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Thank you for throwing up the new thread so promptly. Here's to the year Wilbur finally Gets It Right.
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Jan 1, 2020 07:09
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Look, I hate Ed Krudlick, you hate Ed Krudlick, we all hate Ed Krudlick. But there's a not especially fine line between saying this particular guy completely sucks and saying that people used to and should celebrate overweight people getting heart attacks. From now on tone it down with this poo poo, thread-wide. You can register dislike for a very bad comic strip without being a sociopath.
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Jan 4, 2020 17:04
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readingatwork posted:
This one rules, I think when Robbie and Bobby lands it really, really lands, although it still kind of suffers in comparison to MDiD.
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Jan 4, 2020 17:41
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It seems like nobody wants to read or hate-read Dilbert so unless there's a groundswell of support for it let's just do without for 2020.
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Jan 6, 2020 15:51
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9 CWL is made by a deranged pervert and Dustin is made by the most unbearable boomer imaginable and Kevin and Kell is only imaginable in the absence of a benign god but Dilbert is made by a bigot who makes his money preying on gullible and scared people, and if we're ok with a blanket ban on, say, Gilchrist poo poo-- which we should be-- then I'm going to put my foot down on Dilbert too. Post Pros and Cons if you absolutely must for now-- I don't like it and won't be looking at it unless directed to via report or whatever-- but Scott Adams is a bad and harmful person who makes a comic that is bad and boring when it isn't bad and harmful, and there's no place for him here. No more Dilbert and please don't make me type "posted Dilbert" into the little probation reason box.
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Jan 6, 2020 21:34
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My Lovely Horse posted:Purely as a comic, Dilbert is probably one of the least consistently lovely out of the lovely ones. It had one transphobic arc recently, no doubt at all that's reflecting Adams' own views, but 95% of the time it isn't. Dustin is lovely every single day. I get banning Dilbert from the thread because it's a reminder that Scott Adams is doing his thing, but a lot of comics are cut from the same cloth and it seems they get a pass because their creators are staying just below the line with overt social media statements while regularly crossing it in the actual comics. I'm biased but frankly one transphobic arc is too many. Brother Rock is still out there on the internet if you want to read it, and so is Dilbert.
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Jan 6, 2020 22:52
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I also want to stress, the decision is made. I'm not interested in being persuaded that Dilbert is odious in an amusing way. I love this thread a ton, I definitely skim or scroll past a lot of stuff, but enough people have articulated a serious discomfort with Dilbert that I'm going to be firm about its time here being over. We've lived without Mike du Jour, we've lived without Brother Rock, and we'll be totally fine without Dilbert, which is unlike the dated and shocking material in older comics (even something as comparatively "more contemporary" like FOOB) because it's being made in 2020 by a man from 2020. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Jan 7, 2020 |
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Jan 6, 2020 23:39
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I would love some Goldberg!
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Jan 7, 2020 00:37
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Jucika is also super good and I've been enjoying following it on twitter. It's a really good addition to the thread and for sure a nice companion piece to Mopsy.
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Jan 7, 2020 03:00
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Haifisch posted:Moomin said trans rights. I will go to the ends of the earth for a trans rights Moomin av. I'll do whatever it takes.
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Jan 8, 2020 21:03
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Yeah! The Hal Foster strips are always spoken of in such reverent tones but I never got around to reading them, so this has been great.
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Jan 9, 2020 01:15
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I want to give back a bit to a thread that I've gotten a lot of education and enjoyment out of. I'm thinking about posting Cathy and Crockett Johnson's initial 1942-1946 run on Barnaby-- the former because I think it's a fascinating barometer for what a comic predicated on being "relateable" to a mainstream demographic of (white) women looked at through the 70s-aughts, and the latter because it's an exquisite comic. If either of these have already been posted in a previous iteration of this thread and people are burnt out on them or whatever that's fine, but otherwise I'll try to write up a little intro for both over the weekend?
