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How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
Goon goes to doctor. Says she's depressed by bad ugly comic about atrocious looking people doing incoherent things. Says strip seems harsh and cruel. Says she feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead for the Moon Maid and friends is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, "Treatment is simple. Great comic Dick Tracy's Minit Mysteries is in the papers tonight. Go and read it. That should pick you up." Goon bursts into tears. Says, "But doctor...that was Dick Tracy's Minit Mysteries.”

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Julet Esqu
May 6, 2007




The Vosgian Beast posted:

Sometimes you wonder why we even bother having a social contract if a nationally syndicated comic strip is just gonna let a woman in a sexy red dress flash her tits to entice her husband, who is holding her two infant daughters.

Now, come on, it's not as if there have ever been any negative consequences to sexualizing and eroticizing the act of breastfeeding an infant.

BigDave
Jul 14, 2009

Taste the High Country

Julet Esqu posted:

Now, come on, it's not as if there have ever been any negative consequences to sexualizing and eroticizing the act of breastfeeding an infant.

It can cause the child to become an artist who doesn't actually do any art.

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

Julet Esqu posted:

Now, come on, it's not as if there have ever been any negative consequences to sexualizing and eroticizing the act of breastfeeding an infant.

Thinking about the anime where everyone's magic powers are fueled by drinking from a girl's tit. They have all kinds of deadly serious magic politics fights plus breastfeeding. I watched a few eps in a fit of deranged curiosity but the writing wasn't very good.

EBB
Feb 15, 2005

Was there an art shift in Dick Tracy recently?

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

Here's the rest of Bechdel's intro from the Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (spoiler for nudity):

Case in point, here we see Bechdel tossing out a bunch of queer texts by reactionaries.
-Camille Paglia is a huge poo poo head with a bunch of typical "lousy SJWs!!" fist-shaking in her most recent work. Turn offs: trans people, affirmative action. Turn ons: NAMBLA, climate denialism
-Margarethe Cammermeyer was a colonel in the National Guard who was an influence on the repeal of Don't Ask/Don't Tell. Serving in Silence was a 1995 Glenn Close movie based on her life, which I guess was based on a book?
-Andrew Sullivan is a Catholic pundit who has wheeled all over the map of conservative ideology. Virtually Normal, also 1995, was basically an assimilationist polemic which made fair inroads into popular consciousness.
-Marvin Liebman was a former leftist who hopped the rails to right-wing organizing in the late 40s, focusing specifically on Anti-Communism and the Israeli lobby. He came out in 1990 and published Coming Out Conservative in 1992. It, like him, is deeply tiresome.

-Judith Butler is not one of those people. Gender Trouble (1990) is a stone-cold classic of queer theory and feminist theory, and although it's very very widely misread, I still love it. Butler's basic point in it is that gender is not a fixed quality in people but "performative," ie. something that is learned, that is adjusted to fit the world around a given person, is, basically, a social phenomenon much more than it is an ontological or biological one. Rather than "having a gender" people "are gendered" by the world or "do gender" in various conventional or subversive ways. This is not to say that she's glibly saying that gender is a choice or anything like that, despite prevalent misreadings along those lines-- rather, that instead of daydreaming about gender as an absolute thing that exists outside of systems of interpallation, gender as a set of rules and guidelines and affects is always a part of those systems, and even one's innate sense of gender (see also the trans theorist Julie Serrano) is articulated through socially mediated choice, no matter the degree to which that articulation is an act of self-determination. I'm sure I did a crummy job explaining a wonderful and very complicated book, so go out and read it!


After an intro like that Bechdel really should not have dropped so many strips. I'd be OK with dropping the half-dozen or so meta-strips, in which the characters are supposed to be actors playing their roles in the strip, but generally, if the idea is that the reader is to evaluate the message of her work, she shouldn't be omitting large sections of it.

I'm sorry to hear the therapist strips got the boot. As a rule they weren't particularly funny (I don't think that was the goal) but I do think they give insight into Mo, and it would be interesting to look at Bechdel's take on therapy, which is pretty important to her (it's the focus of Are You My Mother?).

I don't think the last few years of strips were ever published by Firebrand, and that's probably why they're all included. Bechdel may have wanted to produce a curated, "improved" (to her mind) collection but I guess not to the point that she'd consign strips to oblivion.

