Comic Strips 2020: Sumpin Arful

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > BSS: Bisexual Super Son > Comic Strips 2020: Sumpin Arful

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

readingatwork posted:

Calvin and Hobbes (Feb 22-23, 1987)

My son did more or less that for his 3rd grade picture. He put an enormous amount of hair gel in his hair and tried to make it into a fauxhawk. He didn't succeed and ended up looking like he was wearing a roman helmet made out of hair. Years later he got embarrassed by the picture and tried to destroy all the copies of it, including the yearbook, but I still have a copy he didn't find.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2020 15:26

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# ¿ Jan 22, 2025 06:49

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

Hostile V posted:

(re: the end of "Retail")
Would it be more accurate if the sign said "COMING SOON: SPIRIT OF HALLOWEEN!"?

More like "XXX FEET AVAILABLE FOR LEASE".

There was a large consumer electronics store near me - in an economically healthy area in Southern California - that stood empty for 20 YEARS after it closed. It finally became a dialysis center recently.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2020 16:26

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

I also, for the sake of safety first, went back through the Essential DtWOF and read the whole thing, partially for fun but partially to see how bad the transphobic stuff was. I'm happy to report that it never gets very bad, and is only ever really uncritically indulged in here and there with Mo expressing resentment over being mistaken for a trans man. Bechdel does frequently later show us characters being naive, ignorant, or condescending about trans people, but rarely without a more informed character there to correct them and educate them.

I have been a big fan of Bechdel all the way back to the first storyline strip (the first I saw; I didn't see the early standalones until I bought the first collection). At the time, I thought Bechdel was deliberately tackling issues that were controversial in the community without taking strong sides on then, including bisexuality and trans, which were much more controversial within the community then than they are now. Presenting both sides and vacillating on which one is correct is an essential part of Bechdel's "observer" style, as exemplified by Fun Home, where she never resolves the crux of the book (did her father commit suicide, or was it an accident?) even though she dwells on it extensively.

I think part of the reason she made Mo annoying and harder to identify with was that as the protagonist and obvious author insert, Mo's proclamations would naturally tend to carry authentic authorial authority* and I think Bechdel wanted to weaken that. (It's also a lot easier to write jokes about seriously flawed characters.) Mo is *supposed* to be wrong sometimes and I don't think it's appropriate to hold it against the strip when she is.

At the time I remember it being rather contentious whether "Lesbian and Gay" should be extended to "Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual" and in the 80's and 90's how trans people should fit into the community produced some heated debate. I think it's just the style of the strip that some more benighted attitudes would get at least a semi-sympathetic presentation and that genuine opinions from within the community rarely get a strong comeuppance even if they "deserve" it. Real people think and even do bad things sometimes, and I think Bechdel wants to show that, and it made the strip feel much more "real" to me than any other comic from the LGBTQ community.

* yes that's a joking nod to her penchant for alliteration.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2020 04:09

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

Thanks, I'll take a look. I might also take this as an opportunity to try to track down used copies of the old Firebrand Books editions, which also have the bonus "novellas" in the back. I swear to god I'm going to tear my apartment apart trying to find The Indelible Dykes to Watch Out For which has a lot of neat commentary as well as strips from the old calendars and stuff.

I've got most of the Firebrand Books. I didn't get Dykes and Sundry Carbon-Based Lifeforms to Look Out For and I can't find my copy of Dykes to Watch Out For: The Sequel The rest are scattered around my room as your posts have inspired me to re-read them. I could scan some - what would be a good format?

The cover of this particular Firebrand has a throwaway joke I really liked: Mo is washing her clothes with a biodegradable soap called "Dinge!" Which is another joke that probably isn't funny anymore, because laundry detergents have enzymes now and the biodegradable ones can be quite good. But at the time they were awful. I had a roommate once who insisted on a biodegradable dish soap, which apparently was a growth medium for fungi, because after just a few days a new dish sponge would just reek.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2020 04:46

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

-Believe it or not the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), which cracked down on workplace discrimination based on disability and "required" public places to work towards accessibility, wasn't passed until 1990.

I do want to point out that this strip about a disabilities rights panel stars two able-bodied characters. Much like the trans stuff, I feel like Bechdel starts here from a place of more or less benign tunnel-vision. A disabled character will turn up in a bit who's pretty well-written, although, as you might imagine, Mo is immediately an rear end in a top hat to her.

I got a very different take on this when it came out. I remember that at the time the lesbian and gay community made a point of trying to include people with disabilities, even if there weren't any in particular expected to show up. The attitude of general society was more that somebody with disabilities was supposed to ask for accommodations, and a group of able-bodied organizers preparing like this before even getting requests would be considered eccentric. So my take on this is it's establishing the group as part of the LGB (then) sub-culture.

(oblique spoiler)Of course it's more a setup for later events in the strip.

Reading these reposts I'm reminded how many of the ideas here have really stuck with me over the years. "Reading something by somebody's who's not pale, white, and male is not going to kill you!" really stuck with me and altered my attitude toward the whole "great literary canon".

curtadams fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Apr 21, 2020

# ¿ Apr 21, 2020 00:32

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

Edit: Oops! #25 is two pages-- which explains why I thought it just ended without a punchline. I've attached the rest of it.

