whether these comics are as condescendingly, arrogantly, nauseatingly sexist as the two panels below. If they aren't, I may be able to forgive them.* If they are, Armageddon may be just around the corner.

For the last three hundred years,** Jeff's daughter Adrian has been head-over-heels in love with a con man named Ted. Adrian, please note, is a doctor and therefore not a stupid woman; her brains did not stop her from advancing Ted a wad of cash and helplessly bewailing her fate when he subsequently tried to skip town. Luckily, big strong Detective Scott Hewlett came to her rescue. She was wary about trusting him at first, but now that her father has spent seven freaking strips in a row*** gushing about how he knew and adored Scott's father, Adrian seems to have decided that it's okay to fall for the guy. Today, she time-travels back to the 1950s, or possibly the 1350s, as Scott gallantly pays for her meal and sweeps her off her feet with his manly refusal to let her think for herself.

The medieval aspects of the comic are pretty clear. The first, of course, is the fact that a bloody goddamned doctor is apparently incapable of doing anything for herself without her father's approval or the help of her current lover. The only bit of the strip that doesn't fit is the fact that Adrian is a doctor.**** Otherwise, we may as well be back in the days when men were men and women were treated like right idiots.

My latest theory is that newspaper comics are, in fact, a time machine for our brains. Slowly, irrevocably, they are dragging us back into the past, simply by attempting to convince us that nothing has changed since the late fourteenth century. When everybody stops using forks and bathing, we'll know what's going on.

P.S.: "Madrian" is ginger treated with lye, as well as possibly an amusing name for Saint Adrian. I have appropriated it.

*Well, no, but I could possibly refrain from stabbing them for a minute or two.
**Or, in Mary Worth time, ten minutes.
***Or, in Mary Worth time, ten seconds.
****I am sure, however, that when she marries Scott, she will give up odious work and start doing what women do best: nagging, putting on weight, popping out babies, and ending up bitter and emotionally isolated.

Alle Yow Nede Ys Lufe

2009-05-28T20:13:00.000-07:00

The hideous Loveshmoos* of the (for lack of a better word) comic Love Is... have always been terrifying creatures who pretty clearly represent somebody's Issues in a bloody big way, but today they also really show off their medieval roots. The female Loveshmoo here poses nude for the male, which would be more shocking if these two shapeless, sexless things weren't always posing naked for each other. What highlights the medievalness*** in the panel is the position of the female (despite the somewhat ironic caption) as an object of the male gaze. She is even on a pedestal of sorts. I think we may have a metaphor for courtly love on our hands.

It does make a great deal of sense. The female Loveshmoo has been elevated to a point that lies beyond the temptations of the flesh, a fact signified by her lack of secondary sexual characteristics; the similarly non-sexual male Loveshmoo represents the purity of the knight's devotion to the lady. The glances they are giving one another, however, are references to the dark underbelly of courtly love: the idea that beneath all the chaste worship is a vast pit of roiling lust. Check out Malory's Lancelot for a good example.**** The Loveshmoos could probably give Lancelot and Guinevere a run for their money. Five seconds after the moment captured in this comic, they'll be going at it like bunnies.******

I do often wish that the Loveshmoos would just go the hell back to the Middle Ages, but since we're stuck with them here, we may as well just ferret out their medieval characteristics and try not to gag as we do so.

*Or, in fact, Loveshmoon.**
**I have been spelling "shmoo" incorrectly for months, but I have discovered the error of my ways and gone back to change all the shmoo references. I think I need to get out more.
***Interesting factoid: Firefox believes that "medievalness" is a word (or it did for a bit. It has stopped now. Damn you, Firefox...stop playing with me!). I think I shall try to use it in Scrabble. I mean, if someone else plays "medieval" and I add "ness" and hit a triple-word score, I shall be rolling in points. Of course, that would necessitate someone else first playing the eight-letter word "medieval," which would gain the player a bingo for using up all seven letters and earn him or her an extra fifty points, but hey: I would get to play an ultra-cool word that Firefox claims exists (sometimes). I shall shut up about Scrabble now.
****"I haven't done anything wrong, Arthur. I'm completely devoted to you. I'm absolutely your most loyal supporter in every possible way. Mordred, Agravaine, and a bunch of other guys caught me sleeping with Guinevere, and I initiated a bloody slaughter that ended with everyone but Mordred dead, then fled for my life and later abducted Guinevere just as you were about to burn her at the stake for adultery? I know, and honestly, I haven't done anything wrong. As God is my witness, I am entirely virtuous in every way." And on and on and on. It just makes me want to freaking slap him.*****
*****Of course, Arthur isn't any better. "But what should I do, Gawain? Lancelot is my truest knight! It doesn't matter that he's slept with my wife; I can always get another one. I'd like to forgive him. You don't want me to? Okay."
******Bunnies without sex organs. Ah well.

Dagwood the Philosopher

2009-05-27T20:40:00.000-07:00

It has actually been seven months since Japes has paid Blondie a visit, possibly because Blondie often contains a wall of text in every panel, and I am somewhat lazy. At any rate, today's strip has proven impossible for me to resist, as it fits beautifully into the medieval tradition and actually reads better in Middle English than it does in modern English. Here we see Dagwood truly coming into his own as a medieval-style philosopher. Watch his method; it's quite beautiful.

In the first two panels, Mr. Dithers asks his employee a question so hackneyed that it is probable that Geoffrey Chaucer rolled his eyes at it. How many comics have trotted out the whole glass-half-empty chestnut?* There is nothing new here or, in fact, in Dagwood's response, but it's the expression of calm innocence on Dagwood's face as he questions the contents of the metaphorical glass that really highlights the brilliance of the comic. Dagwood is actually challenging the entire framework of Mr. Dithers's approach to the world. Dithers posits a universe that can only accommodate two types of people; Dagwood points out, succinctly, that such simplistic categorisation is unfair in light of the myriad of different possible situations that can make up the contents of the "glass." He is poised to examine the purpose of existence: a key concern of medieval thinkers.****** The comics may seem to be about a fool giving an idiotic response to a moronic question, but we know better.

Another intriguing fact is that the translation has forced me to change the syntax of Dagwood's reply. As far as I can tell, there is no stand-alone Middle English verb that means "to depend"; there are several words that can be used with prepositions, but they wouldn't make sense on their own. The revised sentence deprives Dagwood of his maddening answer-a-question-with-a-question technique but adds a certain zing to his words.

Blondie may be as old as the hills and contain characters who haven't changed their clothes since 1930, but its medieval content and techniques are virtually flawless.

P.S.: There are no Middle English words for "optimist" and "pessimist." I had to go to the Online Etymological Dictionary for help in cobbling together my translations.

*A lot.**
**9 Chickweed Lane did a week-long series on it. No, really.***
***Admittedly, it was infinitely more amusing than the recent months-long series on young lust.****
****You wouldn't think it would be, but trust me: the glass-half-full strips made me much less eager to find Brooke McEldowney and throw rotten fruit at him until he went away.*****
*****I wouldn't particularly care where.
******And Douglas Adams, obviously.

Francis Among the Virgins

2009-05-26T09:12:00.000-07:00

We've seen today's Archie coming for a while now. As you know, its creator, the randy monk Brother Francis, is unable to stop himself from drawing nubile young girls, even when they have nothing to do with the content of his gag. Betty and Veronica are expressions of his fantasies, but of late, he seems to have been growing tired of them; they have faded into the background, replaced by a parade of mute, busty beauties. Almost every comic Brother Francis draws is a desperate cry for help.

Today, he comes out of the cell* and blatantly inserts himself into the strip. The girl in the foreground of the first panel is basically right up against the picture plane, almost within reach of the reader but much further away from Dilton and Archie. She has the usual impossibly gigantic breasts and just a hint of a bare thigh beneath a tiny skirt. Notice that in panel 2, it is Dilton who expresses aloud his opinion that the girl is "very pretty," though he immediately returns to his book. He here represents one of Francis's companion monks; Francis sees him as rapt in his contemplation of marine biology (i.e., the study of life moving over the face of the waters, i.e., the Bible in disguise);** he can appreciate beauty but not be distracted by it. Archie/Francis, on the other hand, has his pupils turn into little hearts just from seeing a perfect stranger pass by. Francis's lust is beginning to overwhelm him; he is unable to keep it from taking over his work entirely.***

There is also evidence here that Francis may be cracking up. That comic book with Jughead on the cover has been making the rounds lately, here in company with a profoundly creepy Archie marionette. Francis is becoming awfully meta; he is acknowledging the fictional properties of his comic within the comic itself. In addition, today's comic actually places Dilton in front of a tilted and skewed picture plane in the second panel, as if he is falling right out of the strip. It is really only a matter of time before Francis loses it completely and has a mysterious new character show up to reveal to Archie that he is the One, destined to liberate the residents of Riverdale from the comic-strip world and show them the gritty reality beyond the panels.****

Someone needs to get that boy a secret girlfriend. At this rate, he'll be having mystical visions in the desert before he turns thirty.

*As it were.
**I'm not sure who that makes the guy on the back cover, but since Francis is busy tumbling headfirst into sin anyway, I'm suspecting God.
***I think somebody needs an intervention. Break out the holy water and the hair shirts, Brothers!
****Or was that The Matrix? I forget.

Richard II, All Grown Up

2009-05-25T06:51:00.000-07:00

Back at The Wizard of Id, that clever tribute to the reign of Richard II, we get a wistful strip that comments metaphorically on the tragic youth of the child king. Due to the comic's frequent references to the Peasants' Revolt, we know that it is set around 1381, when Richard was a fourteen-year-old puppet. He is represented in the comic by a "short" (read: young) king who is frequently ineffective and reacts childishly to the world around him.

Today's strip is extremely telling. Here we see the little king longing to be taller: i.e., to grow up. Behind his words is a veiled wish for more power, which is being kept from him by his advisers. The wizard here represents John of Gaunt, the most controlling of these advisers. Note that the comic is actually named after him; it may often seem to be about the king, but the true power behind the throne is revealed in the title of the work. The manipulation of the mirror is a reference to the subtle politics involved in controlling a puppet king; the wizard/Gaunt must make it seem as if the king has "grown up" and seized power, and he must do so without actually relinquishing his own position.

The Wizard of Id is one of the cleverest comics out there today.* It is not laugh-out-loud funny, but it mimics editorial cartoons in its succinct, multi-layered comments on an important political situation. Though it's true that it hasn't been 1381 for a while, it's fair to say that the Parker Descendants** are extremely good at writing about what they know. If what they know just happens to be late medieval England, who are we to judge?

P.S.: Happy Towel Day. I trust you all know where your towels are.

*If you are taking me seriously here, I shall smite you. I mean that.
**Or whoever is responsible for the comic at the moment. Seriously...these guys eventually sort of fade into the woodwork.

More Filler, Extremely Pointlessly

2009-05-24T21:51:00.001-07:00

As I have remarked before, modern cartoonists are just as addicted to filler as medieval poets, albeit with much less justification. Sunday's Hagar the Horrible acts as an excellent demonstration of this practice. Mr. Browne has a three-panel joke but is working with a nine-panel grid. The first panel goes to the title of the strip; the next two establish that Hagar and Lucky Eddie do not know the gentleman with the moustache,* a fact that is completely irrelevant to the gag at hand.** The next two panels involve the gentleman asking for a dry martini and the bartender promising to get him one. We then get two cut-and-paste panels in which Hagar, Lucky Eddie, and Moustache Man sit perfectly still in silence. In the final two panels, the bartender gives Moustache Man his dry martini, and Lucky Eddie remarks that the drink looks wet.

Leaving aside the fact that the joke here is one that I first made when I was about eight years old,*** what we seem to have is a very, very sparse situation stretched out over far too many panels. Hell...this gag could fit into one panel.**** It is a terrible joke, but even so, it would be funnier if it were shorter. As it is, I had a hard time discerning the point of the comic. The filler panels are especially egregious, as they have absolutely no reason to be there.

This Hagar comic is therefore drawing on the medieval tradition of the really bad verse romance. Not only is it far too long, it inserts its filler so clumsily that the cartoonist may as well be waving vigorously and screaming, "Hey, look! Filler!" Its plot is clumsy and nonsensical, and it ends with a line that is meant to be clever but would not know cleverness if it met some in the street. The effect is very much that of the anonymous romance churned out by an unrepentant hack.

Someone needs to take Mr. Browne's Ctrl-V function away from him before somebody gets hurt.

*I have made him French because Lucky Eddie calls him "fancy-looking," and he is not drinking beer. It is amazing how anti-French stereotypes have lasted for hundreds upon hundreds of years.
**To be fair, a lot of Sunday strips involve two throwaway panels that certain newspapers don't use; cartoonists need to ensure that their jokes will work without them. To be less fair, there is absolutely no reason that the throwaway panels can't actually be funny.
***I mean, who hasn't? When your parents are drinking "dry" wine, of course you're going to make a crack about it being wet. You're eight. That's just the way your brain works.
****Bartender: Here's your dry martini, sir. Lucky Eddie: Gosh, I don't know; it looks awfully wet.*****
*****Or even just...Lucky Eddie: Barkeep! I asked for a dry martini. This one's wet!

Kids These Days and Their Crazy Newfangled Technology

2009-05-23T17:19:00.001-07:00

Today, the odd and disturbing beast-allegory and/or examination of the monstrous races that is Shoe strikes off in a slightly different direction.* The current strip is marvelling at how crazy it is that the world does not remain forever the same. Like many another cartoonist who yearns for the relative simplicity of the Middle Ages,** the hack who creates Shoe is shaking his head at the terrible fact that Things Change. All, he feels, is mutability; the wheel turns, and the entropic dance goes on.

Typically, however, he is disregarding the fact that when things change, they change. Shoe's words to the Perfesser may constitute a wry criticism of our need to stay uber-connected via many different forms of technology, but it is also rather grating because it ignores the fact that the only type of communication that the Perfesser is actually going to need to "hold" for Shoe is, well, the first one. The rest will sort of "hold" themselves by definition. The joke*** is marred by the cartoonist's sacrifice of common sense on the altar of technophobia.

It is possible that the cartoonist actually has no idea what "cell photos" and "tweets" are and is simply repeating exciting words that he has heard his grandchildren using, but I like to believe that he has dabbled in these frightening things called "texts" and "blogs" himself and has come away from the experience scarred. Take heart, creator of Shoe. Someday, when you are gone and your grandson is working on the comic,**** he will find himself looking back wistfully on the days when there were only six or seven ways to keep in touch with his acquaintances. Mutability rules, but what goes around comes around. Those kids with their texts and their tweets will someday bloody well get theirs.

P.S.: I would like to thank Shoe for the opportunity to translate the word "tweets."

*Albeit not, alas, a new one.
**People who yearn for the relative simplicity of the Middle Ages are usually forgetting about the waste-disposal problem, among other things.
***Such as it is.
****You just know this is inevitable.

That's the (Medieval) Spirit, Ziggy

2009-05-21T09:24:00.000-07:00

Those of you who have tried to click on the images in the last few posts and failed should try again. It seems that when I use Blogger in Explorer, the images I upload are not clickable. I have re-uploaded them all in Firefox. I really, really do not understand why this was necessary, but oh well.

At any rate, only people with eyes even less useful than mine will need to click on today's comic in order to see it properly.* Tom Wilson II does love his huge, huge text. See, look at that: even Blogger's largest font setting doesn't make my text as big as TWII's. I think it's possible that possession of a Sharpie makes him go mad with power.

Today's Ziggy constitutes the next logical progression in TWII's yearning for the past. I have already covered this comic's cutting-edge lampooning of a book series completed a full year previously and its timely exploration of how ten-year-old computers are plotting to kill us all. As you can see, TWII is gradually taking Ziggy farther and farther into the past as he reaches back towards the Middle Ages, where he really wants his strip to take place. Today, he actually kind of gets there.

The comic contains a great deal of medieval content: the presence of the waiter/innkeeper figure, the word "sir," the reference to the bloodthirsty nature of businessmen/merchants, and the concept of the diner actually preparing his own meal from absolute scratch. At first glance, it seems as if TWII is mixing his social classes in a particularly egregious way. The innkeeper calls Ziggy "sir" but implies in the same breath that he is a merchant, then suggests he slaughter his meal like a peasant. "Sir" is a word most usually applied, in the Middle Ages, to the nobility; to call a merchant "sir" would be to commit a ridiculous social gaffe, and to treat a merchant like a peasant would probably make the merchant quite squiffy. However, there is another common usage of the word "sir." It can be uttered contemptuously** and thus carry the implication that the person to whom it is spoken is the opposite of noble. Either the innkeeper is awfully confused about Ziggy's social status, or he is mocking him openly.

The presence of the bird makes me inclined to go with the latter interpretation. The innkeeper is, in fact, making even more vicious fun of merchants than one might assume. A "businessman"--or, in Middle English parlance, a "sonne of marchaundye" (in other words, a successful businessman)--is someone on his way up in the world: a working man who regards himself as above a peasant in stature, though nobles look down on him for having money but no distinguished ancestry. The innkeeper is drawing attention to Ziggy's lack of blue blood, first by using the word "sir" contemptuously and then by offering to let him slaughter his own lunch and thus implying that Ziggy's money does not materially remove him from the servantless peasant class. Understanding the medieval context of this comic really highlights its meaning.***

Congratulations, Tom Wilson II. You have managed to take your comic all the way back to the Middle Ages. Be careful, however; if you keep this up, you'll be drawing comics about Alexander the Great by next Christmas.

*Plus it won't work. The clicked version will be the same size as the version here. Neener neener.
**For a good, albeit non-medieval, example of this sort of usage, read any scene from any play by William Shakespeare.
***And makes me slightly less eager to punch it.

Poor Unfortunate Souls

2009-05-20T18:31:00.000-07:00

Back in the central ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell, the realm of suicides and spendthrifts, Chip Dunham's condemned pirates drag out their weary existence. In today's strip, we see Captain Crow and a nameless Green Ship pirate indulging in one of the most common activities of the damned: the attempt to complete a task designed to continue for all eternity. The two pirates are ostensibly setting up for a duel, but they have apparently neglected to specify how many steps they must take before they begin. As they are trapped in a fiery underworld, it is probable that the instructions issued to them at the beginning of the duel were, "Take infinity paces, then turn."*

There are several clues--besides the unusually large number of paces involved--that this duel is not an ordinary one. The combatants are not, as is more common, progressing in opposite directions, but are instead wandering along the shoreline, each at a ninety-degree angle to the other. One might posit that they are attempting to remain close to potential drinking water as they take their infinity steps, though the fact that the water is probably salt kind of destroys that theory. However, it is worth noting that the body of water in question is so badly drawn that it actually looks a bit like the maw of a ravening monster. Might we, in fact, be seeing an example of the Hellmouth here? The pirates are unable to tear themselves away from it because they know that it will eventually swallow their tormented souls forever.**

It is also worth noting that the pirates have clearly not taken nearly eight hundred steps each. Are they trying to cheat their way to infinity?*** I can hardly blame them, but I can't help but feel it's a good thing the demon Louie is not here to witness the duel. If he were, there would likely be blood and mangled limbs.****

Overboard is a courageous comic that graphically depicts the author's personal view of Hell. May it long continue.*****

*Interestingly, my marking instructions are generally, "Mark infinity essays, then go mad." Coincidence? I think not.

**Alas.

***And beyond?

****Mangled soul limbs.

*****I am drearily certain that it will.

The Tendre Cattes and the Yonge Sonne

2009-05-19T11:11:00.000-07:00

Jim Davis really does have it made. While other cartoonists are certainly free to phone it in, Davis is free to hire an assistant to hire another assistant to phone it in. It is entirely possible that he can produce Garfield comics without thinking about his comic strip at all.

If whoever is currently drawing* the strip is not, in fact, rejoicing in the power of Photoshop's cut-and-paste function--and the tiny variation in the hindmost clump of grass in panels one and three of today's strip argues that this person is not so rejoicing--then there is still some awfully lazy cartooning going on here. Why do the characters in this strip so very rarely move? Jon and Garfield are currently outside,** and there's still nothing happening. My theory remains that Garfield and co. are residing eternally in Hell.

The impression is accentuated by the frighteningly gigantic and incredibly badly drawn sun looming behind Garfield. Honestly...what the bleeding Hades is that thing? It looks like something created by an eight-year-old with a compass. It is also about twelve times the size of the actual sun. Either Garfield is trapped in the Inferno and is squinting up at an allegorical representation of the sin of Sloth, or he has been transported to another solar system.***

There is absolutely no way to make this comic funny, but a medieval context does give it some meaning. If the sun represents Sloth, Garfield's desire to "dim" it may serve as an indication that he is beginning to repent of his sins. His awareness of himself as a sinner is expressing itself via denial, but it is only a matter of time**** before he begins weeping and crying out to be saved. Alas, it is also possible that the sun represents redemption (due to being associated with the brightness that is Our Lord), and Garfield's desire to make it less bright is a reflection of his lack of repentance and his rightful position in Hell.

It would be nice if Garfield became even slightly funny at some point in the near future, but in the meantime, we've got the richness of its allegory to tide us over.

*Did I say "drawing" when I meant "tracing"? Now, why would I do that?
**Very, very, very, very unusual for Garfield. Why, on Monday, a poor Paws, Inc. lackey had to draw Jon's entire body. Oh, the humanity.
***Or possibly to Mercury, in which case his blood will start boiling at any minute. Hurrah!
****If there is, in fact, time in Hell.

Roman de la Crock*

2009-05-18T11:31:00.000-07:00

It has never been entirely possible to discern much intelligence behind Crock, but every once in a while, the fact that the comic is probably created by a thousand monkeys with access to drawing materials** is obscured by its use of medieval allegory. On the surface, today's strip makes absolutely no sense and may just deserve to be encased in concrete and thrown into an active volcano. It does, however, take on a limited amount of meaning when one applies an allegorical framework to it.

