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How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
Ok, I've been back from camping for a few days and have finally tidied up my work area and dug out my DtWOF books.

Dykes to Watch Out For #90 (1990)
-Alison Bechdel



MO DON'T YOU DO IT.

Anyway, Mo is referring to yet another litany of ills on the first page. I've already gone over Oliver North-- although initially indicted on 16 felony charges in 1988, and convicted of three in 1989, in July 1990 all charges against him were vacated and by 1991 they were formally dismissed. The little square-jawed tick has gone on to a lucrative career as a conservative activist and talking head.

Richard Nixon's presidential library was dedicated on July 19, 1990 in Yorba Linda, California. Nixon was still alive at the time and while I wouldn't call him popular with progressives today by any means, in the 80s and 90s he was loathed with an intensity that has been somewhat diluted in the past thirty years by two Bushes, Trump, and a more broad consensus on how disastrous Reagan was. Former presidents getting presidential libraries is of course business as usual, I think Mo here is more upset about Nixon as a general cultural figure-- one who was still omnipresent in the national imagination as a complex but largely perverse and nightmarish figure: see Robert Altman's 1984 Secret Honor, or the John Adams/Alice Goodman opera Nixon in China which debuted in 1987. Works like this treated Nixon as a somewhat mythological or archetypal figure-- a sharp contrast to works created during or more shortly after his presidency, like Pablo Neruda's poem Incitación al nixonicidio y albanza de la revolución chilena which is both more strident and more materially concerned with Nixon as a concrete political actor and a metonymy for American policy rather than, as in Altman and Adams, more of a metonymy for problems in the more general American psyche. The typically pious and congratulatory ceremonies surrounding the opening of his library would then understandably, to somebody like Mo, feel delirious and discordant in a way that might not communicate quite so well today.

I'm not going to pretend to be able to explain the Savings & Loans crisis or even that I totally understand it. Suffice to say it was a tremendous white collar scandal in which, from the mid 80s through to the mid 90s, many of the US' S&L institutions collapsed, largely due to predatory and unregulated speculating (I think?). I'm really out of my wheel-house here and I wish Mo would talk about Diane di Prima or something.

I also have to say that I'm used to therapists in pop culture either being cartoonishly inept or supernaturally good at their jobs. Mo's therapist feels believably insightful and a good fit for Mo and her problems. I really like the strips about her.

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How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
Thanks for explaining the whole thing so lucidly, I never even knew that McCain factoid.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

BigDave posted:

It really reminds me of a line by Charles Simic, "Everything is teetering on the edge of everything".

"Blood Orange" is a brilliant poem, I love that I can tab over to this thread and run into a little Simic.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
Please don't post about Bernice pooping, I have a lot to live for and I don't want this thread to kill me.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
Let the woman do what she needs to do in peace. "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen"

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
Dykes to Watch Out For #91 (1990)
-Alison Bechdel



Once again Bechdel is playing around with popular stereotypes about lesbian relationships and mining more meaningful character drama out of them-- the stand-up comic Lea DeLaria, the first openly gay comedian to appear on American late-night fwiw, coined the term "U-Haul syndrome" in the 90s to describe a supposed tendency of lesbian couples to commit to long-term relationships (specifically moving in) very early on in a relationship. Her joke went: Q. What does a lesbian bring on a second date? A. A U-Haul.

From what I've found this exact joke post-dates this strip, but the cliche of lesbians jumping eagerly into emotional and lifestyle commitments with a partner had roots in the 50s and 60s, when such rapid bonding was as much a survival tactic as anything else. Here it coincides with the more pernicious but equally ubiquitous "lesbian bed death" cliche-- as Mo's relationship with Harriet flounders on the emotional and physical level, she tries to save it by jumping onto big, drastic lifestyle changes. I love that Bechdel is so good at portraying unhealthy or unsuccessful relationships without depicting anyone in them as monstrous or evil-- here we just have two more or less good people unable to get to the heart of what's wrong, Mo swinging for the fences and Harriet just clamming up in the hopes of maintaining an unsatisfying status quo.