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Jan 10, 2020 17:03
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If you don't know Barnaby you might recognize Crockett Johnson's signature streamlined, gently sparse style from his better-known creation, Harold and the Purple Crayon. Johnson, born in 1906, didn't break into comics until 1934, but his professional career is bracketed by twin impulses towards elegant precision and a child-like proximity to whimsy. Before comics he was the art director for several McGraw-Hill publications, and after moving on from daily strips he produced over one hundred striking "mathematical paintings" which you can take a gander at here. Johnson's second career as a cartoonist coincided with his political radicalization-- shocked by the Great Depression, he joined the leftist Book and Magazine Writers Union and wound up creating political cartoons for the influential CPUSA organ The New Masses in 1934, at the time an extremely hip and ubiquitous magazine among American intelligentsia which published a who's who of established literary darlings as well as more overtly radical writers such as Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and my homeboy Kenneth Fearing. Johnson's early work here is a little more loose and sketchy than his mature style, and the humor is much more pointed, befitting, I guess, its setting. The goofy one about the antsy Hitler is a striking precursor to Johnson's knack for closely observed body language as the source of a joke.   Although Johnson fairly quickly rose through the ranks and became the magazine's art director, revamping it to what I'd consider its "iconic" design, in 1940 he segued to Colliers to produce the comic strip "The Little Man With the Eyes," an often gently topical or satirical comic relying on minutely observed variations in its mute protagonist's gaze:   If "The Little Man With the Eyes" was absolutely dependent on micro-level gradations of motion and expression-- kind of an extreme close-up Keaton-- Barnaby, which launched in the leftist (but not nearly as leftist as The New Masses!) magazine PM in 1942, imported Johnson's masterful hand at the meticulously structured gag into a more narratively driven framework and into a more fully realized social universe. As goofy and screwball as Barnaby can be, it engages with plot and character (and continuity) in a way totally alien to Johnson's earlier work. A lot of the fun here, to me, is Johnson's intuitive melding of these two comic pleasures: the almost fussy precision of his lines, the novel adoption of a crisp Futura typeface instead of hand lettering, and his Lubitsch-esque pacing on one hand, and the "film blanc" charm and wonder of taking the fairy-tale logic of childhood seriously as the foundation of sitcom antics on the other. Although Barnaby was never especially widely syndicated, appearing in 64 papers at its height, it was admired by a number of prominent figures including Dorothy Parker, Rockwell Kent, and Louis Untermeyer. I imagine they liked it for the same reasons I do-- it's understated but immensely technically sophisticated, as well as just being a super breezy, refreshingly bubbly and sleek little comic universe. There's a little McCay, there's a little Bushmiller, but mostly there's Johnson's own totally suis generis talent. Although his initial run on Barnaby only lasted until 1946, it cast a long shadow, influencing both Charles Schulz and Walt Kelly (as well as, I have a hunch, Chris Onstad). Johnson's own career stretched on for decades, exchanging the clockwork tempo of the comic strip for the langorousness of his Harold books and a number of extremely charming and whimsical kids' books in collaboration with his wife and artistic partner Ruth Krauss. Here's Barnaby! I really really like it and I hope you do too! 4/20/1942  4/21/1942  4/22/1942  I'll write up a bit on Cathy tomorrow-- to be honest I've never read it all the way through before and am only tangentially aware of it outside of the characters colossal pop culture presence throughout the late 80s and 90s, but I have a feeling it'll be an interesting time capsule and maybe a nice companion piece to FOOB in terms of "what kinds of jokes and narratives were being pushed through the back-half of the 20th century in comics geared towards women." I browsed the first little bit of it earlier today and it settles into its familiar rhythm remarkably quickly although the art starts off pretty unruly. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Jan 11, 2020 |
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Jan 11, 2020 06:05
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Ghostlight posted:Barnaby's lettering makes it look like a terrible webcomic from the 2000s. It's an acquired taste perhaps, for sure. Here's a bit from Philip Nel's excellent biography of Johnson and Krauss that goes into it a little: quote:Meeting Johnson's exacting standards was a challenge. According to Sparber, 'I could never quite grasp the tightness of his line. I learned a great deal from him, but I didn't draw that way.' Sparber saw Johnson as more than a perfectionist: 'Perfectionist is sort of ordinary. He was way beyond that.' Johnson's background in layout and in typography inspired him to set his dialogue in type. Barnaby was the first strip to always use typeset dialogue, with Johnson using italicized Futura medium. Designed by German typographer Paul Renner in the 1920s, Futura embodies the Crockett Johnson aesthetic: it excises needless detail, rendering its simple geometric forms in precise lines of uniform width. This devotion to precision informs Johnson's diction, too. As Sparber explained, the type 'wasn't just sort of dashed in. Dave would be writing the text as if he was counting characters in his head, because he knew he had to do five lines to fit into a balloon that would be over Mr. O'Malley's head. (73)
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Jan 11, 2020 06:56
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You'd think she'd get a nice reusable bottle or thermos or something like almost every professional I know in any loving field on earth has.