First of all, a huge thanks to curtisadams for hooking me up with one of the DtWOF strips not included in the Essential. Here's a bonus one:
Dykes to Watch Out For #25 (1988)

It's interesting to look at the "Dykes to NOT Watch Out For" strips Bechdel chose to drop from the collection. If I were the artist, I'd have included them all on general principles but I guess she wanted a stronger/more coherent summary book. So, granting her choice to edit a significant fraction out (after all she has a MacArthur Genius Grant, and I ---- don't), I want to talk about whether I agree with her decisions. Some of them are "I can see why she dropped it", and some of them make me go "What was she thinking?"

This one is one where I can see why she dropped it. A lot of it is that it's a "filler" strip, not important to the ongoing plots, and it's similar to another "filler" How Wonderful already posted:

How Wonderful! posted:

In the original run they were published two months apart (biweekly) and the similarity wasn't jarring. But in a collection they'd be just one or two pages apart and a reader might feel like Bechdel was just rehashing. Of the two, I think the published one is much stronger. Sparrow's arguments are stronger in the published one, and the art is more varied, with Sparrow's mug-slamming delivery on her conclusion and more changes in perspective and focus. The published strip also has a nice personal grace note with Ginger's humorous need for a quick dog walk (shown throw the window too). The argument in the published is pretty timeless, while the one in the dropped strip is pretty dated and needs How Wonderful's (excellent) explainer for most people to understand the details, although I'll grant the principles of action vs. politics vs. religion are universal.

So, "I can see why she dropped it" on this one.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2020 00:36

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

Another missing DtWOF from curtadams!

Dykes to Watch Out For #27

I still know a few people with Mo's attitude about wedding and the family here but it seems pretty rare. When I was in coursework, which was already a bunch of years ago, people already seemed fairly impatient with Lee Edelman and that kind of hardcore agitation against reproductive futurity. I'm biased since my wife and I are itching to buy a house and have the yard and the driveway and all that but still, even friends of mine who are philosophically opposed to the nuclear family will still show up to a wedding.

To be fair 1988 was a different world in terms of the rights granted to LGBTQ+ couples. Even through the 90s same-sex partners had to settle for legally and linguistically hazy terms like domestic partnerships, civil unions, or, in Hawaii, the wonderfully oblique "reciprocal beneficiary relationship." It wasn't until 2004 that Massachusetts became the first state in the US to allow gay marriage, and until 2015 that it was broadly legalized throughout the country.

Adoption is a whole different can of worms, that I'm too depressed and edgy right now to get into, but we'll see that play out in a bit in this very comic soon enough. Mo brings up some other good points though re: health insurance and taxes-- hospital visitation rights were a huge component too.

This feels like a weird strip to have left out of the Essential since it lays the groundwork for stuff that comes up again and again, and in particular in the near future Mo's feelings about marriage just kind of return as if they've already been established. This is also, I think, the first strip to establish that Harriet grew up on a commune, which makes some of her future actions and stances more interesting but is IIRC completely absent from the Essential's curation. I love Mo's "uh... communes, or something." I think she's a great character because I can agree with her on many broad issues but still recognize her as a huge blowhard rear end in a top hat. Her adversarial relationship to "couplehood" specifically in this strip is kind of funny given the weird subplot much later on where her lovely girlfriend (my least favorite character in all of DtWOF honestly) keeps futilely pushing her towards polyamory.

Phoo, you beat me to most of my commentary. I knew people who wanted a different approach than marriage in the '80s, but by the time the collection came out Mo's side of the debate was basically dead and everybody in the community supported equal marriage. It may have been only the seeming impossibility that made people say they didn't want it - kind of a sour grapes approach. I always said it was "just a piece of paper" - until I got my own piece of paper and cried like a baby. So that part of the strip is pretty dated. Mo isn't presenting strong support for alternative relationships, either.

But I agree it's a good strip and provides valuable development on Mo, Harriet, and their relationship. Sorry to hear Bechdel edited out Harriet's commune backstory because I liked that too. So kind of iffy on leaving this one out.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2020 20:34

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

Dykes to Watch Out For #35 (1988)

I think Clarice and Toni are two of the more interesting DtWOF characters but I always thought Clarice is acting like a huge prick in this strip. I suppose if I were to theoretically suggest a right time to cheat on your partner, when they're out of town for their grandma's funeral would not be it. Somebody get Mary Worth on the line, stat.

Oh, Clarice is *totally* being a prick here and the strip is very upfront about it. The jokes here are basically how ludicrous her rationalizations are. "We've been together for 6 years and she's putting me through college and we're talking about having a baby, but I guess we're not married", lol, really? That's about as "married" as a lesbian couple could get at the time. And the timing, and the lustful looks in the last panel as she's making rationalizations. LOL on "an innocent affair" too.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2020 21:01

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

Cowslips Warren posted:

Is it the lady who gets cancer? Not Lisa Moore, with Mo. Sydney. Mo was funny in her irritating way but loving hell Sydney had no redeeming qualities I can remember.