Like Roman de la Rose, already briefly discussed here, this strip could be seen as symbolic of sexual penetration. The...little green man is pointing out that the fortress (read: the maiden) he has been besieging (read: wooing) has left its gate open (read: gone a-Maying in the fair meadow just as the sun reaches over the hill...a hey nonny hey nonny ho), and its guardian (read: the maiden's father) is helpless to stop the little green man from invading it (read: ravishing her). The "SPLAT" sound effect is meant to signal the intervention of the wind (read: God), which accidentally (read: via divine intervention) prevents the fall (read: the rape) of the stout fortress (read: the virgin). Note that the little green man's clothing is dishevelled in the final panel. Clearly, the "wind" has interrupted him in the throes of passion...I mean battle frenzy.

There is still no real reason for this strip to exist, especially since the type of allegory at evidence here has been out of vogue for at least five hundred years, but at least it's not such an utter waste of space as it at first seems.***

*"Crock" has Germanic roots. I have not the faintest idea whether it is, in essence, masculine or feminine. Let us just assume I am making a glib, silly reference and leave it at that.

**They were originally tried on typewriters, but they kept flinging their poo and jamming up the keys.

***If all else fails, we can use it to clean up the monkey poo.

The Further Adventures of the Bear's Son

2009-05-17T10:07:00.000-07:00

As I have previously mentioned, PJ Keane, as a third son with bestial characteristics, is an excellent candidate for heroism: specifically, heroism of the half-human variety, as he takes on the role of the figure sometimes called the Bear's Son. This type of hero is often imbued with monstrous qualities that give him an affinity with the creatures he is born to destroy. Frequently, he will possess special knowledge that the fully human members of his community will fail to understand.*

In today's Family Circus, we see PJ demonstrating his inborn ability to see the truth behind mundane appearances. Where the oldest son,** (presumably) the middle son,*** and the daughter**** see a cute little puppy dog, PJ sees a ravening beast with a Marmaduke/Antichrist-like tendency to swallow small children whole. The older siblings think they are steering their baby brother gently away from his delusions, but they are actually disrupting his heroic focus. PJ needs to be able to see the hell-beast for what it is so that he can slay it, tear out its beating heart, and devour it in a fetishistic ritual designed to augment his wilderness power and increase his efficacy against the monsters he will fight during his later career.

The Bear's Son is not only a medieval figure. However, we can see the specifically medieval content here in the intertextual Antichrist reference; Bil and Jeff Keane clearly know their Marmaduke. Christian texts make use of the Bear's Son, generally turning him into a type of Christ. PJ's vision here foreshadows the End of Days and the coming of the Beast. His family would be wise to heed his warning.

Of course, the comic could simply be incredibly stupid, but then why would anybody ever publish it?

*He occasionally expresses such knowledge by smashing most of his family's belongings and attempting to rape a woman, but I'm not sure PJ is quite at that stage yet.

**Destined to insult a little old lady and be eaten by a giant.

***Destined to insult a little old man and be ground into powder by a large eagle.

****Destined to be abducted by a troll, sleep with him, turn on PJ, and attempt to have him boiled to death in a crystal cauldron at the heart of a mountain frequented by the Fiend.*****

*****I am not making any of this up. I may be embroidering the details, but the motifs in question are sound.

Oh, This Is So Not a Good Idea

2009-05-15T05:36:00.001-07:00

This week, Tom Armstrong's reprehensible Marvin has, not atypically, been milking a single joke right the hell to death. You can see the beginning of this joke here.* Essentially, the members of Marvin's family have all been replaced by super-nice stick figures, and Marvin is wandering around being freaked out. As Josh Fruhlinger has pointed out, Grandpa doesn't actually look like a stick figure at all, but I suppose we're supposed to take it on faith that beneath that bulgy clothing, there are, well, sticks. It is, of course, unclear why the clothing is bulgy, but this is Marvin, after all. If it made sense, it would be Pearls Before Swine.**

What really disturbs me about this series of comics is something quite different. Like this Wednesday's B.C., today's Marvin is intertextual in a medieval sort of way...but where B.C. actually comes close to doing it right, Marvin's attempt is so wrong that I am currently weeping violently for the future of humanity. B.C., you see, steals from a comic that is just about as stupid as B.C.*** Medieval-style content thievery works best when the thieves take material equal to or less than their own work in value. Reversing the process leaves the thieves looking even more hack-like than they already are, as they have gone and butchered greatness.****

The Marvin comics seem to constitute an extremely vague and tenuous reference to the recent film Coraline, wherein the title character crawls through a door into another dimension where her parents are super-nice and have black buttons for eyes. It is the kind of reference that might be made by someone who hasn't seen the film but has heard that that is what the kids are watching these days.***** Hyuck hyuck! Marvin can have extra-dimensional adventures too! Too bad he's going to wake up tomorrow and find it was all a dream!

The problem is that the film Coraline is based on the novel Coraline, and the novel Coraline was written by Neil Freaking Gaiman, and absolutely anything written by Neil Freaking Gaiman****** is so much better than the very best Marvin strip ever produced******* that even including "Marvin" and "Neil Freaking Gaiman" in the same sentence hurts me profoundly. Tom Armstrong, what the bleeding Hades were you thinking? I know you create Marvin, but even you must have at least a few dangling vestiges of common sense. You are not allowed to steal from Gaiman. By doing so, you have 1) turned Coraline into a vaguely cute-ish maelstrom of unfortunate punning and 2) inadvertently upped the creep factor in your strip to the point at which you are going to have young readers screaming and attempting to brush off the invisible rats they are imagining erupting out of the page into their sweet little faces. You make me want to bite out my own eyes.********

Tom Armstrong, please stick to stupid cut-and-paste jokes about how infant girls are trying to snag husbands. It is just as medieval as intertextuality, and it doesn't drag the Prince of Stories into the mix.*********

*The link will probably eventually stop working. That may not be a bad thing.
**Which makes sense in the most insane way possible, obviously.
***I here refer to Garfield and not Garfield Minus Garfield, which greatly exceeds B.C. in quality. B.C. references the latter but technically cannot steal from it, as Garfield Minus Garfield actually does not contain a character named Garfield at all.
****Relatively speaking.
*****For "these days," read, "however many weeks ago the syndicate forced Mr. Armstrong to draw this week's strips." It is possible that Armstrong created these particular comics not long after Coraline opened in theatres.
******Up to and including his grocery lists, I expect.
*******Theoretically, such a beastie must exist.
********Which would, incidentally, be a fairly Gaimanesque thing to do.
*********Okay, okay...technically, the "Prince of Stories" is Dream, Gaiman's creation, and not Gaiman himself. However, it sounded better that way.

And They Will Behold Him, and They Will Know Him Not

2009-05-14T06:28:00.000-07:00

Brad Anderson, the 85-year-old creator of Marmaduke, and the mysterious "Paul," presumably some kind of Anderson Spawn,* are becoming less and less careful about their references--originally at least slightly veiled--to the rise of the Antichrist and the hideous death and pain that will accompany his appearance. In today's comic, Marmaduke, a.k.a. the Damned Child of Eternal Perdition, is demonstrating, in full daylight, his command of the Satanic powers of magic.

The funny-looking people peering at him over the fence can be interpreted in two ways. They may simply be in denial; they refuse to believe that they are living in the Last Days and are about to see a possessed Great Dane levitate on a rug. However, they may actually be discussing the more subtle implications of Marmaduke's coming flight. The woman could easily be remarking that the carpet is not, in fact, magical; it is instead miraculous. Marmaduke is here playing out the bit of the Antichrist's story where he convinces the people that he is truly the Saviour and can use the powers of God to perform miracles. You wait: in tomorrow's panel, Marmaduke is going to pretend to raise a neighbourhood urchin from the dead.**

Flee, funny-looking people. The Big Dog is coming. He is coming for you. He will devour you and cast you into eternal fire. That is not a baseball in the yard; it is a symbolic representation of the planet, and Marmaduke is about to bury it. Run away now. You cannot escape your eventual fate, but you can be elsewhere when the excrement hits the whirly-blades.

*Conspiracy theories are fun. Do you know that though every Marmaduke panel is now signed "Paul & Brad Anderson," it is nigh on impossible to find any information about Paul online? The demon Wikipedia insists that Brad is still the sole creator of the strip. Even the official United Features Syndicate Marmaduke blurb neglects to mention Paul. I think it is possible that Paul is the devil. It would certainly explain where Brad gets his inspiration.
**Actually, though, he is going to feast on the souls of the damned.

B.C. Wyth Sperefeld

2009-05-13T12:46:00.000-07:00

I'm back!

I'm back late. I apologise for that. This last week, I have mostly been sleeping and whimpering into my pillow. I marked myself into a state where I could no longer see out of my eyes. The result was that I went to visit an eye doctor today.* He told me that everything was too fuzzy because my prescription was too strong. It seems my eyes have deteriorated so much that I can see better than I could before. No, I don't understand it either.

Because of those damned drops that open up your damned pupils so that when you go out into the sunlight, it feels as if someone is sticking red-hot pokers into your eye sockets and twisting them, I am currently hiding in a darkened office, shrinking away from the terrible, terrible light. It seems like a good time to get back to the Middle Ages and massacre me a few comics. Perhaps the exercise will help me to forget the two petty, vindictive students who are attempting to ruin my life.

In today's B.C., we see a fantastic example of medieval-style intertextuality. Writers and artists in this day and age tend to be afraid of "borrowing" material from other writers and artists, presumably because writers and artists in this day and age are not afraid of hiring lawyers and suing the pants off thieves. The Hart Descendants, however, care not for copyright protection. They metaphorically spit in the metaphorical face of twenty-first-century law. They need to use Garfield in their comic? They'll swiving bloody well use Garfield in their comic. If Garfield Minus Garfield can get away with stealing a whole comic strip (minus its protagonist), why shouldn't B.C. be able to appropriate an unwanted character and have him kick a tortoise and a bird off a...a...a prehistoric counter? What would Chaucer do? Chaucer would insert Garfield right the hell into his comic strip!

Y'know...I think there needs to be a "What would Chaucer do?" T-shirt. I would suggest it to the King of Chaucer T-shirts, the Chaucer Blogger, but he seems to be M.I.A., and--wait a minute! Wait a minute! The Chaucer Blogger is back! He's back! I just went to check his site, and he has posted things on it! If you have no idea what I'm talking about, stop wasting your time here and go read Chaucer's blog, for crying out loud!**

However, I still may make the shirt myself someday.

*I actually discussed Chaucer with him. He was doing the usual doctor thing of asking me what my job was, though I think he was kind of not wanting me to explain that I taught medieval English literature. He had to read the Canterbury Tales in grade eleven, and the experience scarred him for life, though it probably scarred his teacher, a nun, more.
***"I hereof appeale myn erstwhile freende and companioun Johanness Gowere that he ys a wanker." I mean, come on, people...is this not medieval comedy gold? Oh, Chaucer, how we have missed you.

Francis, Francis, FRANCIS...

2009-02-27T13:24:00.000-08:00

I am drowning in marking, but it's late Friday night, so I shall pause for a moment to impart some medieval observations regarding our good friend, Brother Francis, Creator of Archie and Lover of the Female Form.

One of the qualities about Brother Francis that I find truly endearing is his adoration of breasts at the expense of absolutely everything else about his comic. Brother Francis, who does not know any women personally, nonetheless is so fascinated by the curvy bits on their fronts that he tends to draw random girls who have absolutely nothing to do with his strips in the foreground while the actual named characters fade into the background. So intent on the breasts is he that he does utterly silly things such as making Betty's and Veronica's silhouettes into deformed Rorschach blots, drawing a little Kool-Aid face on Betty's purse,* inserting a mannequin head wearing a coonskin cap into the background, and giving Veronica a "credit card" that is half the size of her head.** What does it matter? None of these things are boobies. No one is looking at them, anyway.

Eventually, Brother Francis is going to give up on the background altogether. Archie strips will become an endless parade of bosoms, each more swollen than the last. After that, it will only be a matter of time before the other monks enter his cell one day to find him huddled in a corner, giggling madly and trying to make love to his mattress.

*Or is that a truly terrible attempt at creating the Watchmen happy face? If so, Brother Francis is falling into a sad little trap that often ensnares his fellow cartoonist-monks as well; he thinks he is being edgy and up-to-date, whereas he is actually just demonstrating his extraordinary ignorance.
**Yes, Josh Fruhlinger made a similar observation earlier today. I am late. And slow. And wanting not to mark any more. Damn it.

So Simple, and Yet So Very Not Profound

2009-02-20T21:54:00.000-08:00

Fred Basset is like raisins: relatively inoffensive but disappointing to find in a cookie you thought contained chocolate.* The strip's humour ranges from mild to completely nonexistent, and while it's hard to see why it has survived for so long, it's even harder to work up a good loathing against it. I don't like it in my cookies, but I'll force it down if there's nothing else to eat.

Every once in a while, however, you get a raisin that has fermented and acts as a hallucinogen.** Today's Fred Basset is such a raisin, though it is perhaps less "hallucinogenic" than it is "completely bloody insane."

The comic reminds me, disturbingly, of a cross between Nancy and Love Is.... Fred is smiling just like either Nancy or a Loveshmoo while making a cryptic statement that means nothing but would fit nicely on a Hallmark card. One imagines that just before he drew this strip, the cartoonist 1) ran out of ideas for good and 2) bought a new compass. He played with the latter while attempting to deal with the former, thus producing the...thing...we see below.

The strip does make more sense in Middle English. Fred's conversion of his world from square to round would make a great allegory for the achievement of spiritual enlightenment. Fred has taken the unnatural corners of his universe and converted them into circles...a circle, of course, being a symbol of the completeness of the Almighty. The dog's obvious bliss in the final round panel is understandable, as Fred is now encompassed within the circle and has become one with his Creator. It's all very beautiful, really.

Moving spiritual allegory or absolute freaking lunacy? You decide.

*Actually, I can't stand raisins, but I wanted to make a simile.
**This is not true at all. I'm still doing the thing with the simile, except now it has become a metaphor. Oops.

Suddenly, It All Becomes Clear

2009-02-18T18:45:00.001-08:00

Nice as it is to be on a week-long "vacation,"* it is a sad fact that my Tuesday evening class doesn't observe Reading Break (it's an adult-ed class). I therefore spent yesterday writing a lecture and not, in fact, doing comics. Today, however, I have something special for you: possibly the most horrifying Shoe comic ever published. It very much makes up for the fact that Shoe offered no Valentine's Day fodder.

On the surface, the joke in the comic below is fairly conventional. I'm sure I've seen it elsewhere at least half a dozen times; cartoonists enjoy making fun of their overweight characters by implying that they are only skinny on the (absolute) inside. The joke is a relatively safe one. We're meant to go "Hyuck! Hyuck!" over the "skinny" skeleton and move on, still hyucking to ourselves, to find out how Cathy is doing on her endless quest to find a bathing suit that makes her look as if she has just been X-rayed.

However, examine the comic more closely. Check out the skeleton in the X-ray.

That is not a bird skeleton. Okay, granted, the head has a weird beak-like protuberance, but otherwise, we're dealing with a human frame, complete with hands and feet. Inside the big fat Perfesser is a skinny human trying to get out.

Do you realise the implications this revelation has for the universe of Shoe? This goes beyond the usual medieval-style beast fable; it even goes beyond allegory. The characters in Shoe are hybrid creatures, unnatural combinations of humans and birds. They are, in short, monsters. Shoe is not an allegory after all; it is a detailed look at the members of a particularly bizarre monstrous race.

In the Middle Ages, many writers provided descriptions of such races; some invented long accounts of their adventures among the monsters. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville is one such account; Mandeville himself is likely an invention, and his "travels" consist of bits and pieces 1) cobbled together from older sources and 2) made up, but the work is still a fascinating look at the way medieval people thought of the lands "over there." Medieval world maps frequently group the monsters around the edges, off on the rim of Africa, and monsters prance through the marginalia of medieval manuscripts (some examples can be found in this blog, which is actually already linked in my own margins). The question as to whether or not monsters count as human is one that--as I've mentioned before--not even St. Augustine can answer definitively.

Shoe courageously tackles this problem by blatantly revealing the human frame beneath the monstrous exterior. It is a memento mori, yes, but it is also a reminder that a monstrous body may very well hide a (potentially) Christian soul. Shoe's writer may actually be advocating that we send missionaries to convert the hideous bird-people in this comic. If Saint Christopher could be saved,** surely the deformed frequenters of Roz's treetop bar have a chance at salvation as well.

At the same time, the Perfesser's oddly human skeleton raises the possibility that our insides may be monstrous. If the inside doesn't have to match the outside, what hideous beast could lurk inside me? That one panel is nightmare fodder. A Perfesser with human insides? *Shudder*. A teenaged girl with a slavering, bestial soul? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh...

I do not think I shall sleep tonight. Thank you, Shoe. Thank you so very much.

*"Vacation" in the sense of "temporarily not teaching three of four classes," not "vacation" in the sense of "relaxing and not having to mark anything."
**Christopher is frequently portrayed as a giant and occasionally as a dog-headed, cannibalistic giant. He may just be my favourite saint.

Allegorical Dessert Foods, Inc.

2009-02-16T20:07:00.002-08:00

The hack who currently produces Marmaduke is really getting into this whole Antichrist thing. Today's comic is an excellent illustration of the rich meaning inherent in the view of Marmaduke as the Devourer of Worlds, Harbinger of the End, Child (Metaphorical or Otherwise) of the Devil, Et Cetera, Et Cetera. Run from the Beast, Marmaduke-flavoured Munchkins. That Antichrist is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. And it absolutely will not stop--ever--until you are dead.*

Below, we see two small, perspiring children hiding behind an ominous black bush as Marmaduke slavers above them, his focus apparently on the doughnuts they hold. Many would claim that Marmaduke is actually aiming to consume their tender young flesh; I, however, believe that he really is yearning after those doughnuts, which clearly represent the souls of the boys clutching them. The golden-haired youngster, generally portrayed as one of Antichrist's disciples, seems to be coming slowly to the realisation that the Beast does not mean him well; he demonstrates his new wisdom by coming out with a cliche that would be annoying if it were not, in this context, so very, very true. Cower, tiny mortals, for the End of Days is at hand, and the Great Big Dog will--after a few amusing adventures resulting from his size--bring down everlasting night. Doom. Doom. Doom.**

*Or, you know, wracked with eternal torment in the fiery bowels of Hell. The Terminator really has nothing on the Antichrist.
**In other news, it was a beautiful day today. How are you?

The Most Wonderful Thing About Crockers...Is There Is Only One

2009-02-15T21:12:00.000-08:00

I spent today having fun in such wildly disparate ways (after a dim sum lunch, my friends and I played mahjong for several hours, then grabbed some sushi and went to see Coraline) that I almost feel that I really may not be hallucinating today's Crock. If I had, say, marked for twelve hours--as I probably should have done--I would have been more willing to dismiss the comic below as a delusion brought on by too many misspellings of the word "writing."* The juxtaposition of several earnest discussions regarding the most efficient way to stack mahjong tiles and the viewing of a 3D film involving characters with big black buttons for eyes has left me quite willing to accept that Crock's insanity is nothing out of the ordinary.

As you can see, Mssrs. Rechin and Wilder have absolutely no idea how sugar works. They seem to think that it makes everyone who consumes it, including legionnaires who are generally portrayed as being on the verge of starvation, grin madly and bounce around like Tigger. Never mind that the sugar is not replacing the actual nutrients that generally keep the soldiers lethargic and despairing; it is apparently capable of energising them to a miraculous degree.

In fact, what we are witnessing here is clearly either a miracle or a demonic possession. As Crock has proven itself to be consistently medieval, I am going to have to go with the latter. Medieval people certainly enjoyed a good miracle tale, but possession was much more fun. Crock is wrong to admonish Orville; he is not feeding the men sugar but attempting to save their souls by forcing them to fast for their sins. Alas, the devil has entered into them, and all the cook's hard work has been undone.

Tune in next Sunday as Figowitz speaks in tongues for six panels, then belches flame and leaps off a cliff. It should be quite a good time.

*As usual, I'm truly not making this up. I've lost count of all the times my students have discussed "the writting of Stephan King's The Shinning." Sometimes, my brain really hurts a lot.

His "Hat" is "Wiggling"...Yeah, Uh-Huh

2009-02-14T07:48:00.000-08:00

Reading Week has begun, my friends, and therefore, I am back.

Reading Week (for those unacquainted with the oddness of university life) is the week-long "study break" students tend to be given in February. They are not given such a break in the fall term. Go figure, really.

As usual, I shall be spending Reading Week marking midterms. However, as I shall also be spending it not teaching almost every morning, I am going to be able to get back to the comics...and what better day to return to the wonderful world of medieval comics blogging than "Seynt Valentynes day, / Whan every foul cometh there to chese his make" (as our friend Geoffrey Chaucer puts it)? I rather wish that Shoe had been love-themed today; I would have been able to make all sorts of sarcastic comments. Alas, today's Shoe seems to be about reducing the carbon footprint with chocolate. No, it doesn't make sense to me either.*

Now, I hate Valentine's Day. As far as I'm concerned, its only redeeming quality is the fact that it gave rise to Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls; otherwise, it can simply go hang. It does, however, produce some absolutely appalling comic strips. Today, we pay a visit to one of those strips.

The Beetle Bailey comic below is not really about Valentine's Day, but I doubt it is a coincidence that it features Killer, the Beetle Bailey character whose purpose in life seems to be to sleep with everything that moves. The necessity of getting 1) Killer to interact with a girl who is 2) not in the army while 3) Killer and his friends are engaged in Killer's second-favourite activity, beer-drinking, has led the cartoonist to set this strip in what appears to be a bar-slash-grocery-store. It is possible that we have here a very subtle Chaucer tribute;*** the jumbled setting may indicate that some sort of dream vision is occurring. I think it more likely that the cartoonist is a lazy ass, but you never do know.