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Jan 12, 2020 00:16
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I also think Frazz having his ribs broken would be the best.
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Jan 12, 2020 02:19
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Barnaby, April 23-28, 1942   (No Barnaby on Sundays)   Later in this second week the strip takes its first turn towards topicality, and firmly plants itself as taking place in a world that can permit both fairy godfathers and the domestic realities of wartime. We'll get into that tomorrow. (It turns out that finding complete archives of Cathy is harder than I thought. I'll keep poking around but going off of the early examples I saw it won't be a huge loss if it doesn't work out-- if it doesn't I might look into doing something like Dykes to Watch Out For instead)
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Jan 12, 2020 06:49
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How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Jan 24, 2020 |
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Jan 12, 2020 07:46
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Pigsfeet on Rye posted:She also has to wear a bald wig when she pegs Les during their Deliverance cosplay sessions. I want to point to this bit from the BSS rules: Waterhaul posted:Don't Be A Creep. Usually I let it slide if it's a little funny or innocuous but this post is pretty weird, and it's a Deliverance joke in 2020!
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Jan 12, 2020 16:42
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AndreTheGiantBoned posted:
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Jan 12, 2020 21:19
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In lieu of Cathy I'm going to post Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For. Bechdel is more broadly lauded for her 2006 memoir Fun Home but her cartooning career begin in 1983 with the self-syndicated strip Dykes to Watch Out For. Initially a single panel strip before expanding to one-page vignettes and eventually the episodic narratives the comic is best known for, DtWOR appeared in an array of small press queer papers and magazines throughout the 80s, beginning with the feminist paper WomaNews before spreading to over 50 other independent publications including Hot Wire, The Philadelphia Gay News (my personal go-to for waiting rooms), Lesbian Contradiction, and Chicago Gay Life. DtWOR isn't perfect, in particular Bechdel appears somewhat tentative and uncertain in handling trans characters as the strip progresses, moving from a single tonedeaf reference in a 1987 strip to fairly well-executed trans supporting characters in the 90s. But aside from showing its age here and there, it's a super important document of lesbian history and queer cultural production. I'm going to start with the strips in the first Firebrand Books compilation from 1986 and then leap forward to the serialized stuff. These are undated because none of these collections are especially well curated and offer very little in the way of bibliographic information! But all of this first run will be from 1986, as far as I can tell.    And if that's not your speed, here's Barnaby! (4/29-5/1/1942)    Barnaby's wish to become an air raid warden is played up as a humorous counterpoint to Mr. O'Malley's more romanticized suggestions, but would have been a familiar fantasy to children of 1942. Fliers, posters, and radio jingles urged American families to practice various forms of diligence and preparation (many of which we've seen already in, especially, Mopsy), and Barnaby eventually winds up dealing with quite a few branches of civic war-time tasks, a motif that would not at the time been especially discordant with Crockett Johnson's leftist convictions or the politics of the progressive papers running his strip. I'm not a WWII scholar so I'm not sure if readers of 1942 would have been doubly amused by Barnaby's adoration for air wardens and the relatively prosaic nature of their responsibilities, but I think that is a theme that develops as this storyline progresses.