It's my impression that Camille Paglia has gotten a lot more awful over the years. I thought she was interesting in the 90's but lately she's a monster. Is it her, or is it my own political opinions improving over time?

Sullivan is a weird case - generally pretty awful, but he did have a significant role in getting equal marriage started.

Since this is a comics thread, here's an Existentialist Comics with a parody version of Judith Butler.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

curtadams posted:

It's my impression that Camille Paglia has gotten a lot more awful over the years. I thought she was interesting in the 90's but lately she's a monster. Is it her, or is it my own political opinions improving over time?

I think it's more her addressing cultural issues more directly than she did in the 90s and even aughts-- when I was in college Sexual Personae was on a lot of shelves, largely I think because it had a reputation for being provocative, even though even then the critical needle was beginning to swerve away from it, and looking it up now a lot of its reception even back in 1990 was pretty brutal.

Parahexavoctal
Oct 10, 2004

I AM NOT BEING PAID TO CORRECT OTHER PEOPLE'S POSTS! DONKEY!!

Although the feminist history lesson is quite interesting, this installment of Keeping Up With the Joneses may have been published before women in the US had the vote.

I have no idea what they mean by "taking the bone out of his nose", but "taking the bone out of his head" is "make him not be a bonehead" - i.e., less stupid. Am I the only one who finds that flavor of abusiveness to be just a tiny bit Ed Kudlicky?

(inflation calculator says $25 then is $322 now)

Only registered members can see post attachments!

Ghostlight
Sep 25, 2009

maybe for one second you can pause; try to step into another person's perspective, and understand that a watermelon is cursing me



EBB posted:

Was there an art shift in Dick Tracy recently?
The last few weeks have been a guest artist.


Bogor 1976




The Secret Life of Plants was a new age book that promoted plant perception, a pseudo-scientific field that proposes plants exhibit sentience or can be 'controlled' through various means such as ESP. Things that belong to this field that you might recognise is the idea of talking or playing music to plants to promote their growth and that one study you've probably heard mentioned but never a lot of details about which revealed that plants feel pain because the details about it are that it was done with a lie detector and the measured stress responses were to things like a shrimp dying in a separate room. Weirdly enough very few people could replicate the results of this study and the author would later go on to prove that he could measure telepathic perception in all living things, including yoghurt and sperm.
Fun fact, Scientology's alien ghost detecting equipment was derived from Hubbard's interest in this telepathic plant distress study.

Anyway, botanists almost uniformly trashed the Secret Life of Plants as nonsense. Of its two authors, one would go on to write a book about the very real science of dowsing, and the other would branch off to concern himself with things like why the Pyramid of Giza is a perfect scale model of the northern hemisphere and other such scientific enquiries about brown people's inabilities to stack rocks that today we would commonly relegate to the ancient aliens framework.

Which is all to say that I enjoy Bogor intentionally torturing this plant.

Ghostlight
Sep 25, 2009

maybe for one second you can pause; try to step into another person's perspective, and understand that a watermelon is cursing me



Parahexavoctal posted:

I have no idea what they mean by "taking the bone out of his nose", but "taking the bone out of his head" is "make him not be a bonehead" - i.e., less stupid. Am I the only one who finds that flavor of abusiveness to be just a tiny bit Ed Kudlicky?
It may be entirely literal - the early 1900s had cosmetic nose jobs available, and I found one anecdote which mentions the procedure as part of a series of attempts to cure what I assume (it doesn't say precisely) was a case of sleep apnea.

FrumpleOrz
Feb 12, 2014

Perhaps you have not been to the *Playground*.
The *Playground* is for Taalo and for Orz, but *Campers* can go.
It more fun than several.
You can go there for too much fun.
I'm glad that Bechdel stuff is being posted and thanks for the commentary and context notes.

The Lockhorns


Brewster Rockit Space GUy A yahoo email address in 2020. Wow.


On The Fastrack


No Safe Havens on Sundays!

Stone Soup


Kevin & Kell


Mother Goose & Grimm


Hagar The Horrible


Sherman's Lagoon

Alhazred
Feb 16, 2011




Zelda

Strontium
Aug 28, 2009

Dexter didn't much care for the party.
Daddy Daze


Take It From the Tinkersons


Dark Side of the Horse


Fort Knox

thesonofmothman
Feb 12, 2016

Pelican, a Bag Man

Discendo Vox posted:

But now I want to see Jane's World for contrast.

Sure thing!