C'mon y'all know what Sidney is there for. She's a comic villain. She's comic because she has the soul of a Reagan conservative; selfish, obsessed with money and status, and horny; but she's a dyke who can spout pseudo-leftist/feminist/deconstructivist rhetoric better than anybody else in the strip. She's inherently ironic and Bechdel milks at least one gag out of her in almost every appearance. Plus, a villain gives a good kick for a soap strip and Sydney provides plenty of that too.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2020 02:42

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

I think it's a love to hate thing at best, kind of a register of where these characters have gone in their lives and how far they've drifted from their original characterizations, just like the little recurring bit about everyone gradually dropping vegetarianism except Mo. As far as foils go I kind of like the College Republican kid who shows up eventually better.

Cynthia is a more sympathetic character, especially once her backstory comes out, but I was just reading what I have of the back half of the series and Sydney noticeably sparks up the comic. She's a ***** but she makes the strip lively, like a good villain does. Cynthia always feels like part of a B story (because she is).

# ¿ Apr 23, 2020 16:04

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

goatface posted:

Do any helicopters even have the range to do the wartime crossing via Iceland? They're not built for intercontinental travel.

With a stop in Greenland, yes. The wiki for Narsarsuaq in Greenland says it was used for that during the Cold War. Even the longest range chopper has a range of 1225 miles so it couldn't make it without a Greenland stop. Normal choppers have a range of only a few hundred miles and can't do the crossing at all.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2020 11:14

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

Another missing strip recovered courtesy of curtadam:
Dykes to Watch Out For #29 (1988)

I get why the Essential skips this-- it kind of goes back over a conversation we've already seen-- but I like how it fleshes out Mo's ambivalence about monogamy as something she personally is comfortable with theoretically feels obligated to oppose. Once again Lois feels like the most ahead-of-the-curve character in terms of saying stuff and holding beliefs that a lot of 2020 lesbians I know share.

and Dykes to Watch Out For #35 (1988)

Interesting contrast between Lois' commitment to and happiness with what we'd now call, probably, "ethical non-monogamy" and her disapproval of Clarice's decidedly less ethical cheating. DtWOF is really smart and nuanced about relationships, and is good here at showing that although Lois' approach to romance is one that was far from mainstream in 1988 it still has a level of responsibility about other peoples' feelings and emotional consent that we don't see in Clarice's affair.

I disagree on dropping that strip because I think it's still relevant, and really funny too. As you say, unlike many of the other debates in DTWOF monogamy vs. nonmonogamy is still a live issue, more of one than in the 80's because of recognition for same-sex relationships, more recognition of fluidity in preferences, and a spread of the idea in the straight world. Plus, I see two thigh-slapper jokes - Mo's wild U-turn at the end in response to mild teasing, and the hilarious expression of the shopper reading "Theoretical Lesbianism" in response to Lois' oversharing about her sex life. Haven't we all experienced hearing somebody say something in public we really would rather not know? It's a nice touch that Bechdel, while using a standard trope of having characters do exposition at work, actually thinks about what it really would be like to have people saying things like that in a bookstore.

The "I think you're brave to work so hard at it" is very funny to me too, because right around the time this was published I was in a public speaking club. One of the things we would do was evaluate each other's speeches; but the purpose of evaluating is to help your fellow members improve and counterintuitively you need to give more positive evaluations to bad speakers (to encourage them and keep them in the club) and more negative ones to the good ones (because they genuinely need to know what's wrong to improve it). One club trainer on this taught

quote:

And what do you say if you can't think of *anything* good to say about a speech? You say 'It was very brave of you to give that speech!'

LOL Pretty sure Mo is doing this here, and Lois certainly takes it that way.

And as a final boost, #29 showing that Lois actively practices nonmonogamy and has a thoughtful approach to it adds to the sting of her disapproval in #35.

How Wonderful! posted:

Henry Louis Gates describes this tendency towards replicating oral storytelling in some of these authors as a political as well as an aesthetic stance, asserting that although antebellum African Americans lacked a broadly visible written culture this didn't imply a lack of any culture at all, and that oral storytelling was as rich and sophisticated tradition as any other literary school of the 19th century. At the same time, you might imagine how this spate of novels about unlettered black women, written in a deliberately vernacular register, might have elicited knowingly or unknowingly racist and paternalistic responses by white critics akin to "primitive genius" tropes applied to black artists and musicians of previous decades. I presume that if Ginger's fictional dissertation was real that's some of the stuff it would touch on. I guess my point is that as far as made-up fantasy academic gobbledygook goes Bechdel does a pretty good job of making it sound like something that a real academic committee would approve.

I'd always thought of Ginger's thesis title as being basically "buzzword bingo" but with your context it sounds like there's some real intellectual meat there.

curtadams fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Apr 24, 2020

# ¿ Apr 24, 2020 21:01

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

I also really like "Feminism and Non-Violence" as Mo is getting ready to throttle Lois.

I'd never noticed that! :roflolmao:

# ¿ Apr 24, 2020 21:20

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.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2020 02:58

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

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.