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Jan 13, 2020 05:42
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Some Guy TT posted:That was me. Bechdel addresses this in one of the later ones with an in-character segment where the characters are contrasting whether they're better off being represented by obnoxious radical dykes that are true to life or more obviously sympathetic mainstream lesbians that are palatable to straights. This whole philosophical aspect of the strip dates it very weirdly, since by the time Dykes to Watch Out For was finished the latter argument had basically won, but as we're seeing today it's starting to feel like maybe they shouldn't have. I think part of why Bechdel trailed off and gave up writing it was because her characters didn't really have any purpose anymore, forced to live in a modern lgbt culture that was everything they had fought against. None of this context necessarily makes Dykes to Watch Out For any more readable, although it might help some of you get a better idea of where Bechdel was coming from. Yeah, the narrative strips in particular play this up a ton with the main character, Mo, especially, who tends to flip out whenever one of her friends does something that strikes her as a concession to the establishment. She's a huge rear end in a top hat during the wedding story, for example, but she also acts as a mouthpiece for some good points when there's stuff about the increasing visibility of Log Cabin Republicans or the commodification of pride marches and such. IIRC she's has the most irritating and dated reactions when trans characters begin to be introduced-- she's definitely kind of a proxy for Bechdel but she's a deliberately exaggerated and distorted one, like Roberta Gregory's Bitchy Bitch. None of this makes her any more or less appealing to actually read about but there's some context. The strip begins at a moment where queerness is still firmly in the realm of the countercultural and effaced (the intro comic to The Essential DtWOF includes the infamous 1981 NYT headline calling AIDS "a rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals"), and takes a clear stance as that begins to change. So there's a real polemic element undercutting the social satire of a very insular world that sometimes reads as at cross purposes. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Jan 13, 2020 |
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Jan 13, 2020 16:25
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Dykes to Watch Out For (still 1986)     Barnaby (May 2nd-May 7th, 1942)      The OCD here is the Office of Civilian Defense, established in 1941 and dissolved in 1945. At its peak it "employed" over 11 million volunteers, including children, and the office covered all sorts of stuff from air raid drills to fire-fighting and organizing scrap drives. Wartime civic service remains a prominent part of this strip throughout Johnson's run. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Jan 24, 2020 |
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Jan 13, 2020 20:11
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SubNat posted:I remember the last time it was posted, it's nice to see it again. Yeah the cleanness really reminds me of Achewood more than anything else. It's like ligne claire to the nth degree, I can't think of anything else of that period which looks quite like it.
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Jan 14, 2020 00:35
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PetraCore posted:I'm a lesbian but also like, a very mid-20s lesbian who does all my queer socialization online, so Dykes to Watch Out For is really interesting. Yeah it's a snapshot of a moment in queer culture that had passed by the time I started circulating through queer culture, and as acerbic as it is there's a real idealism and wistfulness to it that makes me feel kind of bittersweet. I love that Bechdel's entire social universe in these early strips is queer women.
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Jan 14, 2020 03:57
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Powered Descent posted:Strangely enough, I always heard that as the justification for why the man traditionally stands on the right when getting married -- so his right arm would be free in case he needed to draw his sword. Why would I ever marry some chump who doesn't dual wield.
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Jan 14, 2020 19:02
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EasyEW posted:
The first two panels of this are a cute enough gag but he just couldn't help himself.
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Jan 14, 2020 19:57
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Dykes to Watch Out For (still 1986)  One thing that's almost kind of comforting about these is how acute Bechdel's rage and despair at the trajectory of American politics is throughout these. I mean, it's super depressing that we can trace where that trajectory leads us, but it's also somewhat nice to have a sense of continuity. She becomes a little more caustic and self-aware about it when she introduces Mo but we see a bit of it here with the recurrent theme of being terrified of Reagan's nuclear brinksmanship, which carries over to her attitude towards Bush I in the Middle East.   Anyway I'm too impatient to wait until tomorrow-- next up is the really famous one:   There are plenty of variations on this you can play if you truly want to never leave the house without becoming depressed. I tried for awhile to apply the Bechdel test rules to representations of trans women in particular. Pretty rough week! Barnaby (5/8/1942-5/13/1942)      I'm doing a slightly longer block of these as well because I like the gag on the 13th. I initially thought the joke about the mysterious "Axis spy ship" was a reference to foo fighters, an at-one-time popular rumor about mysterious aircrafts that dovetailed into the nascent stages of American UFO mythology, but it turns out those weren't really a going concern until 1944. I presume if you're posting in BSS you know who Superman is, but I should note that he was tremendously popular in 1942. The first Fleischer cartoons debuted in 1941, the Adventures of Superman radio show was a hit, and the newspaper strip was in hundreds of papers nationwide. In the early 40s in particular the character was kind of in between the street-level socialist crusader of 1938 and the planet-trotting superhero he'd become, and it was not at all unusual to see him intervening directly in very topical (read WWII-adjacent) situations, so Mr. O'Malley's fears are not necessarily outlandish.