I also love that after so many strips in which physical intimacy has been an issue for the two, and in which they've frequently appeared separated or kept at a distance formally and literally, we see Mo's aggressive sales pitch accompanied by a ramping up in leaning in and eventually just clutching onto Harriet. The sequence of Mo's staging and Harriet's facial expressions in the final row of panels is great-- Mo almost melting and slouching into her partner whose face goes from skeptical to curious to coyly persuaded, then Mo throws a wrench into the conversation, peels back and away, and Harriet's face reverts to dead-pan.

The "tip of the nib" to Judith Katz is a little murky. There are numerous Judith Katzes who could fit here but I'm presuming that Bechdel is referring to the novelist who was also published at Firebrand Books at around the same time-- she wrote two novels, Escape Artist and Running Fiercely Toward a High, Thin Sound which attracted a lot of attention and acclaim in the queer literary community but which unfortunately have largely faded into obscurity (although Running Fiercely recently got a nice 25th anniversary reprint). Running Fiercely makes sense, since it has a subplot about the protagonist's lesbian lover trying to rush her into marriage. But the 25th anniversary thing is the rub-- neither of Katz' novels had been published yet when this strip came out. Complicating matters, in 2017 Bechdel published a blog post about merging libraries with her partner and having to get rid of books they each had a copy of-- one of which was a signed copy of Running Fiercely Toward a High, Thin Sound. Her blog also has a photo of her, Katz, and Nancy Bereano hanging out at the 1997 BEA-- which might not mean anything. You hang out with all sorts of people at conferences and cons and certainly the BEA in particular is a big weird mingling station, and they were all apparently kind of there "on the clock" staffing the Firebrand table, although I also know that kind of thing is often a volunteer gig and an excuse to, again, just hang around with your buddies. I don't think it's unlikely that as writers moving in similar circles, Bechdel might have had conversations about the subject with Katz or even read earlier drafts of the novel. It's not a perfect answer but it's the best I can come up with.

Anyway-- I think the stuff on Bechdel's blog is actually pretty interesting so here's her at the 1997 BEA and a few tantalizing shots of her library (these are specifically books both her and her partner had copies of), something I'm always intrigued by with writers I like:





The Moosewood Cookbook is extremely unsurprising but makes a lot of the vegetarian cooking jokes throughout DtWOF even funnier to me, not to knock a well-deserved classic.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

Samovar posted:

I appreciate all you do uploading this HW, it totally kicks rear end.

Thank you! It's a nice break from work.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

EasyEW posted:


Funky Winkerbean




The Phantom Empires is a pretty neat movie and for some reason it bugs me that he spells Murania wrong.

That being said that is not a bad likeness of the cave entrance:

I guess I'm proud of him for that.

Anyway here's episode one of The Phantom Empire so you can enjoy it yourself and then knock all the Funky Winkerbean characters as loving Gene Autry poseurs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itw5593MGyM

If you speak Spanish you might also like to really pull rank on these Winkerbean creeps and read Alejandro Perez Cervantes' 2006 short story collection Murania or show off your c. 2008 hep cat credentials by watching The Sam Plenty Cavalcade of Action Show Plus Singing which is a pretty good pastiche.

You could also completely reduce Les and his miserable friends to abject humiliation by brushing up on the real-life conspiracy theory that sprung out of The Phantom Empire's melange of hollow-earth tropes and it's long-term influence on science fiction and pop culture by reading Fred Nadis' magnificent dual-biography The Man From Mars which covers both Ray Palmer and Richard Sharp Shaver with sensitivity and precision.

How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Aug 6, 2020

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
I hope there's a swerve and it turns out Murania is real in the funky Winkerverse and we spend a year with them escaping the clutches of the subterranean empress.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

Hostile V posted:

The empress looks like Lisa and it takes a year because they keep having to drag Les away from betraying everyone.

I would absolutely buy the hardcover deluxe edition of this.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
I like that the Tinkersons family being vegetarian is coming up again although I could've sworn they were just eating wings like a few weeks ago. Granted there are really good vegetarian wings out there but I don't know if I'd necessarily go to the parts of PA this comic takes place in IIRC to look for them.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

Maxwell Lord posted:

I will say, the Bronson Canyon is actually an interesting place to go because it wasn't just used as the location for one old serial, it was used for *everything*. It was the exterior of the Batcave in the 60s Batman series, it was in the Flash Gordon serial, it was in Lost Horizon, lots of 50s sci-fi, and countless westerns- like the whole ravine is clearly something you'd expect to see a bunch of bandits riding down to make a big dramatic entrance.