Incestuous uncles or a gay married couple? I'll take either twist to Gilchrist's backstory.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2020 14:45

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

Julet Esqu posted:

Does Evans even know what a leek is? Branchy green top and single white stalk? That looks like asparagus. It would even have been a little bit easier to draw it correctly.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2020 19:21

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

Johnny Walker posted:

Mark Trail

Seems an odd time to be learning ballet jumps, and I wouldn't have thought it would be bully boy's thing anyway. But, hey, it's a James Allen story.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2020 23:57

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

Dykes to Watch Out For #44 (1988)

Wait, Essential jumps straight from 37 to 44? Do I have a lot of scanning to do?

"Do you think they put sugar in the bran muffins?" That's another joke that really stuck with me. Perhaps because I'm a little like Sparrow that way.

Edit: 38 and 40 are about Toni finding out what happened, 39 is a standalone with Mo and Harriet, and 41-43 are a sequence on coming out. Don't see any particular reason to drop these.

curtadams fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Apr 29, 2020

# ¿ Apr 29, 2020 00:36

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

Darthemed posted:

Rip

Why would people try to duplicate something that tastes like that? "Enh, I like it with more boiled snail flavor." :raise:

# ¿ Apr 29, 2020 17:35

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

The Arlo and Janis today also feels really honest and bittersweet. My own mom is really informed and cautious about covid otherwise but still really wants me and my wife to come visit. I think all the prudence in the world risks flying out the window when you really just want to be with your family and I feel really heartbroken every time I have to re-explain to her why we can't come.

Anyway here's Dykes to Watch Out For #45 (1988)

-Mo is singing "A Groovy Kind of Love," presumably the 1988 Phil Collins cover from the soundtrack to Buster a movie I've never heard of until right now. Kind of a left field choice!

-I have a female Macho Trollops and Macho Strumpets are a reference to something but it's over my head. Same with Pigs & Geese. If anybody can help out with either of these it'd be much appreciated. Throughout this period of the strip a lot of the bookstore scenes are a vehicle for Bechdel to take jabs at the increasing commodification that went hand in hand with higher queer visibility, which kind of blurs into the more downbeat Amazon subplot much later.

I was planning an extended visit to my mother in late March and cancelled it in January once the first R0 estimates came out. Now I'm really pissed that all the Southeastern states are "opening up" because I was expecting a window to come visit in the summer and that's now unlikely.

"A Groovy Kind of Love" was a big hit in the 80's. I didn't even realize it was from a movie, which is because the movie was a massive flop.

Macho Trollops and Macho Strumpets are references to the book Macho Sluts by then-lesbian Pat Califa (now a trans man) who was a pro-S&M writer back when the anti-pornography movement was more, erm, dominant in lesbian culture. Califa had a column in the gay leather magazine Drummer and was an editor in the gay bondage porn periodical Bound and Gagged so I think you can guess what kind of reception came from the anti-porn activists.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2020 00:57

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

Thanks curtadams for the scans!

Dykes to Watch Out For #38 & #39 (1988)

Unless I've really missed something this is the first I've heard about Mo and Clarice being a former item.

Mo and Clarice being exes is mentioned in #4 and #10. It's also in the cast descriptions at the start of the third book, but of course that's not in Essential. And, yes, I had to look them up - I'm not THAT much of a DTWOF fanatic (although I did guess the number of mentions right).

I can see why these wouldn't be top priority strips in the collection but I can't see any particular reason to drop them unless Bechdel needed to squeeze in under some particular page count for some printer reason. The Mo and Lois one explains why Mo nags Clarice into telling Toni but you don't need to see it to understand why Mo does. The styrofoam hat strip is standalone. Both have OK jokes but no killer laughs. Nothing really dated. So if she *had* to drop something, OK, but otherwise, why?

One thing I find really odd is that the pacing and feel of the strips seems very different posted vertically, as they are here, that it does in the book, where they are printed side-by-side on 2 pages forming a really long strip. Every newspaper I saw carried them side-by-side although I'm sure there were others with vertical placement. The extended horizontal strip makes them feel longer, and grabs my attention more - it's harder to just skip over panels, and in particular the conclusion isn't close to the eye while reading the start.

curtadams fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Apr 30, 2020

# ¿ Apr 30, 2020 07:11

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

Good Listener posted:

Having not read it before, I'm glad they added the backdrop and mentioned Heart was in middle school. With the char designs, I thought they were all 20 something age characters. I don't mind the designs but newspaper comics have this problem a lot I've noticed.

Heart and her friends are drawn with very thick limbs. They don't just look like adults, they look like adult rugby players.

My Lovely Horse posted:

Pretty disappointed Hugo didn't frame it like "Dawn, you are pretty good, but the girls in Paris..."

OMG, that would have been perfect! :roflolmao:

# ¿ Apr 30, 2020 17:46

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

Medenmath posted:

Vintage Valiant (Jan. 01, 1939)

I can't really put my finger on why, because I'm not an artists, but Prince Valiant kind of smells of Art Nouveau. Which was perfect because Art Nouveau coincided with an interest in medieval art, and at the time the strip came out had become kind of an old-timey style, which fits a historical strip (even if the times are very far apart). This one is cute too with the personal interactions. Most strips would just ignore that wife extra stranded out in the woods but the writer didn't.