The real medieval content appears with the mention of the word "chivalry" and the almost immediate undercutting of that word by Plato. Killer's "chivalrous" action, which he claims to undertake out of "duty and honor," is, as Plato notes, hollow; his seemingly courteous behaviour is simply a mask for the sexual impulses that are, in this strip, generally represented by the "wiggle" lines around Killer's hat. The hat's motion can almost always be read as indicating that Killer is in a state of physical arousal. Judging by the soldier's self-satisfied expression as he ushers the scantily-clad shopper out the door,**** this strip is no exception.

Today's Beetle Bailey thus encapsulates a common late medieval approach to chivalry, acknowledging the concept's surface ideal while revealing the darker motives that drive it. Actually, Chaucer takes this very same approach in The Parliament of Fowls. Nicely done, Beetle Bailey legacy hacks.

As an apology for my frequent absences this term, I here present to you, for the first (and most likely the last) time ever, a second comic. I include it mostly because though it has nothing to do with the be-cursed concept of be-cursed Valentine's Day, it continues the lovely Family Circus philosophical tradition with a thoughtful question***** that indicates how close the young Keanes are to achieving enlightenment.****** Billy has meditated on why guitar strings are not really strings; Jeffy has described the tragedy of earthly impermanence through the image of a lost spoon; now, Billy inquires as to how one spells "spell" (oh, the irony! The irony!). I am truly surprised that no enterprising blogger has yet produced The Zen Family Circus or The Philosophical Family Circus or something along those lines. There's a need, people.

P.S.: If you are enjoying Valentine's Day, good for you. If not, remember: tomorrow is Half-Price Chocolate Day. Hurrah indeed.

*In fact, it simply doesn't make sense. I advise you not to read it. By the time the Perfesser sticks the light bulb into his ice-cream cone,** your head will already have exploded.
**I am absolutely not making this up.
***Very, very subtle.
****Who shops in a tube dress and high heels? I mean, honestly.
*****Albeit one that has been appearing in comics and bad comedy routines since the dawn of freaking time.
******Or, at least, decent marks in spelling.

On the Rocks (Quite Literally, It Seems)

2009-01-30T21:55:00.001-08:00

There is something eminently pleasing about today's Hagar the Horrible. Sure, it's an antifeminist nightmare of epic proportions--sure, it is reusing the most prevalent of the comic's six jokes--but really, who isn't secretly amused by the image of Helga carefully sliding rocks beneath the sheets on her husband's side of the bed? Even more morally satisfying is that it takes Hagar a while to figure out what's going on, and then he's simply so tired that he just closes his eyes and begins to drift back into highly uncomfortable sleep.

The medieval context makes everything slightly more ominous. Why are Hagar and Helga wearing their helmets to bed? We already know that Hagar, who wears the horns proudly, is a cuckold...but Helga? Is she mocking her husband? Is she implying that she is, er, horny? Did she just forget to take the damn helmet off? Or is she lying there thinking, "I wear a helmet to bed, and you don't care! I put rocks in your bed, and you hardly notice! Maybe tomorrow I should hide my lusty young lover under the sheets. You'll get a real surprise then.*

Helga is the Wife of Bath, my friends. Soon--very soon--she will reveal her true colours. Perhaps she will even introduce a seventh joke to the comic. I can hardly wait.

*A cake! No, wait...

I Always Knew the Titchy One Wasn't Human

2009-01-29T18:39:00.000-08:00

I could probably come up with an unconvincing excuse for every single day I've missed abusing legacy strips this week,* but instead, I figure I'll just jump straight in and abuse a legacy strip. It is a very medieval legacy strip, mind. I am eminently pleased with its medievalness.***

Today, you see, we finally receive proof positive that PJ, the Littlest Keane, is destined to be a hero. He already meets at least one folkloric criterion: he is the youngest of three sons. As any ardent admirer of fairy tales will tell you, it's always the third son who gets the booty; the other two are generally rude to little old ladies in the forest and end up inadvertently chopping off their own limbs.**** As a third son, PJ is probably inclined to sit on top of the oven all day, eating his own lice and pretending to be an idiot.*****

However, Dolly, in pointing out that he possesses paws instead of feet, is also identifying him with a folkloric motif that was quite popular in the Middle Ages: that of the hero with only one human parent. PJ is clearly descended from some sort of beast or demon, and he has a half-bestial form. The little tyke may seem sweet when he squinches his eyes shut and beams a sunny smile at the world, but believe me: hidden beneath PJ's PJs are hairy, deformed feet and the beginnings of a tail. It is probably only a matter of time before the kid starts breaking magical swords, riding untamed man-eating horses, and storming the Holy Land for fun.****** Eventually, someone will betray him; the traitor will be hanged by the neck until he is almost dead, then forced to watch himself be disemboweled and castrated and his entrails and genitalia burned in front of his eyes before he is beheaded and carved into four pieces that will be displayed in public.******* It's not easy being a half-human hero; it's even less easy being the person who stabs him in the back.

This latest revelation should give us new insight into the Keane family. We really need to stop mocking PJ. He's going to have a hard enough life, poor thing.

*For instance, my unconvincing excuse for yesterday is that I spent the evening in pain because while I was returning from the grocery story with my dinner, I slipped on the new-fallen snow in the middle of an intersection and smashed my knees on the pavement so hard that I first nearly threw up and then nearly fainted. The excuse is a stupid one, since my knees are not connected to my brain,** but I foolishly stand by it.
**Except that they clearly kind of are, since there's no other reason sore knees should make me want to throw up and faint.
***Medievality? Medievalitude?
****I am absolutely not making any of this up. I like fairy tales, so I know.
*****I'm not making this up either.
******We are talking about the Keanes here. Richard the Lionheart has nothing on the Keanes.
*******This punishment for high treason was on the books in England until 1814. After 1814, the punishment remained the same, but the traitor was dead for most of it. Everything but the hanging was abolished by 1870. Incidentally, the punishment was for men only; women were burned at the stake. I Am Not Making This Up.

...Eyes Like Smouldering Flames...

2009-01-21T20:50:00.000-08:00

Sorry about the comicless day yesterday, folks. Tuesdays generally suck for me; I lecture for seven hours and don't finish the last class until 9:30 p.m. My night students were laughing at me yesterday because I had to stop every five minutes and take a drink of water; if I hadn't, my voice would have been entirely gone by the end of the three-hour session. There may be a few comicless Tuesdays this term.

However, I couldn't blow off today's comic as well because it provided such a good portrait of how the Antichrist--better known as Marmaduke the Devil Dog--might operate as he led the world towards fiery ruin. Notice how the hell-beast's "owners" cringe from him in horror as he emits the bizarre sound "whoof!" The extra "h" tells us that Marmaduke's every utterance is unnatural, bloated with unnecessary letters. He keeps his slaves in thrall and torments them with fiendish visitors from the most hideous regions of Hell. They know that if they disobey, he will devour them...and keep on devouring them for eternity. There is no winning when you live with the Antichrist.*

*Especially when you have to fill his food bowl every single day.

Love of "Nature"...Oh, Yes

2009-01-19T20:18:00.000-08:00

The titular character of Mark Trail has, at long lost, embarked on a new adventure. Fresh from fighting a dragon-like creature and being tempted by the devil, Mark has become enmeshed in a tragic tale of forbidden love. Poor Patty is clearly having an affair with Bucky; when her husband appears, she rushes the deer out the back door while addressing him as "honey."* Mark and Cherry, themselves animal lovers,** are not shocked by Patty's tragic and doomed relationship with the woodland creature. When Mark is not punching someone in the beard, he is quite open-minded.

One might also see a common medieval story type emerging here. Bucky may very well be an incubus disguised as a deer. Knowing Patty's predilections, he has cleverly wormed his way into her affections and will soon impregnate her with a half-demon child who will go on to advise King Arthur on the running of his ki--no, wait, that's Merlin. All right...the half-demon child will become a great king and eventually go off to the Holy Land to eat Saracen brains for di--no, that's Richard the Lionheart.*** Fine: the half-demon child will grow up to rape and burn alive all the nuns in one convent before he repents and is ordered by the Pope to crawl on the ground like a dog until--oh, damn, that's Gowther. At any rate, the child will be unusual and probably heroic.****

I am rooting for the half-demon child. If he appears, Mark Trail may actually become halfway interesting.

*Considering the context, I just had to translate "honey" as "dereling."
**I.e., people who love animals, not people who looooooooooove animals. Or so I assume.
***I am not making this up. There's a verse romance and everything.
****In the non-Disney sense of the word "heroic." I could tell you about medieval heroes. It would take a rather long time.

Could Someone Please Help Brother Francis With His Hormones?

2009-01-17T06:09:00.001-08:00

Today seems to be another of those "Gosh, I wish I could translate every comic in existence" days. Beetle Bailey has General Halftrack gazing adoringly at a picture of someone he says is Ronald Reagan, though the guy actually looks more like Adolph Hitler. B.C. makes fun of accordion players.* Blondie waxes poetic on the beauty of the obsolete; outmoded stuff, it claims, will one day become popular again. Crock has two characters debating that age-old question, "What do women want?", while standing on top of a phallus-shaped tower. Hagar the Horrible reinforces the solid medieval truth that a woman's place is in the home. The Marvin colourists make the mistake of covering Marvin with chocolate ice cream, in the process causing him to look as if he has had a bowel movement and smeared feces all over his body. Marmaduke involves the Really Big Dog preparing to eat an entire boys' football team. Spider-Man gives us a hero who faints after he is knocked down by water.**

However, I think I'm going to have to go with my first impulse and choose Archie. It's been a while since we've checked on Brother Francis, the breast-obsessed young monk who has never exchanged words with a woman in his life. Today, we see Brother Francis projecting his libido onto his young hero. Just take a look at the direction of Archie's gaze there. Veronica may be expressing noble, albeit patently false, sentiments as she projects little hearts into the air with her mind, but Archie's brain is clearly going, "BOOBIES BOOBIES BOOBIES BOOBIES BOOBIES." The grin is not Archie being suave; it is Archie achieving orgasm.

Brother Francis tries to cover up his personal stake in the content of the comic by giving it a flimsy frame that simply parrots everything he's ever heard about women: they claim to exist only for the men in their lives, they actually exist only for the money in their lives, and they project little hearts into the air with their minds. The antifeminist stereotyping may also very well be the good brother's attempt to convince himself that women really are the root of all evil. The guilt that he feels every time his thoughts stray to breasts has made him overcompensate by vilifying not himself but the wicked creatures who cause his sin.

Note that in the second panel, Veronica's breasts have disappeared. Fight it, Brother Francis. Fight the lure of the evil, evil mammaries. You can do it. And if you can't, you can always nip into your cell for a bit of private time.

*I am the scourge of cartoonists who make fun of accordion players...the scourge, I say. Mock accordionists at your own risk, Hack Writers of Doom!
**Some of these links will continue to work forever; some may not. Curse you, Inconsistent but Otherwise Useful Houston Chronicle comics page.

I Am Weeping at the Lost Opportunity

2009-01-16T11:25:00.000-08:00

It is quite clear to me that the hacks who produce Shoe are medieval at heart. When they're not mocking the French via allegorical cannibalism, they're discussing other medieval-flavoured subjects...such, today, as the seven deadly sins. The mind-twisting image of birds eating meatloaf barely even registers, so prevalent is the completely unexpected conversation on the Deadlies.* However, the conversation is only "unexpected" if one doesn't take into account the fact that these cartoonists are utterly unacquainted with the twenty-first century and everything in it.

If they had been even slightly familiar with, oh, the last hundred years or so of cultural history, they would not have screwed up their own joke so unforgivably. Sure, it's hilarious** to take the seven deadly sins, which loomed large in the lives of medieval people but don't really come up in casual conversation all that much today, and change one of them to something that insults one of your friends...but for optimum zing, you have to pick 1) the right sin and 2) the right substitute. Shoe has chosen to excise pride from the list, and he has replaced it with Roz's meatloaf. As pride and meatloaf are generally unrelated--unless, of course, Roz is proud of her cooking--the substitution is only minimally effective. It's true that "pride" is probably the best choice here. "Gluttony" wouldn't work, as Roz's meatloaf apparently causes the opposite of gluttony, and the others wouldn't really fit at all.***

However...how could Shoe not have excised "lust" and replaced it with "your mom"? For crying out loud, Shoe! It's a stupid joke, but it's less stupid than the tired old "your-meatloaf-sucks-because-you-are-a-woman-who-can't-cook-hyuck-hyuck-aren't-I-the-manly-man" angle. If you're going to tell an idiotic joke, make it a "your mom" joke, for pity's sake. "Your mom" jokes never fail to cause juvenile laughter. Don't you want to cause juvenile laughter? Isn't that, in fact, what newspaper comics are there for?

I am disgusted with you, Shoe hacks. You can't even screw up your own ancient joke effectively.

*Why the hell are Roz and Shoe talking about the seven deadly sins? I mean, I know that realistically, the subject has come up because the cartoonists want to make a cheap, stupid joke, but still: are we supposed to believe that a jaded waitress and a cynical newspaper editor are sitting around chewing the fat when one of them suddenly challenges the other to list all seven sins? I think about these things, cartoonists. You are hurting my brain.
**In newspaper-comic terms, that is.
***I'm guessing, however, that Roz is just on the verge of experiencing quite a lot of wrath.

I Bet You Had to Restrain Yourself Physically from Drawing a Sarcastic Halo

2009-01-15T14:31:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since Jeff Keane (all grown up) has compared his big brother Billy to Jesus. Last time, he managed to humiliate Billy by drawing him standing in cruciform position while wearing a frilly pink dress. This time, Jeff is, on the surface, slightly less cruel; instead of implying that his brother looks ravishing in lace, he merely assaults the poor guy with a brain-cell-destroying pun. It is not a particularly good pun. Actually, none of the puns that appear in The Family Circus are particularly good puns. It does, however, allow Mr. Keane to use his knowledge of medieval philosophy to make Billy look like a jerkwad.

I seriously believe that Jeff Keane had a hard time not drawing a sarcastic halo here. Little Billy is very much a type of Christ in this comic: glowing, surrounded by the Little Lines of Enlightening,* ready to accost the poor unsuspecting world with his revelations about how 2+2=4. Mary and Joseph--er, Bil and Thel--are amazed by their son's raw intelligence, as well, I suspect, by the Little Lines; they are so impressed that Bil just has to say something incredibly stupid.

However, there is a dark side to this portrait. One should certainly aspire to the imitation of Christ, but Billy's smug smile implies that he is very pleased with his own brilliance. Was Christ not humble? Beware, Billy, of the Sin of Pride. To know you are a type of Christ is to prove that you are not a type of Christ. Jeff Keane, by portraying Billy as a self-satisfied Christ-like figure, is saying to his brother, "Billy, you're going to burn in Hell. In Hell, I say. I don't care that you work for Disney. I'm not at all jealous. You are going to weep blood as you boil in the fat of your victims! Want to come over for dinner on Sunday?"**

*We can't use the word "enlightenment"--oh, no--because that would destroy the pun. Heaven forbid we destroy the pun.
**We're having roast pork and baby peas.

Ziggy 2009: The Rise of The Machines

2009-01-14T21:40:00.000-08:00

Back in the world of Tom Wilson II, Ziggy is still doing exactly what Ziggy always does: living in a cultural landscape that hasn't been relevant for years. Once again, Mr. Wilson II is struggling against his impulse to take Ziggy all the way back to the Middle Ages. He is not entirely able to defeat this impulse; he is certainly not setting the comic now. Take a look at that computer. I have a computer like that. It is ten years old, and I don't use it any more. It is ancient, dysfunctional, and obsolete...sort of like Ziggy.

The attitude expressed in the comic is also quite an old one. TWII is, in fact, drawing on a social anxiety that existed in 1968, when 2001: A Space Odyssey came out: the idea that those newfangled computers are eventually going to become sentient and either kill us all or brainwash us and make us kill each other.* Such an anxiety tends to arise every time a new technology is introduced to a society. In fact, I would wager that TWII is here commenting on computers only because he is not quite brave enough to go all the way back to the printing press. You can almost sense the cartoonist's yearning to draw Ziggy setting type while his parrot worries that his mind will be enslaved to the lower cases.

Be strong, TWII. Follow your first impulse. If you really do just go ahead and make Ziggy as obsolete as hell, it may become a great, great comic strip.

*Kill...all...humans...kill...all...humans...

He Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog

2009-01-13T22:13:00.000-08:00

Fred Basset has always been an oddity of a comic strip. First syndicated in 1963 and now drawn by the original artist's daughter and a colleague, this bizarre little daily feature gives us a basset hound named Fred who spends all day behaving quite like a dog and thinking abstract little thoughts that have very little to do with anything at all. I will freely admit that I do not "get" Fred Basset. I am not convinced that there is anything there to "get." Granted, I will take its whimsy over the blatant stupidity of Crock, but I do sometimes wish that Fred would get the hell out of the 1970s. Perhaps his owners could even break out of their gender roles. That might be fun.

In today's strip, however, the authors demonstrate that, in true medieval fashion, they recognise the greatness of their own work. As medieval writers aspired to be "auctors" whose work would be cited and honoured by others, so do Michael Martin and Arran Graham. Their determination to have their greatness recognised has led to them placing a collection of Fred Basset comics amidst books labelled, "Tolstoy," "Dickens," "Proust," and "Mark Twain."* The self-promotion isn't even disguised. Well done, you guys.

Next week, tune in to watch Fred eat a chocolate, imply to his owner that he needs to go for a walk, and join the Third Crusade. It promises to be quite a good time.

P.S.: I had to make some stuff up here. There is no Middle English equivalent for "eponymous." Since there's also no modern English synonym, I had to break the word down and cobble it together out of tiny scraps of English (instead of Greek). There is also no Middle English equivalent for "hero" in the way meant here. Ah well.
P.P.S.: This is Japes' hundredth post. Hip. Hip. Hurrah!

*Why does only Twain get a first name? This is going to bother me for days.

Darkness Visible (and a Big Blue Monster)

2009-01-12T07:09:00.000-08:00

What a crazy, mixed-up landscape the Inferno portrayed in Overboard is. Here we have the intriguing concept of Hell as a ship forever adrift on the Ocean of Eternity, pointlessly moving over the waves in apparent search of treasure the pirates/damned souls never do find. The dispirited battles with the Green Ship (take note: green is one of the devil's favourite colours),* the dead-eyed dalliances with various female characters who soon inexplicably disappear and are forgotten, the misguided attempts to demonise the accordion: all are aspects of a particularly interesting kind of eternal damnation. Flying-Dutchman-like, the doomed ship never stops questing as its demonic vermin (at last count, two dogs, a whole colony of mice, nightmarishly huge rabbits that own little boats, and at least one scaly green monster) keep the tormented pirates on their toes.

Today's strip introduces a new variable into the equation. It seems that Louie, main demonic guardian of the ship, functions to keep the pirates in but also to keep other monsters out. The blue infant Cthulhu that appears today is clearly not welcome aboard. This scenario raises an interesting possibility: perhaps hell-spawn are actually territorial. Each demon is in charge of its own little segment (or circle) of Hell and will not let other demons intrude. "Mine," says Louie in his great universal "Grrrrrrr." "These pirates are mine to send into screaming, writhing despair until the end of time. Go find your own bankrupts or tax lawyers to torment. This is not the blue-squid-monster zone! Gawd!"**

We need more courageous comics that are set not in offices or suburban split-levels but, in fact, in Hell.*** Nicely done, Chip Dunham.

P.S.: It's my birthday. I can think of no better day on which to write about Hell.

*It's true. In various folk tales, not to mention Chaucer's Friar's Tale, the devil wears a green coat. I could go on drearily for a bit about possible implications, but let's just leave it at the fact that the folkloric devil likes green.
**Or, you know, "Saytan!"
***Actually, come to think of it, it's entirely possible that comics involving offices and suburban split-levels are set in Hell.

The Day the Newspaper Comic Died

2009-01-11T09:57:00.001-08:00

Dear Brooke McEldowney, Creator of 9 Chickweed Lane and Pibgorn:

I have stood up for you. I have gone to the freaking wall for you. I have looked back upon your older comics with approval, for though many mock them for their unusually literate teenage characters and their tendency to rely on a lot (a lot) of words, I happen to like words. I also happen to have been an unusually literate teenager, and so I do know that such creatures exist. I appreciate the fact that your older strips deal with the sorts of characters not usually found in the funny pages. It is especially pleasant to see you focusing on three generations of a family from which all the men have departed; the dynamics between grandmother, mother, and daughter are nicely handled. None of the three protagonists is particularly stereotypical, and all are fun to watch.

Alas...I mean "were." They were fun to watch. A few years ago, the youngest protagonist, Edda, moved to the city to pursue a career as a ballerina. Since then, the strip has been heading steadily downhill. Edda has lost her gentleness and originality and become--must I say it?--an intolerable, backstabbing little bitch. She spends every strip whining. So do all the other characters. For the last year or so, Edda and her on-again, off-again childhood sweetheart Amos have been at odds for no real good reason except that Edda is a jerk and Amos a jellyfish. Now you have brought them together again.

I am sorry to say that the reunion of Amos and Edda has propelled your once-promising strip into Japes territory. Well...I'm not that sorry. How often do I get the chance to translate phrases such as, "Helplessly, uncontrollably, her fate imminent, manifest" into Middle English? You have provided me with some deliciously juicy words there. You see? There's still hope! You could still pull yourself out of this terrible, terrible tailspin and make your comic worth reading again! At the moment, it seems a little (dare I say) self-indulgent, with Edda and Amos smooching and having hand-sex* all the freaking time. In today's comic, you even thrust the once-independent Edda** into the stereotypical role that has been allotted women since the Dawn of Sexism. Replace Edda with any medieval maiden, and the comic will remain essentially the same.