Jane's World







Took 6 strips to get the titular character! Hopefully we learn some other names soon.

Jucika






Classic Luan






Reading these old strips really astounds me. You can really see him become a better writer when you compare them to today's strip.

But somehow they're just as awful!

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

Suddenly I'm thinking Bernice can't possibly do much worse.

EBB
Feb 15, 2005

There's something about Jane's World that makes me think of Cathy. The social anxiety in Bechdel's comic feels really...real. Jan'e World felt a little more like Jane getting into predicaments and going Ack! the last time we went through it. Maybe I'll see something different this time.

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

I find it funny that Jane's the one who I'm being told is a narcissistic self-insert, given that it's her alleged friend who's being really callous about losing Jane's dog. That poor dog. By far the most sympathetic character to date.

Samovar
Jun 4, 2011

When I want to relax, I read an essay by Engels. When I want something more serious, I read Corto Maltese.


Haifisch posted:

Footrot Flats


I really like this strip, regardless of it being more often that not gag-a-day, the art is good and the characters don't make me want to tear my hair out

Strontium posted:

Dark Side of the Horse


Ah, Horace has been reading Invincible

Anyway, in today's Corto Maltese: Jesus, CALM DOWN Estevez, you're going to give yourself a coronary!, or You know, after playing Disco Elysium and now reading about how this case is tied up with land ownership and how the owners of this land try to hide the information behind this ownership makes me say: 'Come back, Robespierre, all is forgiven', or O'Maley and Estevez try their hands at playing the game



Angular Cyrus
May 29, 2007

everything is so much harder than it looks
King Aroo 12/6/53


They'll Do It Every Time 11/30/46


Mopsy 12/10/42

Mercedes Colomar
Nov 1, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Nooooo, no no nooooooooo

Family Circus


Rose is Rose


One Big Happy


Foob


Compu-Toon
is yesterdays

Bizarro

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

Cheer Up Boss Dharma



RandomPauI
Nov 24, 2006


Grimey Drawer
Magic boob milk hero show was a porno right?

Kennel
May 1, 2008

BAWWW-UNH!
Surgeon's Tales



Nancy



Dustin


Mandrake


Man in Black


Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011


I was under the impression that Gilchrist made up Sluggo's uncles who are always on the road and are also Vietnam vets. This strip suggests either that Jaimes is integrating Gilchrist's worldbuilding, which seems unlikely, or that Sluggo has always had uncles who are working on the road offscreen instead of taking care of Sluggo. Does anybody remember any Bushmiller strip making reference to Sluggo's uncles?

Kennel
May 1, 2008

BAWWW-UNH!

Some Guy TT posted:

I was under the impression that Gilchrist made up Sluggo's uncles who are always on the road and are also Vietnam vets. This strip suggests either that Jaimes is integrating Gilchrist's worldbuilding, which seems unlikely, or that Sluggo has always had uncles who are working on the road offscreen instead of taking care of Sluggo. Does anybody remember any Bushmiller strip making reference to Sluggo's uncles?

I thought about making the same comment. Bushmiller had several strips with a singular uncle (sometimes looking completely different), but I think the trucker uncles are Gilchrist's creation.

I guess it's fine to use them as an excuse for Sluggo living alone (even though it still does not make sense in modern day setting).

His Divine Shadow
Aug 7, 2000

I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
Sluggos parents were killed by a mugger after leaving the theater, happened right in front of his eyes.

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

That it's uncles plural, not a singular uncle or his aunt and uncle, is the main thing that makes it stick out. I'm choosing to interpret this in my headcanon as meaning that Sluggo's uncles are gay. The ultimate gently caress you to Gilchrist's weird as hell attempts at continuity.

Ghostlight
Sep 25, 2009

maybe for one second you can pause; try to step into another person's perspective, and understand that a watermelon is cursing me



Some Guy TT posted:

I was under the impression that Gilchrist made up Sluggo's uncles who are always on the road and are also Vietnam vets. This strip suggests either that Jaimes is integrating Gilchrist's worldbuilding, which seems unlikely, or that Sluggo has always had uncles who are working on the road offscreen instead of taking care of Sluggo. Does anybody remember any Bushmiller strip making reference to Sluggo's uncles?
Sluggo's introductory week to the comic also introduced his uncle Harry who generated a week of "man is this guy lazy or what" jokes at the poor before disappearing off the planet without explanation. The trucker uncles were wholly part of Gilchrist's origin story retcon for Sluggo to make him more than a kid who showed up one day to say "hi I moved into the neighbourhood wanna date me? also i'm poor"

Ghostlight
Sep 25, 2009

maybe for one second you can pause; try to step into another person's perspective, and understand that a watermelon is cursing me



if you want to know how sluggo supports himself as an orphan without a caregiver then according to 'how to read nancy' bushmiller has actually answered this exact question

Ernie Bushmiller posted:

I assume he delivers groceries on Saturday or something like that.