# ¿ May 1, 2020 01:16

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

howe_sam posted:

Grousing about George Bush and the electoral college is weirdly prophetic, but not really applicable to the 88 election, because Dukakis got absolutely hammered by HW Bush and lost the popular vote by 6 million. Still, I get the depression because three consecutive terms of GOP presidents is tough to consider.

The Electoral College seemed problematic because Dukakis did *not* get hammered by the voters- he lost by 8%, which is a clear loss, but not a rout or anything. But in spite of the relatively close vote, he lost the Electoral College by an absurd amount - 426 to 111. Many people at the time interpreted the difference as an indication the Electoral College was stacked for the Republicans - which it was, but just a little bit. Mostly it was because most big states were relatively homogenous in their partisan divisions, so if a candidate won by a moderate amount nationwide he carried almost all the big states, getting all of their electoral votes and earning a landslide in the EC. Had Dukakis won by 8% he'd have had an EC landslide almost as big.

I have no idea whether Bechdel actually knew this and was depicting Mo as ignorant of details of interstate partisan differences, or whether she didn't know it either.

In any case, *most* people didn't know about these details, so the EC landslide was interpreted as a resounding defeat for Dukakis and liberal politics in general and drove the realignment of the Democrats to be more of a centrist party. In reality a slightly more surefooted Dukakis would probably have won in 1992 and even in 1988, really (he made several significant PR flubs) but for over two decades Democrats thought it politically necessary to disavow strong liberal policies, whatever their personal inclinations. Even Clinton 2016 buried aggressive policies like putting labor representatives on corporate boards in complex white papers which were resolutely ignored by, well, almost everybody. Mo was pretty prescient in being depressed.

# ¿ May 1, 2020 01:48

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

StrixNebulosa posted:

He should've used baseball cards

For a real '80s feel, it should have been a collection of branded ~~dolls~~ action figures. "Tranceformers" or "I. G. Joe" (roots out government waste in the military).

# ¿ May 4, 2020 05:01

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

Hostile V posted:

Holy poo poo old Chickweed is in a weird blank void but it's actually...decent?

I really enjoyed Chickweed for its first decade or so. It centered on strong female characters with personalities and nuance, an interesting drawing style once it got going, and a little surrealism with cats and Thorax to keep some variety. Eventually it followed the path of many legacy strips - McEldowney ran low on good jokes and new plots, and it got uninteresting and trite. He then rebooted the strip into Edda and Amos at Julliard, which was a lot less interesting because Juliette Burber (Edda's mom) became a minor character, and I'd always thought she was the most interesting character in the strip, and there was a lot less variety of characters - the important ones were all young people getting started in the arts. It became a "will they or won't they" romance strip for Amos and Edda, and that got REAALLY tiresome after a few years. Eventually he made them a couple and then it really went to hell, with Chedda and Nazi romance flashbacks and absurdly oversexed characters and thinly disguised wish fulfillment May-December romances and all the other stuff we hate it for now.

An extreme example of why a strip shouldn't go on too long.

# ¿ May 5, 2020 23:05

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

Dykes to Watch Out For #49 (1989)

I love the Emma and Lois storyline. I don't want to spoil it, but it's not a standard storyline, and I like seeing something different. The choices and challenges the various players seem more real and less forced than usual. It pretty much ran as a long-running B plot - it doesn't dominate the strip as much as the Clarice affair does, but comes and goes for a while. I did notice that the cuts in Essential take out a lot of strips where there are a few panels on the Emma and Lois storyline in the context of a different story, and I think that's a loss, because they were often nice bits, and they added to the "life going on" sense the strip was pretty good about conveying. I think the cuts also turn it into more of an A plotline just because several other plots are gone, like Milkweed and the Saturn Return, so for a long stretch in Essential it's mostly Emma and Lois, while in syndication E&L was getting interspersed with the other plots.

# ¿ May 6, 2020 23:53

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

Kennel posted:

"Do you want to watch football on Saturday?"

"Well ok... if the car plays(/works/isn't broken)"

You could make that work in English with "Well ok... if the car is up for it."

# ¿ May 7, 2020 02:36

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

PetraCore posted:

LMAO there are definitely two people tangoing here.

We know Lois doesn't approve of out-and-out cheating, so I'm wondering if the implication is that her lust is overwhelming that or if she doesn't consider it cheating if she's a lesbian still married to a man or what?

We'll shortly see that Emma would not be "cheating" on her husband, although it's a fair point that at this point Lois wouldn't know that. Through the strip Lois is pretty consistent in her "ethical nonmonogamy", as we'd call it today, and on multiple occasions accepts she has to give up a partner to their primary relationship with no more than some grousing. At the time of publication I interpreted the situation as Emma "coming out" as lesbian and probably breaking off the relationship with her husband which was soon revealed to be the case. At the time bisexuality was less accepted - more precisely less believed - than now, and it was a general assumption that most people strongly preferred relationships with only one gender.