You know what, Mr. McEldowney? Women exist for more purposes than showing off their bodies and being protected by men. I used to think you realised this, but if you did, you seem to have changed your mind. Welcome to 1381, sir. Come join the party, to which I have also invited the creators of The Family Circus, Hagar the Horrible, Crock, The Wizard of Id, Hi and Lois, and many, many more. I think you'll fit right in. Have some roast boar.

I did once think, Mr. McEldowney, that your comic was one of the things about the funny pages that was actually pretty okay. I really hate it when I'm wrong.

Yours sincerely,

Angry Kem.

P.S.: And if you want to see something really bizarre, check out Pibgorn.
P.P.S.: In the spirit of obscurity and self-indulgence, I have used medieval Roman numerals in the title panel.

*Hand-sex is a peculiarly McEldowneyish phenomenon that involves the cartoonist drawing hands and arms in various states of entanglement in order to represent intercourse. There has been a lot of hand-sex in 9 Chickweed Lane lately.
**Note for the uninitiated: Superlative Girl is Edda's imaginary alter-ego. She is usually able to fly. Apparently, love has deprived her of this power. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.

More Evidence for Jack Straw

2009-01-10T20:33:00.000-08:00

The Wizard of Id is really quite a misunderstood comic. We complain about its cardboard characters and irrelevant content without understanding that it is actually commenting, with profoundly up-to-the-moment cleverness, on the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. My uncertainty as to whether the King in the comic represents Richard II or Richard III has now definitively been resolved in favour of the former. Today, The Wizard of Id comes right out and tells us that the advent of Jack Straw et al is right around the corner.

This strip succinctly summarises the situation in 1381, albeit with some of the main players disguised. The mention of taxes is a very slightly veiled reference to the unfair poll tax that angered commoners after its institution in 1377. The King's insistence on keeping all taxes, even in the face of revolution,* echoes the real-life situation in the early 1380s, though as Richard II was only fourteen at the time and most of the governing of his kingdom was done by his powerful advisers, it is possible that the "King" in the comic is really only a puppet, a mouthpiece through which the words of John of Gaunt and all his little friends can issue. Rodney, here representative of the more far-seeing (and less powerful) nobles, warns the King of what is coming and proposes a cowardly but workable solution that the King (read: Gaunt) utterly rejects. Once again, the creators of The Wizard of Id are lampooning the government of the day and urging readers to join in their crusade.**

It is truly tragic that these comics are appearing so many centuries too late.

*Sort of like Rorschach, who vows to pursue his self-destructive course "even in the face of Armageddon." Yes, I like Watchmen. Yes, I have read it many times. Yes, I just quoted it from memory. So sue me.
**Who will be strong and stand with...them?

Play That Funky Music, Old Boy

2009-01-09T21:19:00.000-08:00

The demon Wikipedia* tells us that Tom Batiuk first started publishing Funky Winkerbean in 1972. Many have remarked that the early Funky was a funny, irreverent comic dealing with the trials and tribulations of several high-school students and their teachers. I believe each strip ended with an actual punchline. The comic also contained larger-than-life elements that added to its humour. The characters did not age; they remained eternally in high school.

In 1992, Batiuk jumped the comic forward ten years, now portraying the same characters in adulthood. The characters started to age. At the same time, the story began to get more serious as the comic fell victim to Cerebus Syndrome.** The demon Wikipedia mentions the following issues as prevalent in the strip during these years: teen pregnancy, suicide, censorship, dyslexia, gun violence, steroids, capital punishment, bullying, child abuse, teacher-student relationships, alcoholism, breast cancer, and land mines in Afghanistan. Wikipedia forgets to include hearing loss and amputation in this list, but I think you probably get the picture.

In 2007, the strip jumped forward another ten years. Now the original high-school students are fat, balding failures with rebellious teenage children, and the Cerebusity of the strip is more apparent than ever. It is not a terrible comic--I would choose it in an instant over some of its more stagnant little friends--but Batiuk really does seem to have forgotten the meaning of the word "comic." Funky Winkerbean has evolved from an enjoyable gag-a-day comic to a seething cauldron of soul-deadening despair. If you enjoy witnessing a world from which all hope has been erased, read Funky Winkerbean.

This view of life as difficult and rife with the fickleness of Fortune is, of course, quite medieval. The comic does an admirable job of portraying the bleak day-to-day life that one must bear if one wishes to float happily up to Heaven in the end. Note today's strip: even just in the first panel, we have a one-armed woman watching as a man who has lost quite a lot of his hearing while conducting a high-school band lectures a bunch of teenagers on earplugs. In the Funkyverse, it is important to crush the younger generation as quickly as possible; Harry Dinkle here hastens to disabuse his audience of the notion that playing music in a large group can be fun. We must not have fun! We must save the fun for Heaven, which probably isn't fun at all! This makes perfect sense! Despair, little Funkies...despair!

*May it be cast forever into a fiery pit of perdition, obviously.
**Click on this link at your own risk. It is safe for work, but it is not safe if you want to work; TV Tropes is the sort of site on which one can happily spend hours and hours and freaking hours.

Love Is Apparently Quite Morbid

2009-01-08T20:12:00.000-08:00

I already had a headache when I came across today's Love Is.... Now my headache has grown to monstrous size, and I'm still not sure why the legacy clone who produces this comic thought it was a good idea to draw his heroine weeping over her lover's grave. I know the Loveshmoos are quite mutable--sometimes courting, sometimes married, sometimes having kids--but come on...death? In a Love Is... comic? Stefano Casali, have you gone mad*?

A medieval context may cast at least a faint light on this...whatever this is. The female Lovescmoo is clearly sinning here; she is weeping over her swetynge's mortal remains instead of being happy that he has departed this vale of tears for his wondrous, well-deserved afterlife. Her relentless focus on the World and the Flesh (plus, by implication, the Devil) is going to land her in the Bad Place and not win her an eternal place by Mr. Loveshmoo's side.

Woe, quoth the cartoonist. Woe, doom, and despair! Learn to let go, you fools! By placing flowers on some guy's grave, you are flirting with eternal damnation! Marmaduke will come for you and drag you down to Hell!

It is, of course, entirely possible that I am wholly misinterpreting this comic, and the Loveshmoo is actually just hugging her surfboard. It's surprisingly difficult to tell.

*...der than usual?

An Apple a Day Does Not Avert the Apocalypse

2009-01-07T06:45:00.000-08:00

Marmaduke, ladies and gentlemen, is still a great big dog. However, his secondary role as the Antichrist is becoming more and more clear as time goes on. Witness today's comic. The female Munchkin is helping the male Munchkin with what seems to be a subtraction problem; he is worrying his poor little head over the fiendishly difficult question of what six minus one equals. The Munchkins have raided their mother's fridge* and/or fruit bowl in a quest for a visual aid that this incredibly stupid child can use to help him with his math homework. Along comes Marmaduke and slavers over the apples, despite the fact that dogs tend not to like apples much. What on earth is going on?

Well...note that the Munchkins have stolen six apples. The current problem evidently deals with the number six, but what about the others? Surely a child who is incapable of figuring out that six minus one equals five without help is going to need apples for every homework question. We can thus reach the conclusion that no problem on that sheet necessitates the presence of more than six apples. There are three questions. Is it not possible that every one of them involves subtraction from the number six?

Six. Six. Six. Antichrist strikes again.

Of course Marmaduke is slavering over the apples; they represent his future conquest of the world. He will devour them just as he will devour everything else. The little girl, who has demonstrated in the past her place as one of his main disciples, recognises this fact and urges her brother (another disciple) to finish his math before the Devourer of Worlds gets going on the terror and despair.

Enoch and Elijah are going to turn up any day now. Just wait for it.

*It is undoubtedly sexist of me to assume that the fridge belongs to the mother. Then again, this is Marmaduke we're talking about here. The fridge does belong to the mother, who is undoubtedly currently ensconced near it, dressed in a skirt and high heels and probably baking cookies.

The Happy Man Wore No Shirt

2009-01-06T07:29:00.000-08:00

American cartoonists have lately been freaking out quite a lot about the economy; they seem to believe that it is their duty to comment wryly upon a problem that affects their dwindling and apathetic readership, even if the jokes they manage to churn out tend to be weak.* Most of the comics that appear on this blog have been created by people who probably aren't going to be all that affected by the economic downturn, seeing as even if all they do to earn a living is create Crock, they are apparently set for life. Their "Oh gosh, we're in a recession!" jokes thus ring a little false. They also tend to be behind the times, albeit through no real fault of their own; the syndicates' requirement that cartoonists finish their work weeks, if not months, ahead of time leads even the cleverest of cartoonists into the kind of unfortunate error made yesterday by one of my favourite comic creators, Stephan Pastis.

At any rate, every time I read a comic strip revolving around the economy, I cringe and want to burn things. The only redeeming quality in today's Momma** is its profound medieval philosophical background; otherwise, it is just another stupid comic about how hilarious poverty is when it happens to people who aren't the cartoonist.

Francis, Momma's ne'er-do-well son, is here portrayed haunting Momma's dreams as a scruffy panhandler whose plea to the general public revolves around the fact that he was poor first. This argument may seem to be somewhat along the lines of, "What do you mean you're going to eat your last peanut butter sandwich? I was hungry first!", but hey, whatever works for dream-Francis works for me. What makes the comic interesting is Francis's little smile. It can be seen as smug ("Ha! I've found the perfect argument for why you should give me money! It sucks to be you!"), but I prefer to view it as a simple indication that Francis really isn't bothered by anything much and will be quite as happy if everyone ignores him as he will if everyone showers him with dollar bills.

In fact, Momma is having a profoundly significant dream that she is probably going to misunderstand completely. Her son Francis is actually following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ; he is cheerfully poor and entirely willing to live mostly on handouts.*** Unlike Momma herself, who is eternally discontented with her lot and spends much of her time whining, Francis rolls with the punches while emulating his Saviour. His message on the wall can be read as a plea for cash, but it can also be read as a statement of contentment: "Yes, you people are all broke, but I've been broke forever, and I'm doing all right. Would you like to become my disciples?"

Francis also illustrates the story of the Happy Man. Very briefly: a king whose son seems to be pining away through sheer unhappiness goes to a wise man for a remedy and is told to find his son "the happy man's shirt." The king searches far and wide, but everyone he meets is anxious or sad or plagued with worries in some way or another. He is about to give up in despair when he comes across a ragged fellow in a patched coat and breeches who is wandering through the forest, whistling. The king questions him and realises that he has, in fact, found a perfectly happy man. He demands the man's shirt...whereupon the man unbuttons his coat and shows the king that he has no shirt. The moral, of course, is supposed to be that one should be content with one's lot in life and not always be longing for more. You think Francis is a waste of space, Momma? Wrong! He's a born philosopher...a shirtless happy man who embodies Christian morals much more completely than you do. Ha ha HA!

Not everyone is able to appreciate the multiple layers of Momma. It's really too bad that it isn't studied by more academics. I think there's a dissertation in there somewhere.

*Just like all the other jokes they manage to churn out on any subject at all, admittedly.
**Betcha never thought you'd ever hear anyone utter the phrase "redeeming quality in today's Momma."
***Plus perhaps a miraculous multiplying fish or two.

Figowitz, Figowitz, (Humperdink), Figowitz!

2009-01-05T10:22:00.000-08:00

Now, Crock has never been sane. Yesterday's comic, which I'm kind of sad I didn't see in time, is a case in point; it involves Grossie (the Fat-Women-Are-Hilarious character in orange you can see below) inadvertently poisoning an entire regiment with "hash." Today's comic is just as insane in a different way. Sad-sack Figowitz thinks he's a failure, so Grossie tells him to smile if he wants the world to smile with him. Figowitz smiles. Then...

er...

...the world...goes away? The world winks out? The sun goes down? Someone turns off the lights? The world does not want to smile with Figowitz? Trite sayings don't apply to Figowitz? Figowitz is the Cheshire Cat? Figowitz is in the dark about...stuff?

I just like writing "Figowitz"?

I don't know, Crock creators*...I think you need help. Seriously, dudes: the fact that you think you are funny tells me that you are actually both freaking lunatics. Why are people paying you for your nonsensical scribbles? I shall pound my head on walls!

Medievalisation only helps marginally here; Crock is insane in a medieval context as well as a modern one. Clearly, this strip is an allegory gone awry. Figowitz, as Everyman, is despairing because he doesn't seem to succeed at anything he tries. Grossie pops up as Truth or Good Deeds or something and points out, in a cliche that was old even in the 1350s, that There's No Use Complaining Because a Positive Attitude Conquers All (and besides, if you suffer in this life, perhaps you will be all warm and happy and blissful and harp-playing in the next life, especially if you're all paid up in indulgences, or something). Figowitz smiles and immediately turns into Job.

My theory is that each panel has been created by a different monk...not one of our regular bunch, but some visiting monks who have amused themselves by having a comic jam. They meant to burn the results, but Brother Lawrence, who wouldn't recognise "humour" if it joined him in prayer, sent it in to the syndicate. Thanks a lot, Brother Lawrence.

*Why the hell does it take two of you to churn out this hideous monstrosity from Hades? Inquiring minds want to know.

The Great Tradition of the Lazy Cartoonist

2009-01-04T09:12:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, as my mother quoth to me, i'faith, there was a city--a city, I say--near the sea (may God's messenger send you many blessings!).

Filler!

Ah...filler, filler, filler. How I love you. You are sprinkled daintily throughout every extant Middle English metrical romance like a plague of useless little flowers in a meadow.* By God...by Christ...by Mary, full of grace...by God's sond...by Christ's sond ...by Saint Loy...by Saint Charity...by other saints with good rhyming names**...as Isidore saith...as Austin saith...as myn auctor saith...quoth I...quoth he...God send you alle gode chere...as preest yn chapel...and on and on and on and on and on! Filler!

In medieval verse, filler words and lines fulfil a very specific function. It is not easy to go on for hundreds, if not thousands, of rhyming, scanning*** lines without plugging in a few inconsequential bits now and again. The better poets either manage the filler so well that the reader doesn't particularly notice it or draw attention to it for the sake of irony. Less good poets spend way too much time dragging in Saint Loy every time a character experiences joy, and the filler becomes painful to read.

The newspaper cartoonist has a similar practice, though it generally involves images rather than words. As you can see in today's Adam@Home, Brian Basset has run into a bit of a problem. He has a joke,**** but it is a three-panel joke: the sort of thing that would work well***** in a weekday strip. However, as he has absolutely no better ideas for his Sunday comic, he needs to fit his three-panel content into a six-panel format (with a seventh panel containing a header). His solution is the visual equivalent of the medieval filler line...appropriate enough for someone detailing the life and times of Chaucer's idiot scribe.

Look at the skill with which Basset makes it perfectly, deadeningly clear that he's got nothin'. After a header that is mostly wasted space, the cartoonist provides a hastily drawn picture of Adam's back. We only know it is Adam's back if we are foolish enough to keep reading; wise people who give up after the first panel may think they are looking at a lamp or perhaps someone's kilt. In panel 2, we see Adam (in a red plaid shirt) staring at an exercise bike. In panel 3, we also see Adam staring at an exercise bike, though now, in true medieval-romance-hack fashion, he also appears to be worrying about his weight, thus erasing the import of the joke that follows. The remaining panels contain the actual content of the strip.

It is gratifying that Basset has mastered this important medieval technique. Frankly, all cartoonists should. I hope they do; it gives me joy.

And now I'm finished, by Saint Loy.

*Or possibly lyk flowr in mede.
**I.e., not Saint George.
***Well, relatively scanning.
****Well, relatively a joke.
*****Well, relatively--oh, forget it.

The Adventure of the Inexplicable Beast-Man

2009-01-03T11:43:00.000-08:00

In the career of every legacy cartoonist, there comes a defining moment: a moment when he* finds himself slumped in a comfortable chair before a roaring fire, downing scotch after scotch while trying to come to terms with the fact that not only has he exhausted every possible joke allowed by the scope of his comic, but that his predecessor had actually exhausted every possible joke allowed by the scope of the same comic before the current cartoonist ever lifted a pencil to work on it. Despair overtakes him...and then recklessness. Rising from his seat, he stumbles over to his drawing table and passionately scrawls a strip of breathtaking originality, so far removed from anything that he has ever done before that he is sure it will prove the comic's redemption, definitively proving that he has made it his very own.

In the morning, he awakes with a blinding headache, a faint recollection of having snapped four of his pencils in two, and a nonsensical comic in which he compares a fat man to a Sasquatch.

As you can see, Mr. Walker has had such a defining moment. It is true, however, that whereas the comic certainly counts as "nonsensical" in a twenty-first-century context,** it is perfectly comprehensible when regarded as a work of the medieval period.**** The creature in the second panel, which appears to our modern eyes as a grotesque cross between a bear and King Kong, is clearly a medieval wodewose: a wild man of the woods. This popular medieval monster is a hairy subhuman creature who lives in the forest and goes around hitting things with sticks. He is sometimes represented as shy and retiring and sometimes as savage and murderous; he is often solitary but occasionally lives with other wild men (and women). The prophet Merlin is frequently portrayed as a wild man, especially in earlier non-Arthurian texts. What the wild man loses in humanity (though whether or not he is truly inhuman is under debate; for instance, the wild man in the Middle English romance Ywain and Gawain asserts his humanity in no uncertain terms), he makes up for in wilderness powers: strength, affinity with animals, and occasionally knowledge.

"Personnel's" equation of Sarge with a wodewose argues that Sarge himself has the potential for this sort of wilderness power, a fact easily observable via Sarge's proclivity for violence, fondness for camping trips, and inability not to devour everything he sees. The cartoonist is very cleverly showing us Sarge's inner self. While we perceive Mr. Walker as simply having churned out dreck conceived in a drunken stupor, he has actually produced a masterwork that would resonate down through the ages if it had, in fact, appeared in the late fourteenth century.

Some artists are ahead of their times. Tragically, most legacy cartoonists are far, far behind theirs.

*Or they. Or, much less frequently, she.
**Seriously...what? I mean...what the hell? It's a...that's a...what is it? Why? Why, for the love of all that is holy? Why?***
***Perhaps I should spend the evening with some scotch as well.
****I have been reading Arthur Conan Doyle lately, and now I find that I am writing very much as Sherlock Holmes speaks. Somebody punch me.

Charming, Regressive, or Downright Revolutionary? You Decide.

2009-01-02T09:01:00.001-08:00

B.C. has been on a Resolution Kick for two days now. Luckily, the week is almost over, so it is probable that this (for want of a better word) storyline will not continue beyond tomorrow.

The New Year's resolution is a motif dear to the hearts of many cartoonists. Variations on the theme include: 1) I resolve to exercise, eat well, and lose weight (immediately before the character plunks down in front of the TV with a slice of chocolate cake and/or some beer and nachos);* 2) I resolve to be nice to other people (immediately before the character says something cruel); 3) I resolve to keep my resolutions (leading to a supposedly clever meta-discussion in which someone mentions the cartoonist). Oh, the wit. Oh, the irony.

I'm actually quite charmed by today's B.C. resolution comic. It deviates very, very slightly from the formula by allowing the character to keep his resolution...in a pleasingly destructive way, even. Clumsy is darn well going to march to the beat of a different drummer, even if he has to pound a slab of solid rock through another slab of solid rock in order to do so.

What pushes this strip over into Japes territory is the shape of the slot after Clumsy is done with it. Johnny Hart, of course, was well known for his practice of attempting to convert his readership to Christianity in every single strip he drew (in the later years, at least). The Hart Descendants are equally well known for their practice of avoiding all mention of Christianity like the plague. Yet...there's that cross. In any other strip, it would pass without comment. In this one, it raises some complex issues.

Are the Hart Descendants** mocking Old Man Hart? Or are they, in a surprisingly Meta move, conforming to his vision? Is Clumsy's act of non-conformity the HD version of compliance to the Will of Hart? Or could that cross-shaped hole be an ironic comment on the usual trajectory of the New-Year's-resolution comic? Perhaps Clumsy actually is breaking his own resolution by unwittingly embracing the symbolism of a patently conformist religion.*** By trying to mix things up, he is really just fulfilling his ultimately conformist destiny. Good Lord...is this comic deterministic?

The translation makes the heretical roots of the strip even clearer. Note that the word "conform" is difficult to convert into Middle English; the closest equivalent is "comfort," which can only with a great deal of imagination be forced to, well, conform to the modern word. The idea of "following the flock" (or crowd), on the other hand, is easy to translate. "Flock" is a word that can refer to either actual sheep or the Christian community as a whole; it can also easily stand in for "congregation," especially if one sees a parson as a "shepherd" (as Geoffrey Chaucer does in his General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales).**** The Hart Descendants, in their usual cutting-edge medieval way, are subtly poking fun at the Christian conformists who surround them.

You go, Hart Descendants.

*The distinction is generally reliant on the sex of the character. Women will break their resolutions with chocolate; men will head straight for the beer. Someday, there will be a chocolate-loving male character married to a lady with a beer belly. It is highly doubtful that these characters will appear in a newspaper comic strip, but there's always the Internet.
**I do quite like this appellation. They sound like a Christian rock band.
***That doesn't exist yet. Ah well.
****The actual lines in question are, "And shame it is, if a prest take keep, / A shiten shepherde and a clene sheep" (505-506). I am mostly quoting these lines because I am always looking for excuses to use the word "shiten."

Here Comes the New Year, Same as the Old Year

2008-12-31T23:25:00.000-08:00

I'm back!

I don't know how regularly I'll be posting. I'm not entirely sure how I sustained that whole once-a-day thing to begin with. This translation gig actually takes up a fair amount of time. However, we shall see what we shall see.

As I am going to be spending most of January 1st on various airplanes, I shall while away the time until midnight arrives in BC and my parents and I can blow our little bugles out the door* by exploring the radical new direction in which the hack who currently churns out Hagar the Horrible is clearly set on taking the strip.