I never knew! That's actually pretty cool.

Dykes to Watch Out For #92 (1990)
-Alison Bechdel


The First Gulf War, or Operation: Desert Shield/Storm formally kicked off on August 2nd, 1990 and lasted for about six months. Nominally in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, Mo's sentiment that it was fundamentally an oil war-- a hypothesis that history has borne out pretty well.

Ginger is reading Susie Sexpert's Guide to Excruciatingly Incorrect Behavior. This is a spoof on Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, an etiquette guide by Judith Martin first published in 1982. From 1978 onwards Martin wrote a popular syndicated advice column with kind of a snarky edge to it.

As has been covered previously the notion of the G-spot was known by women throughout history and kind of known to male scientific institutional bodies off and on since the 17th century, but only entered the popular imagination in the 80s by way of Ladas, Whipple and Perry's The G Spot and Other Recent Discoveries About Human Sexuality. It was a pretty hot topic and one that had important bearing on feminist and lesbian discourses, as it connotated a kind of sexual pleasure that, in many cases, was not well-served by conventional straight sex.

Lois here is a bit behind the times-- her suggestion that drilling in wildlife refuges is next on the menu is kind of framed as a sarcastic provocation but in fact discussions about drilling for oil in Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge in particular (ANWR) had been on the table since 1977. Oil companies began to press aggressively for opening up the ANWR for drilling in the mid-80s, including a shady test bore by Chevron in 1985, and a bill permitting drilling in 1989 was only derailed by the popular backlash to the disastrous Exxon Valdez spill. In December, 2017 portions of the ANWR were after decades of contentious struggle opened up for oil and gas drilling, and as recently as late 2019 the Trump administration has signaled support for opening the entire coastal plain opened up for energy exploitation.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

Thread class photo

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

Some Guy TT posted:

Guys who are popular with women are not guaranteed this popularity because women always make sensible decisions when it comes to selecting partners with good feminist values, as countless E/N posters can attest.
\

How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Aug 8, 2020

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
I think if my life had gone slightly differently I would have had very dire Bernice energy in college and so, like Mo, I salute her as a comrade—mon semblable,— mon frère!

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
If Billingsley could do strips like that or the one with the laughing ticket taker all the time he'd be the greatest of all time.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
It turns out that redesigning a syllabus for online teaching isn't as easy as I thought it would be, especially in the middle of also having to get certified for online teaching and recording a full month's worth of video lectures and things in case I get sick and am unable to explain Macbeth to asleep-style undergrads on my own anymore and working on dissertation revisions even more. So, anyway, back on the DtWOF wagon for now at least although commentary might be scant since I'm the least exhausted I've been in awhile tonight and I'm still fucken exhausted.

Dykes to Watch Out For #93 (1990)
-Alison Bechdel


This one feels really evergreen to me, not only because Mo flipping her poo poo over being called a liberal feels very timeless but because I think there's something almost universally legible to this sense of two people who should really have split up already just not willing to get to that point with themselves or each other. This feels like the build-up to a very final breakdown but believe it or not Mo and Harriet stay together for a good chunk of the comic after this-- but the sense we've already seen of their friends feeling shaky with the longevity of the relationship continues to build from here on out.

Edit: Full disclosure this one also always stings to me because I spent much of my young adult relationships and friendships being the Mo in this scenario and in hindsight I was abominable. I thought that being sure I was ideologically correct meant I could segue the urgency I felt about woeful current events into rudeness to people who didn't agree with me. Now I find it pretty easy to see Harriet's side of things-- she loves her girlfriend and you know, definitely does care about environmental and social justice, but she's being made out as the bad guy here for having less ethical rigor than Mo. It's a tense strip because honestly Bechdel has done such a good job of making both characters lovable and getting us as readers invested in their happiness. Seeing both of their personalities contribute to the fraying of that happiness is painful to see, which I think is the intent, mitigated a little by the vaudeville-esque narration. Bechdel is the best.