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Jan 15, 2020 05:45
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riderchop posted:great new av, btw Thank you for understanding that although I had to betray Lottie crew it was for a nobler cause-- Little My crew.
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Jan 15, 2020 05:53
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Tiggum posted:Where can I get a copy of that book? Doesn't have to be volume 4.  SubNat posted:Ps: drat that's a fine Thank you! The Splash put it together and I'm delighted by it.
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Jan 15, 2020 06:11
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Barnaby (5/14--5/19/1942)   Dykes to Watch Out For     I'm also going to toss in a bit of Sam's Strip to test the waters. This was a very short-lived Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas strip that ran concurrently with their more well-known runs on Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois. It's much self-referential and meta, and focuses on two guys who run their own comic strip, with numerous cameos by other early to mid 20th century characters. It only ran from 1961 to 1963 but I've been very fond of it since running across the Fantagraphics reprint a few years ago. The meta stuff is not as daring as it would have been 60 years ago, but I love the rhythm of it, it has a super pleasant, very tight vaudeville tempo to it. Please let me know if you'd like to see more of it! Anyway. Sam's Strip, 10/16--10/18/1961:    How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Jan 16, 2020 |
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Jan 16, 2020 04:33
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Calaveron posted:Doesn't Eskimo mean cannibal or something like that There are a number of hypotheses about the etymological origin of the term, the most popular being "snowshoe-wearer." In some Algonquian languages, including Cree, the term for "eater of raw meat/uncooked things" sounds a bit like "Eskimo." Another issue is that the group of people historically clumped under the umbrella of "Eskimo" includes both the Inuit as well as the Yupik people, so "Inuit" as a blanket replacement isn't always an entirely clean fit. As with any area where language and taxonomy is imposed by colonialism, it's a big mess!
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Jan 16, 2020 22:41
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Manuel Calavera posted:Bizarro In 1978 Peter Valenti proposed the term film blanc to cover the very popular genre of film throughout the 1930s and 40s in which people had gently humorous, often uplifting or life-affirming encounters with angels, ghosts, or other benign agents of another world, such as Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Heaven Can Wait, or A Matter of Life and Death: "Peter Valenti" posted:We might use the term “film blanc” to suggest a scenario. with the following characteristics:
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Jan 17, 2020 14:55
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Calaveron posted:Holy poo poo shut the gently caress up about your manager you loathe and go back to making “jokes” about 4th of July decorations already being up and how you’re so much superior and intelligent than the rear end in a top hat customer you smug retail dope Sir, this is a Grumbel's.
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Jan 18, 2020 01:09
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davidspackage posted:Have we ruled out that Zak's secretly a feeder? I think we can probably rule it out.
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Jan 19, 2020 01:08
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I've been super busy with beginning-of-the-semester stuff, but here are some very late comics: Barnaby (May 20th-May 23rd, 1942)   Dykes to Watch Out For (still 1986)     Sam's Strip (October 19-October 21, 1961)  
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Jan 20, 2020 02:04
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Tiggum posted:In what possible situation is verifying not a clear indicator of a lack of trust? Any academic or scientific writing unless you're operating off of a very strange and presumably depressing definition of "trust."
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Jan 20, 2020 04:38
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How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Jan 24, 2020 |
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Jan 20, 2020 15:30
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Barnaby (May 25-May 28, 1942)  Dykes to Watch Out For     Sam's Strip (October 23- November 1, 1961)    The above Sam's Strip features, of course, a cameo from George Herriman's Krazy Kat and Ignatz. We also get a glimpse of Mr. Dry, the, uh, Prohibition Guy of numerous anti-prohibition political cartoons of the early 20th century, many of them by the great Rollin Kirby:      You can find a 1904 book, Prohibition Cartoons,here, for a look at what pro-prohibition cartoons looked like. They are not laugh riots. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Jan 21, 2020 |
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Jan 21, 2020 03:35
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| # ¿ Dec 3, 2024 10:59 |
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StrixNebulosa posted:Would Dykes stop doxxing me!!!!! I too am a proud ingestis poetica.
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Jan 21, 2020 03:46
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