As we can see, today's gag is one that has made an appearance in the comic at least once and very probably five or six hundred times before. The gags in Hagar are, in fact, all recycled, and they have been since the seventh strip, which was the strip published the day after the cartoonist ran out of ideas. This commendable practice is entirely medieval in its provenance, albeit with a modern twist. Instead of borrowing bits and pieces from various "auctors" and thus imbuing his work with "auctoritee," the Hagar cartoonist is borrowing bits and pieces from his own strip and thus imbuing it with both "auctoritee" and status as an "auctor." He is his own source. The technique is innovative--or would have been in 1390--and has been emulated by most of the legacy cartoonists, though seldom so successfully as in this case.

Today's comic again draws on antifeminist stereotypes and the idea of horns representing a cuckold to provide a fresh take on the old "don't-lie-to-me-or-your-horns-will-fall-off" chestnut. Helga, as the typical nagging wife, is also the type of a hypocrite: she rails at her husband (probably with cause, as Hagar demonstrates when he grabs the horns) while actually forbidding him to shed his status as a victim of her own adultery. Hagar unwittingly clutches this status close; he thinks he is unwilling for Helga to know his secrets, but he is really wilfully blind to her treachery. Ah...the womens! The nagging, nagging womens! What a terrible double standard is imposed upon men by this socially and politically powerfully sex!

We here see a subtle evolution in the trope. In the earlier example, Hagar blatantly lies to Helga, thus demonstrating his guilt. In today's comic, Hagar indicates his potential for guilt but never utters the lie. I suspect that the next permutation of the gag will involve a wholly innocent Hagar and a raving, unreasonable Helga with unearthly blue flames issuing from her bodily orifices. Really, it's only a matter of time.

Happy New Year. May the funny pages continue to be relentlessly medieval in their content and outlook. I truly can't imagine that they won't.

*My family has some quite odd traditions. It's best simply not to ask.

A Comic-Strip Christmas Carol: Stave Five

2008-12-07T20:55:00.001-08:00

Jim Davis blinked, dazed, at his surroundings. The mist was gone. He was in his own bedroom, kneeling beside his own bed, and morning light was streaming through the curtains.

"I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future," Davis repeated joyfully, and he rushed to the window to look out upon the new world.

And then, halfway there, he paused.

What did it mean, anyway? How did one live in the Past, the Present, and the Future? Didn't he already do that? Had the Ghost been implying he should change something? Give something up? Something...like Garfield?

"That's absurd," said Davis aloud to the empty room. "I've worked hard on that comic. Why should I give it up?"

Don't, then, the Ghost of Comics Past seemed to whisper in his ear. But remember little Jimmy.

"Little Jimmy was a bit of an idiot," said Davis. Already, the visions he had seen were fading, dying out in the stark light of the new day. "Children are naive. They grow up. They realise the real ticket to success is a solid business model. You don't get that by mooning over comic strips.

Remember the young man who wants to be a cartoonist, whispered the Ghost of Comics Present.

Davis felt a pang, but he counted to ten, and it passed. "Also naive," he said, "not to mention selfish. Why should people indulge him if he isn't willing to conform to industry standards? He has talent; he should give the syndicates what they want."

A spectral Ghost of Comics Yet to Come pointed forbiddingly at a phantom remainders table.

"Uh-huh," said Davis. "Come on...Garfield will never be remaindered in my lifetime. It's exactly what people want...no more...no less. The perfect formula. People who complain about it are cynical discontents. And I hardly have to lift a finger to make it happen."

As he moved towards the door, Davis thought, for an instant, that he saw all three Ghosts floating before him in the air, gazing at him reproachfully. "Oh, lighten up," said Davis. "You guys sure know how to ruin a punchline by hanging around for one panel too many."

And so, heart considerably lighter than it had been ten minutes before, Jim Davis left his bedroom at last.

The Ghosts stared disconsolately after him. "Well," said Johnny Hart, materialising, "another one bites the dust."

"We've tried this chap," said the Ghost of Comics Past. "We've tried Bil Keane, Cathy Guisewite, Lynn Johnston, the entire Walker clan. Every time it's the same: a ten-second epiphany, then bam! Right back to the drawin' board. Why the &^*$ does it happen?

"Cartoonists," explained the Ghost of Comics Present wearily. "They all have amazing capacities for ignoring stark reality."

The Ghost of Comics Yet to Come, exuding menace from every pore, extended a forefinger and pointed out the window. The other Ghosts, following the finger, noticed a pub across the street.

"Yeah, all right," said Johnny Hart. "To tell you the truth, I could do with a drink."

And the four of them faded out, leaving as evidence of their visit only a slight chill in the air...

...plus, tucked neatly under Jim Davis's pillow, a copy of the first Garfield collection, already out of print.

P.S.: A random online name-origin dictionary reveals that "Garfield" means "triangle field" in Old English, but I have chosen to take my favourite meaning of "gar," "spear," and translate it forward into Middle English. "Trianglefeld" just doesn't have the same ring as "Sperefeld."

Why the heck would it matter whether Garfield had stolen Jon's pants? He never needs his pants; he's always stuck behind that counter thingy. I'm also a bit* curious as to how Garfield managed to swipe Jon's pants, which Jon was presumably wearing at the time.

I do not particularly want to think about the fact that Jon apparently owns only one pair of pants.

P.P.S.: I'm afraid marking has once again taken over my life, and I'll have to take another break. With luck, I'll be back in a couple of days.

Stupid, stupid marking.

*Not a big bit.

A Comic-Strip Christmas Carol: Stave Four

2008-12-05T20:32:00.000-08:00

Some time later, Davis opened his eyes.

He had expected--or, at least, hoped--to be back in his bedroom once more. No such luck. Mist roiled about him as he struggled to his feet. He seemed to be on a plane of some sort, though he couldn't see far enough through the fog and darkness to tell how vast it might be.

"Hello?" he quavered. "Spirit? Anyone?"

There was no reply...but he became aware, then, of a presence at his back, and he turned.

A dark, silent figure stood there, cloaked and hooded in black. In one skeletal hand it carried what looked like a rotting newspaper; the other it extended before it, pointing through the mist.

"Ah," said Davis. "I take it you're the Ghost of Comics Yet to Come?"

The Ghost said nothing, but inclined its head slightly.

"Lead on, then," said Davis, feeling--perhaps not unreasonably--that whatever was Yet to Come in the world of comics, he himself would have influenced it immeasurably.

The Ghost, still pointing, slid through the mist, and Davis followed. After only a few steps, he found himself stumbling through into...

...What was this? A dingy bus station late at night...five or six men and women sitting, exhausted, on benches, or leaning against the wall. Three of them, saw Davis, were reading newspapers, and he moved eagerly to peer over the shoulder of the first.

The man flipped the paper closed before Davis could catch more than a glimpse of the interior, then turned to the woman next to him, whom he seemed to know. "Been reading this all day," he said. "Anything good in yours?"

"Well," she said sardonically, "Mary Worth is fixing someone's life again. And Dagwood is late for his carpool."

They both laughed. "God," said the man, "I wish the syndicates would just let those damn things die. Who do they think reads them, anyway?"

A bus pulled into the station, and the couple boarded, leaving their newspapers on the bench. Davis tried to pick one up, but his fingers slipped through it as if it, or he, was insubstantial. "Spirit," he cried, "help me!"

The Ghost pointed at the paper, and the pages riffled as if in a high wind, finally stopping at the comics page.

Or was it the comics page? Before him, Davis could see only three tiny strips: Mary Worth, Blondie, and The Family Circus. The rest of the page was given over to advertising and the detailed discussion of a hand of celebrity poker.

Davis stared at the page in horror. "It can't be," he said. "Where's Cathy? Where's Hagar the Horrible? Where..." He paused. "Where is Garfield?"

The Ghost pointed. Davis rose and followed it back into the mist, emerging finally in a brightly lit office. Before him, Davis saw a man...surely the same young man he had witnessed not long before, crouching in his dingy room as he sketched out comics. The man was older now, and he sat toiling at a desk job in one cubicle among many.

"Is he a cartoonist now?" asked Davis, but the Ghost merely pointed. Davis, following its finger, moved closer to the man.

A woman stopped beside his cubicle. "Got that report done yet?"

"Hardly." The man sighed. "My head hurts."

"Jim won't care," said the woman, shrugging. "You'd better get to work."

"I'm always at work," said the man. "I shouldn't be here, you know. I was going to be--"

"Yeah, yeah, rich and famous, whatever," said the woman. "When are you going to shut up about that, Steve? Newspaper comics have been dying a slow death for years. No one wants to read them; there's certainly no audience for yours. Finish the report."

She moved away. Steve stared hopelessly after her for a moment, then reluctantly returned to his report.

Davis looked anxiously at the Ghost. "Tell me it's not so," he said. "Tell me he still has a chance. Tell me it's not too late!"

The finger pointed. Davis followed it back into the mist.

He emerged in a second-hand bookstore. The proprietor, a creaky old man, moved slowly amongst the shelves, dusting; otherwise, the place was deserted. Davis walked forward. A sense of foreboding was growing in him, but he couldn't seem to stop himself from following that pointing finger, now directed towards a table near the back of the store. Closer he moved...and closer...

Garfield. The table was full of Garfield collections, all of them tattered and worn, none of them under ten years old. He had been remaindered.

For the third time, Davis fell to his knees. "No, Spirit," he cried. "I am not the man I was. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!"

The Ghost stood, still pointing at the table.

"I will honour comics in my heart all my life. I will live in the Past, Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the incredibly low prices on these covers!"

He caught at the Ghost's hand...but the Ghost was no longer there.

P.S.: I don't even understand how today's Garfield is meant to encompass any sort of joke. Why would Santa Claus care if a cat put on a false moustache? Are we meant to accept that Garfield really thinks Santa is that naive? Are we meant to care? I can only conclude that Jim-Davis-as-Dessicated-Monk is at work grinding out nonsensical idiocies yet again.

By the way...the word "Santa" existed in Middle English, but it referred to a female saint. The name "Santa Claus" probably would have made medieval people point and laugh.

A Comic-Strip Christmas Carol: Stave Three

2008-12-04T09:27:00.001-08:00

Jim Davis collapsed onto his bed and fell immediately into a deep, dreamless sleep. He awoke only when the clock was once more striking midnight. Remembering the words of Johnny Hart, Davis looked wildly about for the second Spirit.

At first, he saw nothing...but various stealthy sounds soon alerted him to the fact that someone was crouched at the foot of his bed. Davis leaned over as far as he could and beheld an emaciated young woman in threadbare clothing, a pen clutched in her right fist. She was running her fingers up and down the cracks in Davis's floorboards.

She noticed him watching her. "Oh, sorry," she said, leaping to her feet. "You'd be surprised at how much change sometimes gets stuck in those things. I am the Ghost of Comics Present."

"Why are you looking for change in the floorboards?" said Davis, who had rarely encountered anyone imbued with an air of such quiet desperation.

"Come and see," said the Ghost. The bedroom vanished, giving way to a much smaller, shabbier room: a bachelor apartment, cramped and falling to pieces. A man in his early twenties was working at a cheap IKEA kitchen table. Davis peered over the man's shoulder and saw several half-finished comic strips.

"Hey," said Davis, "this guy's very good. The art is simple but effective, and the words complement it well. And look at this punchline. It's...it's...I don't know...right on the tip of my tongue..."

"Funny?" suggested the Ghost.

Davis snapped his fingers. "That's it! So which syndicate has picked him up?"

"None," said the Ghost. "He has tried them all, but he is rejected again and again. All the rejections begin with praise. 'You are a warm, intelligent writer, but...' 'Your comic captures the humour in an unusual scenario, but...' 'We were impressed by your astute use of visual storytelling, but...'"

David bit, cautiously. "But what?"

The Ghost shook her head. "But his comics encompass an ongoing storyline, not simply a gag-a-day world frozen in time. But he is not writing about office workers, suburban families, or high-school sports, and the syndicates therefore aver that his comic lacks wide appeal. But there is no room for him in newspapers choked with legacy strips and long-running features that have long since ceased to be funny."

Davis became aware that he was beginning to experience an unfamiliar sensation. It took him a moment to realise that it was guilt. In an attempt to stifle it, he said, "Okay, sure, if he ignores convention--"

The Ghost said, "How much good art has sprung from a slavish devotion to convention?" And Davis, despite his rather indignant feeling that he was being thumped over the head with an Odious Moral Lesson, had no reply.

She went on: "Do you think this cartoonist is alone? All over the continent, young cartoonists are struggling to break into a business dominated by a few lazy people who are already rich enough to retire permanently. By clinging to fame without putting any work into it, they are both depriving new artists of the opportunity to shine and ensuring that newspaper comics will not grow and change. The more out-of-date the strips become, the less interest the public will demonstrate in them."

Davis was only half-listening. The plight of cartoonists in general was just an abstract concept to him...but the young man he could see working hard at a comic no one was going to read was quite real. "What's going to happen to him if he can't sell his comic?" he asked.

"Who cares?" asked the Ghost. "He may as well give up his dream and start working in an office. Less competition for you, yes?"

Once again, Davis found himself falling to his knees in supplication. He clutched at the Ghost's rags and found them coming away in his hands. Beneath them, clinging to the Ghost's flesh, were what looked like two wasted children, bestial and sharp-featured. Davis recoiled from them in horror.

"Ah, yes," said the Ghost, "them. The boy is Tradition; the girl is Lowest Common Denominator. No matter how I try, I cannot escape them."

"But that's horrible," said Davis.

The Ghost said, "Why? They have been clinging to you too for many a year."

Dreading what he would see, Davis glanced down...and two little faces peered up at him as he felt phantom fingers dig into his flesh.

Jim Davis fainted.

P.S.: Today's Garfield isn't the best possible candidate for medievalisation, but I do seem to be committed, via my current Dickensian format,* to medievalising five Garfield comics in a row. I have thus sucked it up and translated the word "blink." Believe it or not, "Twynklen" really does mean "to blink" or "to wink"; it can refer to the human eye or to a shining star (thus the song). I aver that it works just as well for that tiny little Christmas light, though frankly, I'm not sure that even such a wonderful word as "twynkle" can save this strip.

I propose that the mice in Garfield hook up with the mice in Overboard, build a spaceship, and blast the hell off the funny pages. They will have plenty of adventures, and we won't have to read about them any more.

*Yes, I do realise that Charles Dickens was not writing in the Middle Ages. I could access my academic training and trot out a convoluted, evidence-clogged justification of my attempts to parody him, but instead, I think I'll just direct your attention towards a shiny object and run swiftly away.

A Comic-Strip Christmas Carol: Stave Two

2008-12-04T04:24:00.000-08:00

Blame the lateness of yesterday's comic on my absurd need for sleep. I shall try to finish today's eventually as well.

Jim Davis woke at midnight to find someone in the room with him: a fat man with a disproportionally large nose, odd bandy legs that seemed too spindly to support his weight, outdated clothing, and a tendency to drop his "'g"s and swear entirely in keyboard symbols. "I am the Ghost of Comics Past," said the fat man. "Tonight, I'll be showin' you the error of your ways. Come with me, you ol' #$&%@!$."

Davis found himself floating out the window. He drifted for a moment, then fell...and landed, not, as he had expected, on the pavement, but in a bedroom strewn with old-fashioned toys and comic books. A small boy sprawled on his stomach on the bed, leafing through a newspaper. He took no notice of the Ghost or Davis, the latter of whom leaned forward to catch a glimpse of the date on the paper: July 15, 1955.

"Why," said Davis, "this is my own bedroom! And that's...that's me!"

"Got it in one," said the Ghost in a genial manner. "Little Jimmy, back on the farm again. And just look at what he's readin'."

Davis peered over the boy's shoulder and saw...

"All my old favourites!" he exclaimed. "Nancy! Blondie! Popeye! Peanuts! Pogo! They're all here!"

"Tha's right," said the Ghost. "Most of them were still funny then."

"I remember," said Davis fervently. "The hours I used to spend poring over the funny pages! The joy they brought me! I wanted to be like those cartoonists; I wanted to bring that kind of happiness to readers."

"And so you did," said the Ghost. The scene dissolved, then reformed. They were in the same room, and the boy Jimmy was still there...but he was older now, curled up on the bed, doodling on a scrap of paper. Davis saw slightly lopsided versions of Charlie Brown, Pogo, Beetle Bailey.

"Ol' Jimmy had talent," said the Ghost as the scene melted again. Davis was now in the different room, watching a yet older Jim Davis opening a Chicago Tribune that looked to be from June 19, 1978. "And one day, his talent led him to invent--"

"Garfield," breathed Davis, watching his past self read the first published Garfield strip ever. "The Tribune tried to cancel it, but no one would let it. And look what it's become!"

"What it's become?" intoned the Ghost...and Davis shrank back from its expression. "What has it become, boss? An automaton...a zombie, still clingin' to the glories of the past, churned out by a committee!"

"But...but you're the Ghost of Comics Past," quavered Davis. "You should like the backward-looking, the tribute to the genius of yesteryear..."

"I may be representin' the past," thundered the Ghost, "but I don't expect everyone to live there. We shouldn't be forgettin' the past, but that's no reason for us not to move forrard into th' future! Adaptation! Growth! Change! Tribute without stagnancy! Remember ol' Jimmy, and stop *&$% well betrayin' what he stands for!"

The Ghost, as he spoke, had grown to monstrous size, apparently swelling with indignation. Jim Davis fell to his knees and clutched at the Ghost's bow-legs in supplication. "Mercy!" he cried. "Mercy..."

The Ghost shrank...dwindled to a bedpost. Davis was back in his own room, in his own Now.

P.S.: As you can see from today's translation, this is the sort of strip that, while purporting to deal with universal themes, becomes dated quite quickly; the language in it thus reads as code to succeeding generations. The problem, of course, is that Davis is so stuck in the past that he genuinely believes that all his readers will know what a lava lamp is.

A Comic-Strip Christmas Carol: Stave One

2008-12-02T20:39:00.000-08:00

Jim Davis, or whoever does Jim Davis's work for him nowadays, has a sweet, sweet deal. The Davisites* churn out three near-identical panels a day. The jokes are old and/or stupid; the characters do not grow or change. As young, hungry cartoonists shiver outside in the cold, the Davisites hunch over their drawing tables, sneering, "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?"

Jim Davis:

I am the ghost of your colleague, Johnny Hart. I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard, constructing it of terrible jokes, cardboard characters, predictable situations, lazy art, and the inability to recognise my own shortcomings. Would you know the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It is a ponderous chain!

You wonder at my condition, as I was always a good man of business? Humour was my business. The promotion of enjoyment was my business; cleverness, originality, boundary-pushing, and good writing were, all, my business. The earning of money was but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!

I am here to-night to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. You will be haunted by Three Spirits. Without their visits, you cannot hope to shun the path I tread. Expect the first to-morrow when the comics appear in the newspapers.

Look to see me no more; and look that, for your own sake, you remember what has passed between us!

P.S.: And yes, this strip is worthy of medievalisation. The stupidity of the joke is as nothing compared to the idiocy of the unchanging "art." Jim Davis isn't quite one of our trio of monks, but he operates like an ancient monk gone to seed, bored with his own work and taking as many shortcuts as humanly possible. Instead of drawing all sorts of monsters in the margins of his manuscripts, he produces the same one over and over. He is, really, to be pitied.

*Quite like Deadites, except that even if you cut off their heads, sever their limbs, and burn their bodies and/or drawing materials, they keep grinding away at this damned strip.

Maybe I Could Feed My Students' Papers to Marmaduke

2008-12-01T20:34:00.001-08:00

I'm nowhere near finished my marking...I am mired in plagiarism proceedings...an idiot driver clipped me with his car this evening...and a large dog tried to eat me. In honour of the last of these depressing circumstances, I shall spend at least a brief time with our friend Marmaduke.

In today's comic, we see that Marmaduke has grown to the size of an SUV. The joke is no longer simply that he's a great big dog; it is that he is becoming the canine equivalent of Audrey II.* If the artist is, in fact, familiar with the rules of perspective, he is calmly and deliberately drawing Marmaduke to be the same height as the guy with the hat...when Marmaduke is lying down. That, my friends, is a great big dog.

As well, the Antichrist story continues apace. As the Beast gains more power, that power begins to have an effect on his physical presence. Beware, Random Walking Couple; Marmaduke will swallow you whole. Just look at that tongue. It looks like an identifying mark of the Hellmouth to me.

Before long, Marmaduke will grow to roughly the size of Saskatchewan, and Armageddon will begin. It's really only a matter of time.

*If you have never seen Little Shop of Horrors on stage, now is probably a good time to start.

Slightly Behind

2008-11-29T16:32:00.000-08:00

Due to marking beyond my control, Japes for Owre Tymes will be taking a short break this weekend. You may already have noticed the beginning of this break happening yesterday. That portion of the break occurred accidentally. The rest will be occurring on purpose.

I apologise for any inconvenience, though if you are truly inconvenienced by the lack of Middle English comics, our funny pages are in an even worse state than I keep implying.

With luck, I shall get enough work done tomorrow that I won't feel guilty about resuming my daily Japes on Monday. Until then, happy weekend. May your piles of marking not be as hideously enormous as mine.

Yours in the midst of another headache,

Angry Kem.
P.S.: To tide you over, here is a picture I drew for my class. You probably recognise Harry Potter...but the guy on the left is Sam Vimes from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. We were discussing the Pratchett/Rowling clash that took place after Rowling announced that she didn't particularly like fantasy and hadn't thought of her books as belonging to the fantasy genre until after she had finished the first one. There is really no reason for me to post this picture, but I was feeling all empty and wrong about publishing a post that did not contain any images. I think I may have issues.*

*Oh, all right...I know I do have issues.