How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 07:40 on Aug 15, 2020

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
I don't want to out and out ban stuff on a whim because like, even Dilbert had it's defenders and people who missed it, but I would not shed any tears if 9CL just vanished. It's not breaking any rules though it's just extremely disgusting on an ontological level, so if someone wants to post it I guess they can keep posting it until they do, I don't know, a Holocaust denial arc or something.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
And She Died

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
Dykes to Watch Out For #94 (1990)


I'm very interested in the process curtadams described in his post where "liberal" became used as a pejorative counterpoint to a more progressive or radical form of leftism. I imagine it has a long history and even in the 60s and 70s you see hints of what "liberal" denotes to many people in 2020 through terms like "limousine liberal" or the associated "champagne socialist." I feel like I should know more about this etymologically but sadly I don't. I would guess that it had some connection to the rise of "neoliberalism" and the increasing association of "socially liberal" platforms with a full-throated embrace of global capitalism. I dunno though. I think of the 1966 Phil Ochs song "Love Me, I'm A Liberal," which pretty clearly demarcates the line between a leftist committed to systemic change and someone making abstract evaluations from a position of comfort and it feels like it could have come out of 2020 C-Spam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nFvhhCulaw

I think it's striking through that it strikes this much of a nerve in Mo-- the implication is that there are very few worse things to call her and I don't think such a visceral response, especially framed here, as culturally legible if nothing else, is coming from a vacuum.

I mean obviously there's a ton of other stuff going on here and bubbling to the surface but I think the root of the conflict comes down to what it almost always is for Mo-- how much of a commitment to queerness is tied in with political praxis, and how much room there can be for pleasure and material comfort within that commitment.

How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Aug 15, 2020

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
Dykes to Watch Out For #95 (1990)


Ruth Westheimer, aka Dr. Ruth, was a popular sex therapist and media personality who became a star after her 1980 radio show Sexually Speaking took off. She was remarkably frank for the time about all sorts of issues of sexual health and enjoyment and notably was an advocate for queer sexuality and for gay men during the AIDS crisis. She's led a pretty interesting and harrowing life.

This is a remarkably languid and low-back strip after the heightened tension of the last two. Even the punchline unfolds in a leisurely fashion with the actual comic beat coming in the second to last panel and the last panel being devoted to just a small moment of Mo and Harriet being close and comfortable with one another. It lacks some of the visual and narrative spark of the last little bit but it feels like a nice, even interlude. Even some of the ongoing problems and subplots involving Toni and Clarice are put on hold and they're just allowed to be the happy couple for a moment.

"Outrageous fortune" is a pun on a line from Hamlet's famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy.

Hamlet posted:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep;

Just a cute little joke, sure, but we also see Harriet and Mo here suspended in their own "to be or not to be," weighing their options and trying to decide whether they're better off pushing through their issues or just ceasing to exist as a couple.

As a side note I love the drawing of the other family eating in the background. They're totally just set dressing but I think Bechdel gives each of them a lot of personality. My favorite is the kid just going to town.

How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Aug 16, 2020

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
That reminds me, this is kind of a cross post because I shared the picture in the GWS vegan thread, but I remember being curious a little while ago about how the Tinkerson's dad was always eating wings and stuff but was pescatarian. Was he lying and secretly eating chicken at work, or did he live in a town where he could get vegetarian wings easily? Anyway I became obsessed with this question and couldn't stop thinking about vegan wings, so I went and made my own. Normally if I want something kind of wing-esque I do tofu because it's really easy but I wanted to try seitan in honor of my favorite bar I haven't been to since pre-lockdown, which had really good seitan wings.

So here are some buffalo seitan wings in honor of the Tinkersons Dad. I think he would have liked them, they were awesome and crispy.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

catlord posted:

That looks pretty good. I've not had seitan before, or at least not knowingly, how's it taste? The wiki page for wheat gluten seems to want to compare it to TVP which worries me a little, but a quick search for seitan wing recipes shows something that looks real quick and easy to make, so I'm willing to try.

It's not that appetizing right when you're making it or if you buy it premade. It's kind of like if raw chicken was grey and came in a big round clump. However much like tofu it picks up flavor amazingly well, with the difference that it doesn't absorb quite so much moisture so it's much less of a headache to marinate it.