This was the period where it was becoming possible to live a life as a semi-open homosexual without losing your career and friends. As a result, a fair number of lesbians and gays in long term married relationships were coming out, leaving their spouses, and looking for same-sex relationships. Of course it still happens today, but it's less common, because same-sex relationships have been a much more available option for, well, decades. At the time it was almost a trope - someone of Emma's implied age (early 40's or so) - would have met and married her husband before same-sex relationships were an option outside of a very limited subculture, and so even people with overwhelming preferences for same-sex relationships usually ended up married in a heterosexual (hetero-asexual?) couple.

So although Lois' thought processes (beyond "Emma is :heysexy:

") were never revealed, I kind of figured she was thinking like I and most readers were, that even if Emma was formally married, she was in the process of leaving and so ethically available.

# ¿ May 8, 2020 16:32

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

Dykes to Watch Out For #52 (1989)
In general I think this strip serves to address some of the questions brought up already about this plot and how it contrasts with the Clarice/Ginger thing. Jerome gets built up quite a bit in these early stages, which is funny because I don't think he ever actually appears. Later on DtWOF will have a small but pretty rich roster of men in the supporting cast but right now Bechdel is still very interested, I think, in keeping the spotlight deliberately and intently focused on women interacting with women.

"yenta" is a general term for a busy-body lady that originated in Yiddish comic theater. The Jewish-American writer Jacob Adler, who had a healthy amount of crossover appeal with gentile audiences, introduced a character named Yente Telebende in the 20s, leading to the adoption of the term in popular American vernacular. Here's a little snippet of Adler's Yente:

The match-maker in the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof, named Yenta, was just such a stock busy-body, leading to the slightly inaccurate transmission of the term as generally referring to match-makers and other romantic meddlers.

I can't make out the writing in panel eight but it looks like it's something and not just scribbles.

Your commentary is like an (interesting) class in 20th century American subcultures. Wish my teachers had been so evocative.

I think I saw Jerome in one strip, one with a family dinner of Emma's. Can't find it in my Firebrands, so it's probably in DTWOF: The Sequel, which I am missing. Hopefully he's actually there (as opposed to just referred to) and not just a false memory of my faltering mind. He doesn't say much IIRC.

Edit: And I just found my copy of DTWOF: The Sequel (yay!), and Jerome is in there, but he doesn't have any lines. I guess that strip was dropped from Essential. I can sort of see why Bechdel wanted it because it looks like it's building up to a big plot event or joke and then...bupkis. (Although I'm still on team "Collections should collect, so put it in").

curtadams fucked around with this message at 20:44 on May 8, 2020

# ¿ May 8, 2020 20:28

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

Kennel posted:

Surgeon's Tales
The final part of this summary!

Book 2, Part 3, Chapter 8 - Unfaithful servant

Bertelsk�ld now explains that anyone who shows lavish lifestyle gets the attention of the reduction officials. He has already lost all of his other properties, but has so far managed to please the king enough to keep Mainiemi. Now he had heard that the king was considering to take it as well. He says that once the news about the party reach the crown, he is guaranteed to lose it. He is also sure that some of his servants are traitors who have been bought by his rivals.

The count also tells that he himself had heard about the party a week ago and that's why he rushed to Finland. The countess says that it is impossible, since she hadn't even started the preparations a week ago. She then remembers that she had discussed about it with the house-master Janssen and that he had supported the idea. Bertelsk�ld then says that the house-master had promised him to make sure that nobody would live lavishly while they were in Finland and it's now clear who is the traitor.

The count hides and they summon Janssen. The countess asks how much she owes and after she doesn't get a straight answer she starts angrily throwing her jewelry at him. Janssen takes just one ring and the countess asks to get the debt vouchers she has signed. She then starts speaking more sweetly and the house-master thinks that she's flirting with him, loses his cool and starts declaring his love.

Bertelsk�ld steps out of his hiding place and starts mocking and humiliating Larssen. He asks him to give back the ring he got from the countess, because he doesn't deserve anything that belonged to her and will get something else for a payment. The house-master first gives a wrong ring and quickly hides it (later Bertelsk�ld realizes that it is the magic ring that his father lost).

After more humiliating orders Janssen recovers from the shock and stops obeying. He says that he is now a free man and then retells how Bertelsk�ld's father stole him from his mother and how he still remembers the mother's wailing. He says that he had vowed to destroy Bertelsk�ld's family and while unfortunately wasn't able to steal his wife, he has still more surprises coming. After this he escapes.

That's quite a lot of story to omit from the comic! I'm also guessing that the ring is important - that Larssen having it is why he has been super-capable, and maybe it's going to bail Bertelsk�ld out of his predicament.

# ¿ May 9, 2020 19:01

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

Anyway here's Dykes to Watch Out For #54 (1989) early so I can go make Mother's Day calls. Fortunately this one is pretty straightforward (NSFW for nudity):

I like how all the little spatial details add up to Lois' ambiguous look in the last panel-- the prickly looking (very 80s imo) foldout couch, the pizza box not even closed all the way, etc.. I think curtadams is right, this is a really stand-out and unusual storyline.