The Banality of Evil

2008-11-27T13:36:00.000-08:00

It really is a week for medieval puns. Today, Love Is..., which deserves to be mulched, burned, and flung into an abyss of everlasting darkness, makes a pun that works better in Middle English than it does in the modern variant of the language. Oh, sure, we still tell a man who hasn't shaven for a while that he "looks a bit rough"...but why do we? Because "rough" means not simply "rugged" or "not smooth" but also "hairy"...that's why. The male Loveshmoo is hairy...and thus "rough" to the touch. Ha ha ha ha ha!*

I sincerely advise you not to think about the following facts:

1) The Loveshmoos are naked.
2) The Loveshmoos appear to be prepubescent.
3) The Loveshmoos have no identifiable sex organs, though the female Loveshmoo does have tiny nipples, whereas the male Loveshmoo does not.
4) Nonetheless, the male Loveshmoo can grow facial hair.

I really, really hate these little guys.

*I never said it was a good medieval pun.

Oh, My Sainted Aunt...I Must Scrub My Brain Out with Soap

2008-11-25T21:33:00.001-08:00

Sometimes, when I'm reading The Family Circus, I find myself thinking, "Good grief, this is appalling. Oh well...at least I know it can't possibly get worse."

And then it does.

Today's Family Circus may be one of the most horrifying single-panel comics I have ever seen. At first, it looks innocuous. Billy is taking Dolly's measurements as PJ looks on. How precious! How cute that the widdle childwen are acting just like adults...

...and fixating...over Dolly's...bust size...*

Heavens to Murgatroid, Keanes. What the hell is wrong with you?

The humour here is probably supposed to be inherent in the fact that Billy innocently calls Dolly's funny pear-shaped measurements "perfect." Perhaps the Keanes think they are being progressive in describing Dolly's lumpy body as "perfect." However, what we actually have here is a tiny little girl buying into the myth that women should have "perfect" measurements. How old is Dolly? Five? Six? Isn't it nice that she's already learning to obsess over her body? Look at that coy, self-satisfied smirk on her face. Any minute now, she's going to strike a Paris Hilton pose and go around modelling bathing suits.

The Keanes are clearly trapped in the past. Their outmoded portraits of women make me want to punch brick walls for fun. Go back to the Middle Ages, Keanes. You wouldn't be considered progressive there either, but at least you'd be out of my hair.

*It is entirely possible that my head has just exploded.

Proof! We Have Proof! Vindicated! Vindicated!

2008-11-25T13:04:00.000-08:00

Though I dealt with Apartment 3G just three days ago, I need to return to it again now because today's strip contains fairly definitive proof that Brother Lawrence exists. I am happy to say that this comic really is created by a medieval monk who must strenuously exercise his imagination when dealing with just about anything.

My evidence:

On Saturday, Tommie made a beautiful pun on the word "male," which, in the Middle Ages, could mean both "masculine" and "evil." This pun does not exist in modern English. Without it, the strip made no sense at all; with it, it became quite clever. Brother Lawrence is not a stupid man, my friends. He may be naive about the outside world, but he knows his wordplay.

Today, Margo comments that her boyfriend has "fallen off the edge of the earth."

The edge of the earth? Really? Isn't it now more usual to say, "He's dropped off the face of the planet"? The latter expression acknowledges Earth's spherical nature; the former assumes that it is flat. Margo is here speaking in a medieval or pre-medieval idiom. She does not know that the earth is round because as far as her creator is concerned, it isn't.**

Brother Lawrence, show yourself. We know you're out there. Don't be ashamed. You may not know much about much, but we appreciate your attempts to imagine the world outside your monastery, and we support you on your mental journey of discovery.* Good on you, holy Brother. Keep up the strange but inadvertently entertaining work.

*Just be careful not to fall off the metaphorical edge of the metaphorical earth.
**Okay, okay, okay. As voxindeserto has pointed out, I am buying into unwarranted stereotypes of medieval ignorance. Brother Lawrence would have known the earth was round. However, it is possible that his characters, as silly women, would have known no such thing. Thank you, voxindeserto, for presenting a better solution. I shall try to be fairer to my trio of monks in future.

Happy Anniversary...and Now I Shall Mock You

2008-11-24T07:15:00.000-08:00

I suppose it is actually quite cruel of me to medievalise Gasoline Alley for the first time on the occasion of its ninetieth anniversary. Luckily, I am well on the way to building a reputation as someone who is quite cruel all the time. Congratulations, Gasoline Alley and its bevy of intergenerational creators. I respect your accomplishment. I also think it may be time for you to change or die.

In a way, Gasoline Alley is an anomaly among legacy strips. The demon Wikipedia tells us that Frank King began the strip as a Chicago Tribune Sunday feature involving a bunch of guys standing around talking about cars; it was popular enough that it spawned a daily comic. Through the years, the characters of Gasoline Alley have, unlike other creaky comic-strip characters such as Nancy or Hi and Lois, grown and changed. A baby who appeared on the protagonist's doorstep in 1921 is now in his late eighties; older characters have died, giving way to the younger generations. In fact, the comic has a great many characters. Unlike Blondie, a mere whippersnapper of seventy-eight, Gasoline Alley has the potential to have remained fresh throughout its run, as, for the most part, has Doonesbury, which has adopted a similar multi-character technique.

The problem is that Gasoline Alley has become so incredibly stupid that it has to be read to be believed. A relatively recent storyline involved the unbearable character Slim plotting to buy an asteroid and drop it on a basketball court that was bothering him because it was attracting perfectly polite basketball-playing teenagers who assaulted him with their NOISE, NOISE, NOISE, NOISE.* The fact that the perfectly polite basketball-playing teenagers were all black was pretty damned cringe-inducing, though admittedly, Slim is probably not meant to be a particularly sympathetic character. Lately, he has been displaying open greed, breathtaking arrogance, and utter self-centredness, not to mention hypocrisy, as he attempts to steal back a painting he had been given but thrown away because he thought it was worthless. A few months ago, there was a long, soul-deadening plot revolving around a cat-food commercial. It was probably meant to be whimsical. It wasn't.

In other words, though this strip was, in its time, innovative and amusing, it has dwindled to a shadow of its former self. The current creator can certainly draw, but his plots are rarely worth reading. It's really too bad.

As today's strip looks wistfully back into the past, it makes a good candidate for medievalisation. Gasoline Alley is, like other legacy strips, essentially past-focussed. It recognises that the twenty-first century is happening, but it kind of wishes it weren't.

Happy Birthday, Gasoline Alley. Maybe there is hope for you; it would be nice if there were. It would be nice, in fact, if a legacy strip would show the ability to move with the times...if the characters did not simply grow older but also grew up. Though you have become stupid, Gasoline Alley, perhaps there is hope for you yet. Do not go gentle into that good night.

P.S.: My translation of "Gasoline" is weird, but I stand by it.

*At this point, you should be imagining the Grinch grimacing as those little wee animated drumsticks pound at his ears.

Better to Wash Dogs in Hell Than...Well, I'm Not Sure

2008-11-23T10:35:00.000-08:00

Back in what reader Voxindeserto has competently identified as the centre ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell (the place of punishment for suicides and spendthrifts), Louie the Demon Dog and the condemned pirate souls continue their eternal struggle. Our last visit to the pirates acted as a demonstration of forced soul-on-soul torment, though there was perhaps a hint of rebellion in Charley's sculpting of a topiary squirrel with which he meant to agitate Louie. In today's strip, we see the dead-eyed, emotionless pirates demonstrating somewhat more autonomy by attempting to fool the demon into leaping into a bucket of what I suspect may actually be holy water. The demon, however, is not fooled; the tell-tale bursting bubbles (representing the hopes of the souls) send him scrabbling under his Fiery Bed of Despair. The pirates may attempt to rebel, but the demon will always be one step ahead of them. He is playing with them, really. Every once in a while, he lengthens the leash, letting them believe they are nearly free...and then he yanks it back again.* The illusion of potential escape is, of course, part of the punishment. The pirates will never get free.

Unfortunately, neither will we.

*Oh, the terrible, terrible irony. The dog has the pirates on a leash! Snork!

All...Men...are Like That?

2008-11-22T10:35:00.000-08:00

It was difficult for me to resist today's Family Circus, wherein little Billy says in what is apparently complete innocence, "Daddy, my pen is stuck in your pencil sharpener." However, 1) I did a FC cartoon quite recently, and 2) that particular comic would make much better fodder for Utterly Filthy Filth for Our Times.* If Chaucer had known what a pencil sharpener was, he probably would have had a field day with this comic.

Luckily, fun stuff is also happening elsewhere on the funny pages. The Apartment 3G monk, identified by me a few days ago as the silent, contemplative Brother Lawrence, is gamely having a go at guessing what women talk about when they are alone together at their secret female bourbon parties. So far, the subjects of discussion have been Alan (a dead man) and Gary (a living man). It seems that once the ladies have drawn the mystic circle and chanted the runes of power, they tend to settle down to good long chats about...men.

Brother Lawrence interacts with women only very rarely. There are a few nuns who turn up at the monastery every once in a while, but he tends to avoid them. Nonetheless, he has a vivid imagination and has often thought about women, whom he regards in the same light as the dog-headed cannibals he has read about in books full of Isidore quotations.** The good Brother does, however, find himself frequently having to fall back on writing about what he knows, and what he knows is the world of men. Of course these women would discuss men. Doesn't everybody? Yet since they are women and thus completely alien, their conversations must necessarily be alien as well; they therefore talk about how frustrating men are, just as men in the same position might talk about how frustrating women were.

A major clue that this comic is the brainchild of a medieval monk lies in Tommie's final statement, which contains a Middle English pun. The word "male" means "male," but it can also mean "evil." Tommie is, in fact, coming out with an antimasculist rant: the very opposite of Brother Lawrence's natural inclination. He really does enjoy getting into the brains of creatures so completely inscrutable. If he knew about novels, he would be thinking about writing one.

*A site that doesn't exist but should.
**The dog-headed cannibals are actually only the tip of the iceberg. Just don't ask about the people with ears so huge they are able to use them as sunshades.

Life is a Playground...but Don't Tell the Ladies

2008-11-21T12:28:00.000-08:00

Hagar the Horrible, ever the progressive comic, today returns to the fifth of its six themes: "women are repressive nags designed to keep men from having any sort of fun at all, and we should hate and fear them." Here, Hagar teaches his son Hamlet that if a real man wants to experience happiness, he first needs to learn to keep his activities secret from the women in his life. Those women will be naturally inclined to stop him enjoying himself by indulging in the exclusively male activities of fighting, raiding, drinking beer, partying, and playing games.*

Here we are...right back with the medieval antifeminist movement again. Note how the very clouds in the sky mimic Hagar's words of foreboding, looming over father and son as if representing the forbidding presence of Helga herself. The pathetic fallacy merely underlines the seriousness of the whole issue. Why, men, are women such killjoys? Why do they choke all interest and satisfaction out of life? Do they exist solely to do so? Their lives revolve around men, right? It isn't remotely possible that they sometimes like to have fun themselves, is it? Nah. They probably don't exist when men aren't in the room. That's really the only explanation for all the nagging.

Hagar is set in the Middle Ages. I shall pretend that this fact explains its consistently medieval treatment of women. Har. Har. Har.

*I forget: is Hagar a Viking warrior, or does he live in a frat house?

Great Minds Think Alike, Albeit Not Always at the Same Time

2008-11-20T13:44:00.000-08:00

I shall celebrate the fact that I am not going to starve next term* by whaling on poor old Ziggy for attempting to comment on the Harry Potter books, which I happen to be teaching at the moment. Woo-hoo. I have a job.** Moving on:

Tom Wilson started syndicating Ziggy, based around a character he had first invented*** for a book published by a greeting-card company, as a newspaper comic in 1971. In 1987, Tom Wilson II took over.**** The comic is not about anything. Ziggy is no one, and he has no interests. Nonetheless, he appears in newspapers every single day.

Ziggy is one of those comics that desperately try to keep up with modern times that their creators do not understand. Tom Wilson II has clearly heard of cell phones and That Other Crazy Stuff Those Kids Have These Days, but he is able to write and draw about them only in the vaguest of terms. Ziggy seems particularly prone to receiving weird answering-machine messages from seashells. That is the only truly interesting thing I can think to say about him.

Today, Mr. Wilson II makes a hilarious joke about a series of books that ended in the summer of 2007. It is a joke you have probably seen before, for the simple reason that every living, breathing cartoonist made it in, yes, the summer of 2007, if not before. Hell, some of them made it as early as 2000. Mr. Wilson II demonstrates his natural inclination towards the Middle Ages by leaping eagerly and with Ent-like speed upon the phenomenon of the Harry Potter books. One can almost sense him triumphantly punching the air and crying, "Yes! Yes! I am being Topical! No one has ever done anything like this before!"

Mr. Wilson II is longing after the fourteenth century; I just know he is. Daily, he must hold himself back from creating comics about Ziggy's miserable life as a peasant in fourteenth-century England. His comic seems to be about nothing only because, tragically, he cannot gain his heart's desire and write about a world that has been dead and gone for six hundred years.

Mr. Wilson II, take a look at my translation. Today, I fulfil your dream.

*Don't you just love this whole "I am a sessional, and thus I have to reapply for my job every three months" thing? I know I do.
**For now.
***Perhaps "invented" is too strong a word. According to the demon Wikipedia, he stole the idea from an anonymous college student.
****I am not making this up.

Another Ancient Pun and Some Gratuitous Fleshy Bits

2008-11-19T05:54:00.000-08:00

Next in its series of Puns So Old Not Even Chaucer Would Have Touched Them is The Family Circus's take on the word "draw." Admittedly, it probably would have been more likely for English people in the Middle Ages to make a bath, but if we follow the idiom back into the Mists of Time, we will likely find that the original sense of "draw" here derives from a meaning that was around in texts by 1400 and probably earlier in speech: to draw water from a well (and then use it to make a bath). I thus claim that the Keanes are once again dredging up jokes designed not just to make extremely old people titter and cry, "What are they teaching them in these schools?", but to make the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-etc.-grandparents of these extremely old people do the same thing.*

It is also worth noting that the Keanes have been drawing** their sweet little doppelgangers half-naked a lot lately. Jeff and Bil Keane rarely miss an opportunity to strip the kiddies--especially little Jeffy, interestingly enough--down to their skivvies. All that pale, doughy flesh on display is really beginning to make me feel physically ill. For pity's sake, Jeff Keane: cover up the munchkins. Don't punish the rest of us for your need to draw*** yourself unclothed. Get a hobby. Rediscover the joys of life. Fling down your pens and dance away, happy and free, no longer obliged to draw**** this pestilential comic.

Eh...I knew that last one was too much to ask.

*Technically speaking, obviously.
**I here use "draw" in only one sense of the word. I thought you would like to know.
***Ditto.
****Yeah, yeah.

The Wisdom of Noght Returns

2008-11-18T11:59:00.000-08:00

Our friend Zero is at it again. While technically the least intelligent of the denizens of Camp Swampy, Zero tends to demonstrate a certain foolish wisdom. Last week, he used this wisdom to teach us about the Bible. Today, he uses it to draw our attention to the fact that War Is Wrong. His wistful question, emerging from so childlike a brain, comes at us with the same visceral impact as "Is there a Santa Claus?", "Don't you love me any more?", or "Why would they discontinue my favourite chocolate bar?"* O Zero, accept me as a disciple. Teach me the path of truth.

Looking at the comic outside a medieval context simply does not work. When one does, one has to take into account the fact that Beetle's comment in panel one is the comment of a soldier. It is, in fact, the comment of a soldier whose country is at war. Zero's reply is the reply of another soldier. The whole comic dissolves in a big steaming vat of silly nonsense.

No...I shall stick with the medieval interpretation. I have faith. I shall cling to the following thought:

Angry Kem, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Angry Kem, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Angry Kem, there is an intelligent Beetle Bailey. It exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no wisdom in this comic! It would be as dreary as if there were no Angry Kems. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which comics fill the world would be extinguished.**

'Nuff said.

*Why? Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?
**Yes, you have seen these two paragraphs before...or something like them, at any rate.

Monk #3 Tells It Like It Isn't

2008-11-17T19:47:00.000-08:00

I think it's probably time to name our monks.

If you remember, we have discovered three lonely medieval monks toiling away at newspaper comics. They all belong to the same monastery, but they rarely speak to one another; they are wrapped up in their own imaginative pursuits.

Monk #1, the creator of Apartment 3-G, is called Brother Lawrence. He has taken a vow of silence and spends much of each day sunk in contemplation. His comic-strip specialties are realistic dialogue and human interactions.

Monk #2, the creator of Archie, is called Brother Francis. He was dropped off at the monastery by his young, unmarried mother when he was five days old, and he has lived there every since, never venturing outside the walls. His comic-strip specialties are nubile young girls and their...attributes.

Monk #3, the creator of The Better Half, is called Brother Cuthbert. He is an extremely holy monk who remains always within his cell, only ever emerging to pray with his fellow monks. His comic-strip specialties are marital disputes and references to current events.

Today, Brother Cuthbert is in fine form. Almost exactly a month ago,* he drew a comic dealing with Stanley perpetuating identity theft on his cat; now what has gone around has come around, and Stanley himself is the victim. Brother Cuthbert still has absolutely no idea what identity theft is. He is worried by it--he is sure that it is the work of the devil--but he wouldn't know it if he passed it in the street.** He was, however, a little uneasy about his cat interpretation, and he is taking this opportunity to have another go at a definition. Since he is rather worried by his own deteriorating physical condition, he is projecting his anxieties onto his comic-strip characters.

It's also worth noting that Brother Cuthbert is so modest that he can't bear to draw Stanley with his shirt off. He has thus given Stanley's stomach angular folds that make it look a little bit like a shirt. He has forgotten to leave out the belly button, but let's cut him some slack; he's obviously trying his best.

*I seem to be returning to Brother Cuthbert's work roughly once a month. My theory is that he's actually creating an extremely widely spaced series of thematically related comics, probably because he's bored.
**Especially since he wouldn't be caught dead in the street.

Write About What You (Already) Know

2008-11-16T12:21:00.000-08:00

A very long time ago, a tribe of early human was trembling on the verge of an intellectual breakthrough. These people had, for generations, been using simple sounds to signify certain concepts: for instance, "cold," "hot," "danger," "follow," "jerkface."* However, some young and clever members of the tribe had lately been discovering that they could make more sounds, which would then mean more things. A rudimentary grammar was beginning to form.

One day, as the sun rose over the veldt, one of these intelligent young people turned to the other and made the very same joke that Marvin makes today. In that instant, language was born.

I think perhaps what I'm trying to say is that today's Marvin does not tell a new joke. Technically, of course, it doesn't really tell a joke at all...but the attempted joke in this comic is so creaky that poking it with a stick would probably cause it to collapse into a pile of dust. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, other cartoonists have created comics featuring this exact same joke. I really hate this joke. I have read it so many times in so many different (albeit ominously similar) forms that I am even now resisting an urge to beat it with a baseball bat until it stops moving.

It works well in Middle English because it was old even in 1350. If Tom Armstrong had been writing then, he probably would have attributed the joke to Isidore of Seville.** Geoffrey Chaucer likely rolled his eyes when he heard this joke. What I think I'm driving at is that it's old. It's old, Tom Armstrong. You are telling an old joke. You are always telling old jokes. Either stop it now or get in your handy time machine and go back to school early humans in the art of non-humour. You are, after all, the past master of that.

P.S.: "Marvin knoueth a flie in milk" is a medieval way of saying, "Marvin can see the obvious." Yes...yes, he can.

*There has been a word for "jerkface" since humans became capable of rational thought, plus possibly for some time before that.
**Cardinal rule for medieval writers: if in doubt, attribute it to Isidore of Seville.

The Middle Ages Go On and On...

2008-11-15T20:10:00.000-08:00

Look, boys and girls: we are laughing at Irma Thurston again today! Isn't this fun? Irma is a downtrodden hausfrau with a self-centred ass for a husband, and we snicker at her plight because only an incredibly stupid woman (the womens...the womens...so brainless are they) could have got herself into such a situation. Today, we laugh harder than usual at Irma because it appears Thirsty actually indicated in their prenuptial agreement that he was going to be a sexist bastard...and she married him anyway. Why laugh at Thirsty? A man has a right to be a jerk. It's the woman idiotic enough to marry him who is deserving of our ridicule.

Oh, Hi and Lois...you out-medieval the Middle Ages. You don't do it by being side-splittingly hilarious, a la Chaucer, or by meshing complex and layered theological implications with secular frames, a la my good friend Anonymous, or by contracting the plague, a la far too large a percentage of the population of Europe. You do it by pretending to be progressive--Lois Flagston has an actual job, after all--while actually putting the uppity women in their place. Your pretence at mocking Thirsty while you have a go at Irma would identify you as satire if you were not too moronic to be satirical. Instead, you're simply mean-spirited and petty. Way to go, Hi and Lois. Propel those women all the way back to the late thirteen hundreds...where they belong.

Someday...somehow...someone will publish a comic strip featuring a female protagonist who does not spend ninety percent of her time kowtowing to men, never complains about her weight or attempts to purchase a bikini, and is neither impossibly hot and thus created to be drooled over nor impossibly ugly and thus created to be laughed at. She will not be The Condescendingly Wise Girlfriend. She will not be The Unattainable Bombshell. She will not provoke knee-slapping guffaws as she slaves for her delightfully lazy husband. She will be a real person with real feelings and motivations. I am expecting her to turn up whenever the Middle Ages are over.

That should be any century now, really.*

*I live in hope.

And I Thought I Was Cynical...