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

gay travelling barista hipsters whose VIET NAM VET caps are in ironic reference to cà phê đá

beards remain exactly the same

Kennel
May 1, 2008

BAWWW-UNH!

amigolupus
Aug 25, 2017

Thanks for posting DtWOF, How Wonderful. Aside from how cool it is to learn more about queer culture, it's kind of interesting comparing it to Zelda. The characters in DtWOF come across as a bunch of good people with their own quirks and flaws, and when Mo starts to ramble to her friends, the others provide some reasonable viewpoints to counter her so it feels like an actual discussion. Meanwhile, Zelda and Cesar's toxic relationship just makes me go, "ugh, straight people".


Ed, you piece of poo poo. You constantly cheat at your diet and even flaunt it in front of your wife. And you get mad at the idea that she'd share her concerns about your health with your doctor? gently caress you!

Some Guy TT posted:

That it's uncles plural, not a singular uncle or his aunt and uncle, is the main thing that makes it stick out. I'm choosing to interpret this in my headcanon as meaning that Sluggo's uncles are gay. The ultimate gently caress you to Gilchrist's weird as hell attempts at continuity.

This honestly feels like the best solution for that. Olivia Jaimes wouldn't bring up "uncles" without good reason, so maybe she's got something planned out.


Holy poo poo. :lol:

Tiggum
Oct 23, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


Haifisch posted:

Dick Tracy
Wait, what? Mysta bought what? Who is that in the last panel?

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

RandomPauI posted:

Magic boob milk hero show was a porno right?

Surprisingly, it was not. It would fit right in with other teen shounen shows except for the breastfeeding.

RandomPauI
Nov 24, 2006


Grimey Drawer
I know that you are telling the truth about it not being a porno or a satire. After all, 9CL is somehow a thing that is in newspapers. But I want you to be lying.

Ghostlight
Sep 25, 2009

maybe for one second you can pause; try to step into another person's perspective, and understand that a watermelon is cursing me



Tiggum posted:

Wait, what? Mysta bought what? Who is that in the last panel?
That's Scarmony, the felon of this Minit Mystery who kidnapped Mysta because she stopped writing to her in jail due to being kidnapped and brainwashed receiving letters about the pony farm they had both planned to buy when Scarmony was out of jail before said kidnapping and brainwashing that Mysta has now bought and is writing about to Scarmony in jail.

LazyQ
Feb 22, 2011

Mämmilä



Hurriganes was a Finnish rock band, considered to be a pioneer in Finnish rock scene and the first to really get attention abroad. Their music is pretty straightforward rock 'n roll, often with nonsense lyrics, and generally non-threatening which contributed to their mainstream acceptance.

gleebster
Dec 16, 2006

Only a howler
Pillbug
Andrew Sullivan ad Camille Paglia have always been awful people. And since they have made money by being awful, it is unlikely that they will ever stop.

Anyway, in Juliet Jones, Kiwi has an eye for the protagonist.

~Coxy
Dec 9, 2003

R.I.P. Inter-OS Sass - b.2000AD d.2003AD

Monty

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Cowslips Warren
Oct 29, 2005

What use had they for tricks and cunning, living in the enemy's warren and paying his price?

Grimey Drawer

Some Guy TT posted:

I find it funny that Jane's the one who I'm being told is a narcissistic self-insert, given that it's her alleged friend who's being really callous about losing Jane's dog. That poor dog. By far the most sympathetic character to date.

Jane's not narcissistic, but she is a self-insert who looks just like the author (and happens to get a lot of girls who want to date her). The goon who called it a Cathy strip is pretty spot on, though I don't remember anything about Cathy other than her going on diets and going ACK to various things. It's not a horrible comic like Holbrook crap, but it is nothing but stupid fluff that reads like a fanfic/fanart.

And I....have no idea what was happening in Dick Tracy but I almost think it's worse than Intelligent Life.

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