Another thing I notice about Bechdel's art, after the first year or so, is that even when the strip is basically just a talking head strip (sort of the case here) she draws almost every scene from a different angle, with the characters in different poses. It used to be the norm that even comedic strips did this, but now we find lots of cut'n'paste to mock. She uses it to express subtler emotions in her characters too - like Lois looking conflicted when she says "it was nice for me too" - drawn to show the expression is made out of Emma's view.

Are you still interesting in posting the "missing strips"? There are a lot of dropped strips between here and the next event in the Emma and Lois plotline where Lois is waiting to hear back from Emma, kind of as an ongoing sub-B plotline. Experientially, it was an unusual effect - there was one strip with Lois racing to pick up the phone, and I was really hoping to find out what *was* going on with Emma. Meanwhile the strip just kept going with two multistrip arcs which were interesting in their own right. It's not an effect you often see in comics (can't think of any off the top of my head). It had kind of a "Who Shot J.R.?" effect on me. I was hunting the strip down every other week (at the time it was in local LGBT periodicals, and I'd have to go someplace that had them) because I wanted to know what was going to happen with Emma.

sweeperbravo posted:

Christ. [Jared and Dawn reuniting in Mary Worth] packed about as much punch as a semi-deflated birthday balloon drifting on a vent breeze across the room to touch you.

Such fake drama. Everybody has cell phones; why didn't Dawn call Jared to tell him that she had broken up with Hugo and that Hugo (in a similar situation) was A-OK with it? If the writing were better, perhaps it would be an indication Dawn is rather a $%# but I don't think that message is actually here.

curtadams fucked around with this message at 23:48 on May 10, 2020

# ¿ May 10, 2020 23:41

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

I am, I've just had bad allergies this week and haven't had the energy to drag my rear end to our scanner. My very last semester obligations are behind me now though so I'll try to get through a good chunk of them tomorrow.

Your comment also reminds me of a project I'd love to do some day which is to just dig into all of the comics that ran in queer periodicals through the 80s and 90s, just because it's something I know so little about what was out there aside from DtWOF and stuff like The Chosen Family, Doc and Raider, I don't know... the Ethan Green thing? Harry Chess? It just seems like there's so much to be done-- it's like pulling teeth just finding out solid syndication information about DtWOF.

What I should really do is just sit down with something I know has been digitized like off our backs and just pull out whatever's interesting.

Edit: this is already paying off

I've got a few.

I have two collections of Donovan's single-panel comics for the Advocate during the 80's. Some are funny, some funny more to GLBTQ, some are dated. There's a bunch of jokes about clones (referring to fit gay men with short hair, mustaches, jeans, t-shirts, and maybe leather vest/jackets) which hasn't been a thing for 25 years or more.

Second, I have the (I think) complete Curbside/Curbside Boys by Robert Kirby. The first collection is semi-autobiographical comics with himself as the main character, which I think become increasingly fictionalized as the comic continued. The second collection carries over some of the characters, including himself now as a secondary character but, (again I think), with an entirely fictional story, turning into more of a dramedy.

I also have the first two collections of Leonard and Larry, a long-running in-real-time serialized strip centering on a gay couple in Los Angeles. It's quite well-drawn and frequently funny, but not deep like DTWOF.

Yes, I'm a middle aged gay man who likes comics. How could you tell?

# ¿ May 11, 2020 05:14

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

csammis posted:

Isn't the oncologist giving the "good news" to the person whose scans were mixed up with Lisa's? Does TomBat show "Mrs Wilson" dying too just to bring in extra pathos?

"Good news, Mrs. Wilson! You know that last round of chemo and radiation therapy that made you lose your hair again and lose 20 pounds you can't afford because you're already underweight? It was totally unnecessary! We mixed up some charts and you were already in remission!

Well, that is a prolonged time for taste disorders, but I assure that patients' sense of taste returns most of the time. Eventually. I'll get some therapy set up for that lung damage."

A real thigh-slapper of a punchline. I don't know how Batuik missed it.

I have to say, aside from the casual dismissal of nasty consequences of lame plot twists, I like the pacing of "Lisa's Story" parts more than the current Funky. Funky is a dramedy strip, and Batiuk mostly adds comedy with smirky quips by his characters. That's not too much of a problem in itself, but the problem is that he seems to think that needs to be the punchline, and having almost all the strips end with a (frequently lame) quip feels forced, detracts from the drama and gives this sense of flippancy and same-ness to the strip. DTWOF has a lot of quips and wordplay, and sometimes it's lame, but most of the time a strip ends with an irony-based action joke that doesn't undercut the storyline. Plus sometimes there's no good joke to be made at the end, and Bechdel just lets it land with a character moment or dramatic conclusion.

Basically the ending of a strip is what sticks, and with a dramedy quips are not what should be sticking. In the Lisa' Story section, Batuik was doing a better job of having quips lighten the strip rather than side-track it. Some of that might have been forced on him by the more serious plotline - dying of cancer is far worse than having trouble getting a script idea greenlighted - but I think mostly it's a structural error on his part.

curtadams fucked around with this message at 15:50 on May 11, 2020

# ¿ May 11, 2020 15:20

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

StrixNebulosa posted:

oh god i provoked a thread title change - to anyone who doesn't like the funky winkerapocalypse, I promise that it'll be over soon. I just counted and we have about 8-10 weeks of cancer left. I tend to do 1-2 weeks per update, twice daily, so that's about 5-6 days left of funky, give or take the rest of wally stepping on a landmine.