2008-11-14T17:26:00.000-08:00

The ferocious headache that I have gained by spending eight solid hours updating my teaching dossier in order to reapply for the job I have right now--not that there are any guarantees I'll get it again, so it's possible that next term I shall be living under a bridge in the Don Valley--and actually finishing everything a whole hour before the deadline*, then taking another hour and a half to get my damn computer to send the damn relevant files to the right damn address without freezing, crashing, developing an alternate personality, and trying to expel me into space...**

...at any rate, the ferocious headache that I have gained doing all that is as nothing compared to the throbbing horror that invades my brain when I glance at today's Momma. I really don't understand why this comic is allowed to live. Who reads it? Who thinks it is funny? Who doesn't see Momma herself and go, "Aaargh! The bugs! The bugs are back!", then try to stomp on her before she scuttles beneath the sink?***

The harsh cruelty of Freda's proclamation that she can't tell the difference between a living husband and a dead one**** reveals her as a medieval antifeminist stereotype. You see, gentlemen, all women think of you as mere furniture. They are ugly, cold-hearted shrews who may have been quite pretty right up to the point they shrank three feet, gained forty pounds, started wearing ugly hats, and decided that husbands were unnecessary appendages. While a first glance tells us that the cartoonist is laughing at Freda's husband, the second confirms that he is, in fact, laughing at Freda. Scorn her, readers. Shake your heads sagely at her womanly callousness. That's what medieval antifeminist stereotypes are for.

Some day, I am going to lock Mell Lazarus in a room with sixteen older women and a number of chainsaws. He should consider this blog entry fair warning.

*Extremely unusual for me. I never get applications in more than five minute before they are due. I do not like this state of affairs, but it exists nonetheless.
**That's more like it.
***This "joke" was not intentionally stolen from Ces Marciuliano's Medium Large, but once I'd written it down, I started having the sneaking feeling that I may have been unintentionally plagiarising, and when I went to check, I found that Mr. Marciuliano had, indeed, portrayed Momma as a dust mite. To be fair, I think of her as more of a cockroach. I'm pretty sure that she's hatching her young in that coffin.
****Well, maybe he wasn't her husband. Maybe he was her brother. I think I just squicked myself out.

When Allegories Kill

2008-11-13T10:16:00.000-08:00

Shoe is a comic strip about a bunch of birds who live in trees, wear clothes, fly to work (briefcases and all), and seem to be bird-sized and people-sized simultaneously. It is possible that it has been around since 1977, though it's hard to tell; the demon Wikipedia doesn't say, and other sources are kind of ambiguous. I do know that its original creator is dead. It is now churned out by a team.

A problem frequently encountered by cartoonists who 1) work with anthropomorphic animals and 2) care even remotely is that their characters are virtually human and thus can't seem to stifle the urge to make jokes about devouring animal flesh and taking pets for walks. Watching a dog Plugger walking his dog is an almost hallucinatory experience. Melissa DeJesus and Ed Power, the young, hungry creators of My Cage, get around the pet problem, at least, by giving their platypus protagonist a pet amoeba. Most cartoonists don't bother to think about the issue this deeply. They thus end up mindlessly producing comics quite like today's Shoe.

My friends...only a medieval context saves this comic from being utterly horrifying. I don't know what the hell kind of bird the Perfesser is supposed to be, but he has always reminded me rather of a rooster...in other words, a chicken. Why is he so calm when the waiter mentions that frogs' legs (NOTE THE APOSTROPHE, ZOMBIE-LIKE SHOE DRONES*) taste like chicken? Why does he only stare in wide-eyed horror after the waiter has made his egregious and unfunny "Kentucky Fried Frog" joke? Why does he seem to be okay with the idea of restaurant-goers devouring his flesh? Why am I thinking this deeply about bloody Shoe?

When the comic is transported back to the Middle Ages, however, its meaning becomes relatively clear. The conversation is a veiled reference by two birds (read: patriotic Englishmen) to the despised frogs (read: French). When the waiter posits that frogs' legs taste like chicken, he is implying that the French seem, on the surface, like the English (chickens), though deep down, they're terrible French cowards, known mainly for their love of running away** (and thus frog legs are very different from chicken legs). The question about popularity rubs salt in the "French people are snivelling traitors who shake with fear when swords are forced into their unwilling hands"-type wound, and the waiter's reply is a sniggering dismissal of the French: even their name sounds stupid when it replaces the good old English "chicken."*** The Perfesser is horrified because he is realising for the first time that Frogs really aren't like Chickens; the waiter's phrase has driven the terrible truth home.

The fact that this allegory is absolutely full of holes is irrelevant; medieval allegories usually are. At any rate, anything is better than the alternative.

*It is, of course, entirely possible that whoever is writing Shoe right now subconsciously recognises its medieval leanings and is leaving out this patently non-medieval punctuation mark as a subtle acknowledgement of this fact.
**This was a real medieval stereotype. I am not applying it in any way to modern France. I would not give George W. Bush the satisfaction.
***I have "Morlond" for "Kentucky" because it is possible that "Kentucky" means "meadow." Don't ask.

And He Will Come, and He Will Give Thee a Goofy Look, and the World Will Erupt in Flames

2008-11-12T05:57:00.000-08:00

If not for the Antichrist allegory that lends profundity to every Marmaduke comic, I would despair for the future of newspaper comics. Strip away the allegory, and what is left? A really big dog, that's what. Surely no one would spend fifty-four years laughing at that.

In today's strip, a young sinner learns that when the Antichrist's disciple promises that you will ride on the back of the Beast, you are actually going to end up with your belt clamped in his slavering jaws as he drags you cheerfully off to torture and, eventually, Hell. Note the golden-haired innocence of the disciple here. He seems all virtue, whereas he is actually scheming to snare more credulous urchins for his Master and is right now thinking simply, "Horrible death to all. Horrible death to all!" From the number and size of the coins on the milk crate,* the disciple has made forty-five cents, an indication that 1) Antichrist has now devoured two children, 2) one of them cheated the disciple of a nickel, and 3) the disciple hasn't noticed because he can't add up change. Beware the evils of not paying attention in math class, my children! Beware! You may end up working for the Destroyer of All...and liking it!

*Okay. Excuse me...but who gets wooden milk crates now? I was born in the 1970s, and I only ever remember the plastic ones. How do all these comic-strip characters turn up with miraculous wooden milk crates? Perhaps Antichrist has created this one with his infernal powers, but why? WAKE UP, CARTOONIST! IT'S 2008! THERE ARE NO WOODEN MILK CRATES ANY MORE!

Bible Stories for Our Friend Noght

2008-11-11T11:55:00.000-08:00

Is it just me, or does Zero strike everybody as the most refreshingly imaginative character in Beetle Bailey? Unlike Sarge, Beetle, Killer, and the rest, Zero tends to think outside the box. Sure, he can be seen as sticking within his stereotype--Beetle is Lazy, Sarge is Violent, Killer is Lustful, Zero is Stupid--but in Zero's naive approach to the world is a child's boundless creativity. Why, he asks today, do we complain of days without sunshine? Are there nights without darkness? If day and night are utterly opposed, how can we possibly have days without the sun? Wouldn't such days be nights? Would nights without darkness be days? When the sun hides behind clouds, can it actually be said to be "gone"? If it were, wouldn't it be night? Isn't "day" more than the mere apparent absence of sun? If there is no sun, why is there light?*

Ah, Zero...sweet Zero. Your words clearly constitute a medieval-style leading question designed by the "lerned" to teach the "lewed" about the Bible. Look how perfectly Zero's query sets up a discussion about Genesis 1:4-5, in which God separates the light from the darkness, calling the former "day" and the latter "night." God doesn't separate the sunshine from the darkness...oh, no. Day is light; night is dark. We can't have a whole night without darkness because the darkness is night! And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Zero's question may seem foolish, but it contains more potential for wisdom than Beetle's griping. Silly Beetle: there are no days without sunshine. The sun is always there, lurking just on the other side of the clouds. Follow the Philosophy of Zero, Beetle. It will teach you how to survive the unchanging, stereotype-clogged landscape that constitutes your world.

*Forty-two.**
**Yes, I have had this footnote before. I shall have this footnote again. Get used to this footnote.

Majesty, Can You Spare a Halfpenny?

2008-11-10T05:11:00.000-08:00

I love it when The Wizard of Id tries to get topical. As always, this comic is on the cutting edge when it comes to criticism of English monarchs of the fourteenth or fifteenth century; only when one attempts to apply it to twenty-first-century America does everything fall apart. The cartoonist clearly does not understand how government bailouts work. He has heard the phrase "government bailout" repeated ad nauseam, and he has decided that since he has a character who represents the "government" (the King) and a multitude of characters who might enjoy being "bailed out" (the peasants), he can stick 'em all together in two badly drawn panels and cause gusts of hilarity to arise from the masses. The gusts will be stronger than usual because this particular comic is Topical. Hyuck! Hyuck! Har...

My alternate theory is that the cartoonist is once again having a go at Richard II. That "out-of-work" peasant will not be sitting against the wall for long; his monarch's contemptuous gesture will goad him to rebellion, and a certain Revolt will get started. Odds are that before long, this particular peasant will be calling himself Jack Straw* and wielding a pitchfork with murderous intent. The cartoonist is thus commenting on a dangerous situation brewing in England six hundred and twenty-seven years ago rather than an unfortunate situation occurring in the United States three weeks ago. Since in both cases the comment is out of date, we can probably just point and laugh,** then forget this comic ever existed.***

*Thanks to the demon Wikipedia, to which I just resorted out of a sort of anal curiosity, even though I bloody knew who Jack Straw was and didn't actually need to look him up at all, there is currently a Right Honourable Jack Straw, MP, Lord Chancellor, Secretary of State for Justice, in the British government. The irony is killing me.
**At the cartoonist, not at the comic. Heaven forbid we should laugh at the comic.
***Yes, I know that comics have to be submitted to the syndicates weeks ahead of time. It still amuses me when a cartoonist tries to make a topical comment about a weeks- or months-old happening. B.C.'s weak gestures towards the popularity of The Dark Knight are especially painful to watch.

And a Great Light Shone About Her, and the People Were Amazed

2008-11-09T07:34:00.001-08:00

Mary Worth--the character, not the unforgivable comic in which she appears--is many things: a friend, a neighbour, a lover, a mother figure, a condo owner, a meddling old biddy. Today, however, we learn that all these roles are mere disguises for her real identity as an out-and-out medieval-style type of Christ. When Mary dispenses her wisdom,* she is not simply nattering uselessly at people who would probably be better off without her; she is relaying the Word of God to the clueless masses.**

Look at that last panel. In it, Mary shines with an unearthly light as she thunders her condemnation of skating dad Frank, who is relentlessly squashing his daughter Lynn beneath the urgency of his own need for glory.*** Mary is clearly possessed by a force greater than herself. If Frank doesn't listen to her, he is going to end up struck by lightning or, worse, working in retail for the rest of his natural life.

Some may, of course, argue that Mary here represents her namesake, the mother of Christ. However, I am not sure she is passive enough to be the Virgin.**** Saint Mary seems more the type to smile sadly and drop miraculous tears on Lynn's head and less the type to unload the Wrath of God on a cowering Frank.

It is also worth****** noting that Frank's name identifies him as, well, French. A medieval Frenchman would certainly be capable of behaving so moronically that a representative of God might be forced to interfere. ******* Everybody knows that the French are cowardly traitors, after all.******** Down with St. Denis! Up with St. George! We don't care that Richard the Lionheart probably didn't know a word of English! The Maple Leaf forever!**********

I shall watch with interest as Mary rises into the air, glowing with sacred fire, and smites Frank into a little pile of sinful, whimpering dust on the pavement. If all this does indeed happen, we may just get to witness the least stultifying Mary Worth ever.***********

*Don't drink and drive. Don't date two girls at once and expect both of them to be happy. Don't lie to your husband about your own idiocy, you evil, evil woman. Unclean! Unclean! May God forgive you.
**I.e., everyone who is not Mary.
***I honestly didn't mean for that sentence to turn out as icky as it did.
****The matter of the virginity itself is still an open question. Mary does seem to have some sort of relationship with Jeff, but it is unclear as to whether it involves more than chaste dinner outings to the Bum Boat***** and the occasional creaky lovers' tiff.
*****Yes, Bum Boat. No, I am not making that up. No, I swear.
******No pun intended, though pun, alas, committed nonetheless.
*******According, at least, to a medieval Englishman.
********And everyone knows the English have tails, but that's a different story.*********
*********It is entirely possible that I haven't been using as many footnotes lately and am beginning to miss them.
**********Er...
***********A medievalist can dream, can't she?

Not Even Chaucer Was This Raunchy on Purpose

2008-11-08T20:36:00.001-08:00

The medieval monk who writes the daily Archie strip has been at it again. This time, however, he does not attempt to draw teenage girls and the startlingly huge breasts that are constantly causing him to undergo quite a lot of penance. The monk has attempted, this week, to take a bit of a break from breasts. I am not entirely convinced that he realises how blatantly he is demonstrating exactly what, despite all the praying, is constantly on his mind.

Why fixate on breasts when you've got allegorical dog sex? In this comic, Jughead's dog attempts to rape what Jughead seems to regard as a sexy young poodle. Hot Dog has, rather disturbingly, always reminded me of a man in a dog suit; the furry implications make my bowels shiver. It doesn't help that his tail is so very...erect. As well, the fact that the little dog on TV is apparently laughing and flinging her ears back in the fashion of Paris Hilton causes me to lose all faith in humanity.

Our Archie-creating monk has no idea there is anything odd about this comic. He sees nothing wrong with the phrase "comes on,"* and he is not squicked out by the illustration of the randy dog ravaging an electronic device, perhaps partly because he has never encountered an electronic device in his life. As far as he's concerned, Hot Dog's lust is perfectly understandable. Who wouldn't drool over such a lovely bi--er...female creature? Trapped in the confines of his cell as he is, the monk can only shake his head sagely over the dog's sin and completely miss the innuendos he has sprinkled throughout the comic.** He can remain smugly secure in his purity of spirit while demonstrating to the world that he is actually thinking: SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX!

*The pun on "comes" would have worked in the Middle Ages. Monks may not have understood it, but I'm kind of betting that many of them would have.
**Up to and including "Bonk!"

Punnily We Pun Along

2008-11-07T06:01:00.000-08:00

I sometimes contemplate the possibility of a world without puns. Such a world would, in many ways, be much poorer. Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare would both have found their humour sadly constrained by the lack of a punning option; it is possible they would even have given up in despair and taken to writing depressing plays about two characters waiting at a crossroads for a man who never came.* Without puns, our innuendos would be less spicy. Without puns, we would have a lesser understanding of the power of word-play. Without puns, there would be no Family Circus.

That last point is the one that really does sometimes have me longing for a punless universe.

Today's Adventures of Idiotic Melonheads has Dolly making an atrocious pun about Moses' tablets. There are many places Dolly can take this pun and stuff it; it makes my brain cringe. However, while still trying to control both the dry heaves and the rage, I started wondering whether this comic were really a candidate for medievalisation. Surely "tablet" wasn't a pun in the fourteenth century. Surely today's melonheaded chuckle couldn't be that old.

Surely it can. "Tablet," according to a certain eminently useful online Middle English dictionary, is from the Old French and can mean both "one of the tablets of stone upon which God wrote the Ten Commandments" and "a small, flattish or compressed cake of a medical substance, a troche, lozenge." The Family Circus is drawing on a pun that has been possible since 1394.

The Keanes are thus missing something from their comic. If they want the true medieval feel, they're going to have to cite an authority in order to prove their pun's antiquity; if they can't find an authority, they need to make one up. I have thoughtfully glossed their comment with the immortal words of Isidore of Seville. I'm sure the Keanes would have done so themselves if they hadn't been running entirely on autopilot since the end of the Vietnam War.

*Metaphorically, of course, this more or less describes the plot of Hamlet.

Nausea Is...

2008-11-06T21:53:00.000-08:00

I'm all late again and stuff, but with luck, I'll be back on schedule tomorrow. This has truly been the Week from Hell.

In 1970, according to the dreaded and terrible beast that is Wikipedia, New Zealander Kim Grove (soon to be Kim Casali) decided it would be a good idea to take the love notes she had written her husband and syndicate them. She called the comic Love Is.... Ever since, we have been plagued by these putrid little "comics," which all begin with the words "Love is..." and sort of go from there. Casali, who died in 1997, has now been succeeded by her son Stefano, who continues to churn out this absolute dreck and will probably do so until the end of time.

The comic has been adroitly summarised by Homer Simpson as being "about two naked eight-year-olds who are married." That's about it, really. The two main characters, who usually appear starkers and seem, horrifyingly enough, to have no toes, are apparently deeply in love. Despite their apparent lack of secondary sexual characteristics, they have spawned at least two even smaller children, also naked. It is incomprehensible to me that anybody publishes this comic when the space it takes up could be used to advertise cold cream or feature a small editorial about how terrible comics are nowadays.

Today's vomit-inducing piece of utter dreck portrays the female Shmoo* showing off her bling,** which has presumably been given to her by the male Shmoo. In other words, this comic is informing us that if one really loves one's significant other, one will provide her with shiny objects that cost a lot of money and still don't manage to hide the fact that she never wears any clothing. I am glad to see that Casali Junior is upholding his mother's devotion to all things pre-feminist. He should draw the female Shmoo holding a little broom and leaking hearts as she merrily sweeps the kitchen floor.***

As usual, the comic is right at home in the Middle Ages, though it has a less positive connotation there. We are once again dealing with an antifeminist text. The author is clearly depicting the prelapsarian lives of Adam and Eve. Adam, as we can see from the smile on his face, is content living as a naive small child in a perfect paradise, but Eve is naturally vain, as are all women. Even in her innocence, she demands pretty presents from her husband. The serpent will be along in a moment (do we see a hint of him in Stefano/Kim's scrawled signature?), and he will play upon Eve's vanity and selfishness in order to convince her to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. She will fall because she is female and weak. Alas for the presence of women on earth! Alas for their shame! Alas for the fact that they do not all have huge breasts and no ability to speak!

We should give Love Is...the recognition it deserves as a source of Christian allegory and reverently remove it to an obscure religious newsletter composed in a small town in the American South. Who's with me?

*Well...she reminds me of a Shmoo. She has just as few toes.
**Oddly enough, there is no medieval equivalent of the word "bling." Who knew?
***In high heels...unless those count as clothes.

You Think You're Tired? I'll Show You Tired

2008-11-05T19:56:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the extreme lateness, everyone. It has been a very busy day. I am still not finished tomorrow's lecture and not sure when I am going to finish, as I can barely stay awake at all. My comment here may therefore be rather short and incoherent.*

I have given up trying to figure out which For Better or For Worse comics are new and which are old.** All that seems to matter is that Lynn Johnston will use every single strip to mock her ex-husband. Yes, I am being a bad English student and reading intent into the comic; no, I don't freaking care. Almost every strip constitutes a poke at John/Rod. It's beginning to get downright embarrassing.

Witness today's comic. Elly actually breaks the fourth wall in the interest of sniping at John...and FBOFW is not a breaking-the-fourth-wall sort of comic. We see perpetually grumpy Elly glowering out at us as if to say: "The men! The terrible, terrible men! They understand not the value of human life! They love puppies more than they love children! How could you leave me, Rod? The terrible men!"

Seeing as the great majority of cartoonists are forever lamenting about the terrible, terrible women, the change is almost refreshing, albeit in a brain-destroying way. Is Johnston painting the lion? In medieval terms, is she simply turning the tables, giving the wise young wife a voice for once?

Or is she going to pursue this vendetta to the grave and beyond? I'm guessing the latter, for some bizarre reason.

*Blueberry.
**Lynn Johnston has started her strip again from the beginning. Some of the comics are reruns; some are freshly made; none are less than maddening.

DRAMA! DRAMA! SOB! SOB! SOB!

2008-11-04T12:33:00.000-08:00

At long last, the interminable Mary Worth plot involving Toby's epic battle with phishers is over, and a new storyline has reared its ugly head. Mary is visiting her old friend Frank, whom we have never seen before and who has presumably been created specifically so that Mary can meddle in the life of an old friend, even though until this point, we didn't think she had any. Frank used to be a skater, but he has retired and passed on the mantle to his daughter Lynn. As has been apparent for a couple of weeks now, Frank spends much of his time yelling at Lynn and telling her that she needs to work harder if she wants to win whatever competition she happens to be preparing for at the moment. It has been clear since something like the second day of the storyline that Mary is going to have to open a can of whoopass on Frank.

What strikes me about this strip is that everything is absolutely soaked in drama all the freaking time. Every word and action may as well have a full orchestra swelling madly behind it; every character is either choked with anger or trembling on the verge of tears; every situation holds the potential for Terrible Tragedy to Strike.* The utter seriousness of every single aspect of the comic tends to obscure the fact that these people live small, mean little lives and don't have the brains God gave a pot of rhododendrons. Good Lord, Lynn. Is that a tear on your cheek? Why don't you just rise up in fury and clock your dad in his smug little face? It would save the rest of us about four and a half months of whining.

Another problem is that all the female characters except Mary look exactly the same. Lynn is the doppelganger of both Vera and Toby; she could also be Dawn with a bad dye-job. For crying out loud! There is more than one type of female face! The characters in Peanuts are easier to tell apart, and they have dots for eyes and squiggles for noses!**

Unlike in the last storyline, Father does certainly not know best here.*** However, the medieval angle is still present: Father may not know best, but he does seem to have complete control over his daughter's life. This comic is radical for the Middle Ages: a work that delves into the heartbreak of a girl forced into a situation over which she has no control. "Skating" is clearly a stand-in for "marriage"; the author is cleverly disguising a critique of marriage as an inane tale of a skating competition. Lynn's dilemma is moving and eloquently expressed in the context of the fourteenth century; only when removed to the twenty-first, when a father with complete control over his daughter would probably be put on display in a museum, does it become jarring.

This comic is wasted on our century. How I long to find a time machine and send it back to where it belongs.

P.S.: A friend has given me a neglected old bike, so I am once again provided with a means of transportation. I think I shall now go and buy a truly expensive lock.

