Slightly Behind

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

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

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!

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

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

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?

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.