C'mon, go for the gold! FW has been going for almost 50 years (yes, really, started March 1972) so that's over 15,000 strips. You could post a Monday-to-Sunday Funkstravaganza every day into 2027!

I know you want to

# ¿ May 14, 2020 14:28

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

Shugojin posted:

Funky wouldn't really be that bad if it weren't for TomBat's love of ending something on a tepid 1-liner and smug face

Kind of how I feel. Lots of people needle the "Grim Funkyverse" but it's not all that grim compared to real life. Most people Les Moore's age have had to deal with a couple of tragic deaths, and there's a lot of regular life and whimsical stuff in the strip too. I like that Batuik is doing something different with the comic medium.

The weakness of FW is its execution. The tepid final panel jokes, yes; also the meandering plotting, deus ex machina endings, the audience fake-outs, and, actually, a *lack* of the very grimness it gets criticized for having. The cancerwife saga did a reasonable job of conveying the tragedy of cancer (I've had a family member die of cancer) but the CTE saga just totally wiffed. I've had a family member die with dementia and that delivers some brutal gut-punches. I never got anything of that from the FW CTE storyline - there was just none of the emotional impact of somebody you love disintegrating. And then this ending to the landmine story - the girl's parents just got blown to smithereens, but hey it's OK because Wally wants to adopt her so we can all smile now? NO. Just NO.

# ¿ May 14, 2020 22:33

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

StrixNebulosa posted:

Part eight. Yep, we're back to cancerwife.

Funky Winkerbean - August 27 - September 9th. I thought about skipping the second week and going straight back to cancer, but no. You need to experience this arc in its full glory. I'm not skipping any strips until the end.

The only thing funny in the sequence that came from was the realization that Batuik apparently didn't know the slang and IME most common meaning of "going commando". There's got to be a funny edit in there when they are climbing over the fence.

# ¿ May 15, 2020 00:24

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

catlord posted:

It occurs to me that this is as gently caress, but I hated tying shoelaces so much that I just buy slip-ons. So don't worry kid, there's... I'm not going to say hope because, you know, you're gonna be a goon buying slip-ons, but there are options!

Edit: What a page snipe.

With most low-top shoes, you can tie the laces so that they work as slip-ons, other than you often have to hold the tongue as you slip them on. If you can't slip them on loosen the laces a bit; if they slip off tighten them; repeat until correct. My husband demands a no-shoe household and I'd hate to have to retie my shoes a half-dozen or more times a day.

How Wonderful! posted:

Dykes to Watch Out For #48 (1989)

Ok, I think I'm back in business.

I just love the bit where they're saying "I love you" to each other for the first time while Mo is holding smelly rotting broccoli.

curtadams fucked around with this message at 22:56 on May 19, 2020

# ¿ May 19, 2020 22:45

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

catlord posted:

Conan the Barbarian vs. Rodents of Unusual Size Nov. 13th, 1978- Nov. 19th, 1978

Posting this has pushed me to finally order the RE Howard collections I was missing. Anyway, now, I'd maybe do a bit more research before cracking open an ancient, magical amphora, but poo poo, what do I know? Crack that fucker open and see what pops out, what can go wrong?

Edit: vv Very much so.

The registration on those old color Conans is just unbelievably bad. A one-off is sort of understandable, but this is every week.

# ¿ May 20, 2020 21:06

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# ¿ Jan 22, 2025 06:49

curtadams: Mar 24, 2019

catlord posted:

Almost certainly worse! Remember, Conan and Cthulhu? Same universe. The rules of the universe might be different, you might be able to actually fight them, but they're still gonna mess you up. Also, one of the early Conan stories, The God in the Bowl, is basically all about not busting open strange, ancient artefacts without knowing what they are. It's never gems, guys! Except when it is, but those ones will probably gently caress you up too.

Anyway, I love this Valiant. I like it when people wrestle with the physical manifestations of abstract concepts or other things you probably shouldn't wrestle with.

Although RE Howard wrote some Cthulhu mythos stories as well as the initial Conan stories, and there are certainly shared themes of "evil things outside the world trying to get back in" and "mysteries man was not meant to know", they aren't *technically* the same universe.

Too bad for Val he didn't wrestle with his conscience; he'd have wiped the floor with that weakling! Although if that witch can just restore his youth with a potion, I'm thinking he wasn't *really* wrestling Time; maybe some illusion of the witch.

I'm impressed by the art - that sequence of aging Valiants is quite realistic and all recognizably him. And all that stuff in the background! Not something you see on the comics pages these days. Nowadays you get Stephen Pastis whining about drawing very simplified cars.

# ¿ May 20, 2020 23:19

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > BSS: Bisexual Super Son > Comic Strips 2020: Sumpin Arful

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