*And every sperm is sacred, or so one would suppose.
**I am angry at the world and want to use a lot of exclamation marks everywhere!
***Oh, okay...Ian isn't Toby's father...but he damned well acts like it.

With Cops Like These, Who Needs Supervillains?

2008-11-03T05:46:00.001-08:00

After my lovely day yesterday--a day that featured a brisk afternoon chase of screaming fury after the guy who had just made off with my bike in broad daylight in a public thoroughfare as the teeming masses stood around and stared*--I am in no mood to tolerate comic-strip stupidity. I'm afraid today's Spider-Man is about to be crucified...pun most definitely intended.

This strip is incredibly stupid. A lot of writing for superhero comics is, very unfortunately, incredibly stupid..."very unfortunately" because as certain writers have proven over the years, it really doesn't have to be. The Golden and Silver Age stuff is especially prone to the following sort of dialogue: "Great Scott! The Dominator has just climbed into his supersonic Punishomobile and is escaping through the time tunnel! I must activate my mind powers and stop him!" For the most part, comic-book dialogue is not quite like this any more. It is sometimes stupid in different ways, but it does not do as much explaining of what you can see right in front of you.

Stan Lee, or whoever is now writing this strip under Stan Lee's name, is still stuck back in the Silver Age. He does not seem to understand that visuals can actually stand in for dialogue. He is also addicted to incredibly moronic plot machinations that have nothing to do with how real people behave. To wit: if you were a cop, and you for some reason decided to enter an antique clock exhibit in the middle of the night, and while you were there, you found that all the clocks were gone and someone had put a man in high-tech handcuffs and left him lying unconscious in the middle of the floor, would you blame the unconscious, handcuffed man for the theft? You would in Stan Lee's world. Why? Who the hell knows?

Only returning to the Antichrist narrative we discussed earlier in relation to Spidey is going to help us here. The cops are clearly under the influence of the Beast; they may think they are simply hauling in a perp, but in truth, they are believing the terrible lies of the False Spidey, the henchman of Satan, and thus rejecting the True Spidey, the human incarnation of God. Never mind that the timelines have been folded back upon themselves to allow Spidey and the Antispidey to exist simultaneously; it's all an allegory anyway. Next up, we will undoubtedly have some sort of crucifixion scene during which Mr. Lee will come up with all sorts of excuses for no one to think of reaching down and removing Spider-Man's mask.**

It's possible, of course, that Spider-Man is merely an incredibly idiotic comic that is taking up precious newspaper space and should be put out of its misery before it starts foaming at the mouth and biting other strips, but I prefer to look at it as medieval allegory. That way, I spend a slightly shorter time each day weeping copiously into my pillow.

*Did I catch him? No. What would I have done if I had caught him? I'm not sure. He was a big burly guy, and I have arms like strands of overcooked spaghetti. However, I did have quite a lot of adrenaline on my side. There could very well have been some semi-successful flailing involved. At any rate, I might have had a bike at this point instead of suddenly and unexpectedly being utterly without transportation. I really love Toronto sometimes.
**The last excuse in this vein belonged to Big Time / Satan, who apparently simply didn't have enough time to pull off the mask while he was stealing an entire clock exhibit and framing his nemesis for it.

Somebody Needs a Hug

2008-11-02T05:58:00.000-08:00

After my blatant misreading of yesterday's B.C., which fooled me with its cunning stupidity, I hesitate to tackle today's Hagar the Horrible, which makes me want to curl up in a corner and suck my thumb. However, duty calls. I shall mock this comic or perish in the attempt.*

I don't know what's going on with poor Hagar lately. Two weeks ago, Hagar was lost at sea, screaming questions to the heavens as a callous, uncaring God looked down upon him and accused him of being a terrible sinner. Today, he and Lucky Eddie are chained in a dungeon. The comic's progression is reminiscent of certain productions of Waiting for Godot; the dialogue is broken up by panel-long pauses as the two characters, trapped forever in a single setting, stare straight ahead and speak, presumably in thin, dead little voices. Even more disconcerting is the way those background rocks keep changing position, as if the light is constantly shifting, picking out different bits of the background from moment to moment. I'm not sure whether each panel takes place at a different time of day or Hagar and Lucky Eddie are chained up next to a highway and are being bathed in the headlights of passing vehicles.

The dialogue itself is chilling in its implications. If one stretches one's imagination, one can see the joke: Hagar and his young friend are caught in an utterly hopeless situation, but they are also kept going by hope. Haw haw...the irony! However, the blank stares of Vladimir and Estra--er--Hagar and Lucky Eddie seem to indicate that this conversation is actually straight; the irony is in the whole situation, not in Hagar's reply. The cartoonist is exploring a medieval-style moral paradox. If hope is, in fact, all that sustains us in this vale of tears we call Life, why do we go on about it when we seem to have no reason to hope? When the lights go out with chilling finality and we are left in the dark, alone, pinned to the wall by the certain knowledge that the end has come and we can do nothing to stop it, how can we claim that hope guides us?**

The only acceptable answer would involve suffering through the slings and arrows of this life in order to reap the benefits in the Next World...but in the narrative landscape of Hagar the Horrible, ruled as it is by a vindictive, fallible deity, the Next World may be simply a pipe dream. The irony of the base paradox expands to include Hagar's entire life, which is, in the end, a tale told by an idiot...a sparrow's flight through the mead hall. "Hope" is just a word. If it is an anchor, it is one dropped into a bottomless ocean.

All right...now I'm depressed.

*Or possibly both.
**Forty-two.

Sometimes, a Cigar is Really Not Just a Cigar

2008-11-01T13:01:00.000-07:00

While the Keane kids continue their insane, miscoloured Hallowe'en adventures, which have evidently gone on all night, the crew over at B.C. have finally gone completely off the deep end. I figured the utterly mad Batman comics had taken B.C. into a realm of chaotic weirdness, but today, I have learned that those strips marked the beginning, not the end, of the journey. Today, ladies and gentlemen, B.C. gives us a hilarious non sequitur and unexpected breasts on a tree.

I do not understand today's B.C. If I squiddle my eyes around just so--a trick I have learned while trying to derive even tiny slivers of meaning from hopelessly terrible student papers--I can see a distant connection between the word "kickoff" and the word "death"; this connection, along with the stunned state of the anonymous B.C. character in panel three,* does not at all justify the invocation of Dr. Kevorkian, who would probably not want to euthanise someone who had just kicked himself in the nose. Unless the little man is ultra-flexible and has kicked so hard that he has somehow driven bits of cartilage up into his brain, he is probably just mildly stunned. Bafflement is mine.

Even more baffling are those tree breasts. Leaving aside the fact that B.C. takes place in prehistoric times, when--y'know--there were no phones, 1) old-fashioned phones do not look like that, and 2) why must the phone be old-fashioned-looking, anyway? Does "obsolete" now automatically equal "prehistoric"? If you're going to have a phone in prehistoric times, why not make it out of stone so that it actually looks like a part of prehistory? It won't make the joke any less stupid, but it will certainly avoid the necessity of giving the tree breasts.**

The strip may do a little better as medieval allegory. The Roman de la Rose is full of suggestive bits involving a besieged rose...and some...penetration...of the rose...kind of...and...at any rate, the Roman de la Rose is the sort of text that would probably welcome a tree with breasts. Dr. Kevorkian can, allegorically, represent Death, Time, Change, or all three, whereas the anonymous footballer is, once again, Everyman. The Coach is probably his Good Deeds (Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide). The football...is...the football is...er...

The meaning of the football is lost in the mists of time!*** It is also outside the scope of this paper! I shall stand behind that statement! Have a good weekend! Thank you, and good night!

*Can you tell them apart? I can't tell them apart. Some of the male characters have distinguishing features, but the others could all be the same person. What's the point, Hart Descendants? Can't you give one of them a mole?
**It is not a necessity to me. It may be a necessity to some people.
***And, simultaneously, stolen from Peanuts.

Happy Hallowe'en! Aren't Gender Stereotypes Fun?

2008-10-31T06:11:00.000-07:00

Ah, Hallowe'en...that favourite holiday of cartoonists everywhere. Christmas leads to a lot of soppy, heart-warming goop, and Valentine's Day allows explorations of the human heart,* but only Hallowe'en offers a certain kind of licence: an opportunity to let loose, turn things upside down, bring out the monstrous sides of one's characters.

Some cartoonists embrace this opportunity. Some ignore it. Many completely squander it, possibly because they are phoning it in.** Jeff and Bil Keane take it and bludgeon it upside the head until it stops moving.

In the comic presented below, Billy, Jeffy, and Dolly eagerly await sunset so that they can go beg candy from their neighbours. Billy is dressed as Iron Man, probably because an Iron Man movie came out this summer. Jeffy is dressed as Batman, probably because a Batman movie came out this summer. Dolly is dressed as...

............Sarah Palin?

Gosh! I guess little boys want to be superheroes, whereas little girls want to be ultra-conservative, moose-hunting figureheads who have been shunted into positions of power not because they deserve to be but because somebody is trying to pretend he's progressive! Let's celebrate Sarah Palin as the closest a woman can come to being "super"! Excuse me while I go kick several walls in impotent fury, then throw up! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh...

The Keanes have also, of course, demonstrated that they don't know their superheroes. Iron Man and Batman are from different comic-book universes, but more importantly, they represent almost opposite superhero impulses. Iron Man, especially lately in Marvel's Civil War storyline, tends to ally himself with the U.S. government, whereas Batman is a vigilante who works outside the law and frequently comes into conflict with it.*** In between them, we have Dolly as a potential Vice President who thinks she is a "maverick" and, while happily promoting the Republican party, seems determined to undermine it at every turn and promote herself as the next-but-one President of the United States. I'm getting mixed messages on the politics here, Keanes. Or did you expect me to read the comic in an entirely brain-dead manner? Oh, wait...you probably did.

Medievalising this comic actually helps it marginally. No, there were no superheroes per se in the Middle Ages, but our "superheroes" are really just "heroes" under another name. Medieval texts, especially romances, are not afraid to present the larger-than-life hero, with his monstrous personality and his tendency to tear off heads with his bare hands;**** in fact, in a few little poems based on the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, Christ himself appears as such a hero. Significantly, other poems and stories elevate real historical figures to hero status. Several romances deal with Alexander the Great in this fashion, and one does it to Richard the Lionheart, who appears as the son of a demon princess: a man who wields a huge axe, consumes human flesh, and is frequently compared to the devil.

It could be that Dolly's Palin represents this type of national hero. The Keanes are implying that though she may seem monstrous, she will use her monstrosity to beat back the outsiders and make the States strong. Iron Man and Batman are all very well, but Sarah Palin is a real-life American hero.***** Right? Right? McCain-Palin 2008!

My name is Angry Kem. I am a Canadian. This message has not been paid for by any existing political party. I assume my politics are becoming rather clear by this point, but try not to worry about it. We Canadians tend to become rather passionate about the American presidential election because though it affects us quite a lot, there's not a damn thing we can do about it.

*Well...the part of the human heart attached to 1) the greeting card industry, 2) the heart-shaped chocolate industry, and/or 3) horrible, horrible glurge.
**What am I saying? They are obviously phoning it in. They don't care. They are forcing us to bear their unforgivable trash because they believe that the fact that they are all great-grandchildren of great early-twentieth-century cartoonists entitles them to steady paycheques. I hate them all.
***Yes, I am simplifying. I am simplifying a lot. At this point, feel free to exclaim, "Golly, she's simplifying a lot!" Then go shopping at the comic-book store to let off a bit of steam.
****Or, occasionally, his bear hands.
*****I would like to make it extremely clear that this sentence is meant to be read in a highly sarcastic tone of voice. I in no way condone a reading of this sentence that does not include either sarcasm or irony. Thank you, and good night.

I Am Not in a Good Mood, and This Comic Doesn't Help

2008-10-30T10:40:00.001-07:00

As I have now finished frantically marking and lecturing for the day and must only spend the next several hours working feverishly to finish tomorrow's webcomic--while I'm not practising music with my band, I mean--I can finally get to the Idiotic Comic of the Day. It's just too bad for Leroy and Loretta Lockhorn that I have a headache and am still busy kicking myself after my disastrous lecture.*

The stupidity that imbues The Lockhorns becomes even more intense today as Loretta openly displays the hatefulness that characterises her marriage. My God, woman...if you loathe him that much, get a divorce and stop torturing us with your pointless griping. Backhanded griping is one thing; sticking a photo of your husband to a dark board with his left eye in the centre target seems an indication that you might be happier not married to him. Honestly...anybody want to draw these morons up some divorce papers? If I could, I'd do it myself. What the hell is the point? Loveless marriages are no longer traps for helpless women. PAY ATTENTION, CARTOONIST.

This comic only makes sense if it takes place in the Middle Ages, when Loretta would not only not have had the power to divorce Leroy but would not have been expected to love or even like him. Clearly, Loretta is a rich merchant's daughter foisted off on a landless knight (his name, after all, means "the king"; it is possible he is a sixteenth cousin of royalty with really optimistic parents) who needs her money, even as she needs his title. They can't stand each other but stay together for convenience's sake. Their children will be wealthy minor nobility; that is all they care about, though they are beginning to think that they may not ever have children. Here, Loretta gleefully flaunts her marriage's farcical nature. The cartoonist is commenting satirically on marriage as a medieval institution and cynically implying that its reality does not live up to its ideal.

It's really too bad it happens to be 2008 at the moment. It really is.

*At one point, I found myself staring at my notes and realising that I didn't understand what the hell they were saying. I fumbled around for an excruciating minute or two, then gave up, said something about how one's brain stopped working when one stayed up to four to mark, and moved on. The students were all catatonic, and I just wanted to go home.

Monstrous Races...Philosophical Musings...So Much Fun...

2008-10-28T22:06:00.000-07:00

On Monday, Garfield was hallucinatory.

On Tuesday, Garfield was utterly bizarre.

Now it is Wednesday. Wednesday's Garfield rocks my world...albeit only in a medieval context, of course.

Four of Garfield's characters--Jon, Garfield, Odie, and Pooky*--have spent the past three days arbitrarily swapping heads. I'm assuming that on or just after Hallowe'en, Jon is going to Wake Up and Find It Was All a Dream. For the moment, however, we're getting cat-headed men, man-headed cats, cat-headed dogs, dog-headed teddy bears, and teddy-bear-headed dogs (with big doggy tongues). When Jon's head is on Garfield's body, he communicates in thought bubbles rather than speech bubbles, while when Garfield's head is on Jon's body, the opposite rule applies. You have no idea how disturbing newspaper comics can get until you take a look at this week's Garfield.**

One might posit that Jim Davis is running out of ideas*** and is thus simply drawing**** random garbage as he hums madly to himself to drown out the voices. However, one might also see today's strip as a thoughtful exploration of monstrosity via medieval dream-vision imagery. I am inclined to choose option #2.

What is humanity? St. Augustine muses on this very question and can only come up with a wishy-washy answer.***** The problem of the categorisation of the monstrous races is one that haunts the Middle Ages. If dog-headed people who bark instead of talking nonetheless demonstrate signs of human intelligence, are they not human? Yet...if we categorise them as human, do we have to view them as equal to us? If we accuse a monster of cannibalism, are we not admitting his humanity, since cannibals, by definition, consume the flesh of creatures just like them? If we maintain the monster is an animal, how can we call him a cannibal?

The debate is complex and nuanced, and today's Garfield captures it perfectly. The hybrid characters seem unsure which of them is the dreamer and which the dream; they thus symbolise, in the world of the dream vision, the subject's anxiety about his identity and even reality. The hybridity of the characters points to the monster debate, characterised by the inconclusive, uneasy conflict between human and subhuman, Self and Other, inside and outside. The dreamer--Jon, perhaps?--is lost in a sea of uncertainty, unable to reconcile his view of himself as a perpetual outsider (a monster?) with his own humanity. He has lost touch with his essence and therefore dreams himself as fragmented.

What he needs to do, of course, is get himself a spirit guide--possibly a vain, sarcastic eagle with personality issues--and set off on a journey through a paradisal landscape full of madly singing birds. He will eventually run into a highly symbolic situation that he will completely misunderstand, then muddle about until he has a revelation and tries to yank someone's head off someone's shoulders and replace it with his own. Then he'll wake up. He'll be relieved it was all a dream until he finds an eagle's feather under his pillow.

Sadly, this is Garfield we're talking about here. There will be no spirit guide. The nonsense will continue until the end of the week, then lapse again into stupidity. Jim Davis is simply not aware of the philosophical implications of his own comic. Someone really ought to keep him informed.

*Pooky is a teddy bear but also, in a sense, a character. Don't ask.
**Of course, there's also Monday's Heart of the City, which features a little boy and girl dressed up as a pimp and a ho.
***Or that Jim Davis ran out of ideas decades ago, but that's a whole other rant.
****Or, really, cut-and-pasting. Damn it, Jim. (Okay...to be fair, panels 1 and 2 have some tiny, tiny differences. At best, however, there was tracing involved. Do these "people" never change their poses?)
*****Not hugely unusual for him, but still.

An Open Letter to the Best Cartoonists Ever

2008-10-28T06:09:00.000-07:00

Dear Creators of Crock:

I am writing to commend you on your recent series of comics dealing with the starvation policies of the French Foreign Legion. There are some, of course, who claim that there is no series and that you are simply brain-dead zombies who do not particularly care when you end up recycling a joke that you used just nineteen days before, but I have faith in you. I believe in your mission to bring this terrible, terrible situation to the attention of the world, or at least the three or four world dwellers who still follow your comic strip.

Your swift return to the subject of shoe consumption is appreciated, especially since the idea's medieval repercussions raise the spectre of cannibalism. I am also pleased by the current variation, in which Crock is dismayed by the fact that one of the legionnaires is either a cross-dresser or a woman. Obviously, it would be appalling if someone other than a badly drawn straight white man managed to enter the ranks. We denizens of the fourteenth--er, twenty-first--er, whatever--century must take arms against a sea of people not like us. We also must destroy the Internet. It is Satan. I'm sure you agree.

Your edgy humour, which does not at all steal from M*A*S*H and probably a lot of other army-related books and films I have not read or seen because I'm just not that interested, thrills me. I wish you would contact Mr. Chaucer and ask him if he would turn your wonderful story into a verse romance. I just know he would do a fantastic job of it.

Please keep up the good work. Your gripping comic is keeping me right on the edge of my seat. What will happen next? Who will eat whom? Why does your current "starvation" comic follow hard upon that "Grossie is a bad cook" comic? Is she cooking shoes? Is she? The suspense is killing me. What a good job you are doing, creators of Crock.

Yours sincerely,

Angry Kem

Goddes Bones...A Twist!

2008-10-26T21:18:00.000-07:00

There are some days on which I search frantically through the comics, trying to find just one with the right medieval atmosphere. On other days, way too many brilliantly idiotic strips seem to fall into my lap. Today is one of those other days. I have been hard put to it to decide on a comic. Should I, I asked myself not long ago, choose Blondie, in which Blondie and Dagwood wander so far through their neighbourhood that they actually enter the Other World? Or should I go for Crock, whose misogyny is so acute that the comic is a good candidate to be put on trial for hate crimes? What about For Better or For Worse, which features a screamy, screamy Elly who reacts to a quite ordinary situation in an utterly unreasonable way? Or Garfield, in which we see some of the monstrous races: a cat-headed man and a man-headed cat?* What to do? How to choose? Why can't this happen to me every day?

In the end, however, I gravitated towards Mark Trail. It hurt me to give up Blondie, Crock, Garfield, and Foob,** but Crock's Grossie will certainly be mocked again, Elly screams for no reason quite frequently, Garfield is Garfield, and I suspect Blondie and Dagwood will be having Hallowe'en adventures all week. Mark's encounter with Satan, however, has to be dealt with now.

The last time we checked up on Our Hero, he was rescuing a damsel from a dragon, as would any verray, parfit gentil knyght (or, in fact, saint). Now that very damsel, who is carrying a bit of a torch for her rescuer, has discovered that Mark is opposed to her dastardly plan to drain the wetlands so that she can build--as she puts it in Saturday's comic--"new homes and shopping centres." Mark has not yet realised that Sue is the person against whom he is fighting the good fight, but the revelation cannot be too far off.

Today, Sue takes Mark for a long walk on the beach so that she can recruit him to her side. In fact, she tempts him; she dangles power in front of his nose, luring him to her with the promise that if he works for her, he will be able to have his cake and eat it too.

Good Lord. Is the fair Sue, our very own damsel in distress, actually the devil? The scene is ominously reminiscent of the bit in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 4:1-11, Mark 1:12-13, Luke 4:1-13) in which the Tempter encounters Christ in the wilderness and promises him all sorts of booty if Jesus will only worship him. "Susan," after all, differs from "Satan" by only two letters. Sue appeared to need rescuing from the alligator/dragon/devil, but in fact, she must have set up the encounter in order to gain Mark/Christ's trust. Now she probably thinks she has him believing she's the allegorical representation of Truth or some such thing, whereas she's actually the Father of Lies. Be wary, Mark! Do not fall for the blandishments of this seeming maiden! Keep protecting the wetlands and preaching the gospel of Environmentalism! If she tries to convince you that you would look good in a beard, stand firm!***

Will Mark fall, or will he resist temptation and go on to become a true Type of Christ? Read Mark Trail tomorrow, plus probably every day for the next three years, in order to find out.

*All these links should remain functional forever. Unlike Nancy, these four comics are hosted by the Houston Chronicle, which has a wonderful comics page offering archives that go back to something like 1998 (for some strips, at least).
**It would take an awfully long time to explain why many people call For Better or For Worse Foob. Just take it from me that it richly deserves it.
***Most of the villains of Mark Trail have facial hair. Sue doesn't. I am still deeply suspicious of her. I think she may be sprouting a little blonde moustache.