The other thing is to definitely cook a bit longer than you think you need to or else the middle will still be kind of gluten-y. When it gets nice and crispy all over though it's some of the best vegetarian protein I can think of. Philly used to have a legendary vegan dim-sum place back when I was in college and it was one of the favorite places to eat even for omnivores because their seitan "chicken" was just that good.

(it also works pretty well for beef-- I've had great seitan cheesesteaks although those are usually rounded out with mushrooms or something else too)

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

Raskolnikov38 posted:

Jeez ted give the man the buffalo wings already

Ted knows his rights:

The U.S. Constitution posted:

No cop shall, in time of peace be entitled to any buffalo wing, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
Dykes to Watch Out For #96 (1990)
-Alison Bechdel

Full disclosure I think the "queer black Bart shirt" panel is the funniest panel of all time and I've been waiting to post this one since I started.

The "tip of the nib to Emma Goldman" refers to a famous misattributed quote commonly ascribed to the Anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman, "If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution."

While Goldman never seems to have put it quite so pithily, the general sentiment appears in her 1931 memoir, Living My Life:

Emma Goldman posted:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everyboy's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world--prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.

The motto-ized version seems to date to 1973 when the anarchist mainstay guy Jack Frager printed up a bunch of t-shirts to distribute for a street festival celebrating the end of the Vietnam War. He was offered the above passage by Alix Kates Shulman and wound up with the condensed, more famous version, which certainly seemed to move t-shirts.

It's an interesting inclusion here because once again Mo's repression and anxiety about enjoying life in the midst of crisis are kind of positioned as the butt of the joke. I don't think it ever feels mean in the strip though-- we get the impression that Mo's friends really do want her to open up and relax a bit, to dance at the revolution as it were.

I don't know if they're all supposed to be at a specific anti-Gulf War march but such events were pretty common in the autumn of 1990 and continued through the winter of 1991 until the war's end in February.

As for Black Bart, bootleg Simpsons merch with a black Bart SImpson were really popular in the very early 90s

They usually repurposed lyrics from current hits or blended him with other famous stuff like the classic "Air Bart" shirts, but as seen here he also turned up on more cheekily subversive shirts pretty often.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

Selachian posted:

"Little Willie" jokes were still popular back in the 1910s, and if you've got a morbid sense of humor, well worth looking up.

(Willie saw some dynamite,
Couldn't understand it quite;
Curiosity never pays:
It rained Willie seven days.)

I'm in love with this person's site and unless anybody else wants to I might post a few of the "Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants" by Nelson Harding later this week. I think they'd be a really apt companion piece for DtWOF.

Like: (2/15/1914)

I gently caress with this

How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Aug 23, 2020

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

curtadams posted:

Yeah, it's not like there's a significant amount of resources being spent on the mammoth revival.

Two scientific side note on mammoths: First, they probably didn't go out because of climate change. Climate change was much more severe in the previous glacial minimum, the Eemian, than it was in the current one, the Holocene, prior to current global warming, but the mammoths did fine then. In addition, mammoths *did* survive on Wrangel Island until about 2000 BC, surviving both the fastest Holocene changes and the peak Holocene temperatures, only to disappear around the time human artifacts start showing up there. Mammoths were likely exterminated by human predation. If we *could* recreate and release them they'd probably do fine.

Fun trivia fact: There were still mammoths alive when the Pyramids were built.

Second, as a biologist, I am *super* suspicious of any current "revive the mammoth" project. Slow-frozen mammalian cells aren't going to be viable after 10,000 years in a lousy freezer. Even if they could revive the cells somehow, mammoths and elephants are as divergent as us and apes and viable hybrids are unlikely. Mammals are rarely able to crossbreed more than 2-4 million years out because of changes to fetus-placental-maternal signaling, probably driven by genomic conflict (fetal genes "want" the mother to invest more resources into the fetus than the maternal genes do, so there's an ongoing evolutionary arms race). IMO any "revive the mammoth" project will require re-creating mammalian cells "from scratch" using the mammoth sequences, and that is decades off.

This is really interesting-- I had no clue mammoths survived for that long.

My mammoth story is that when I was in middle school we went on a class field trip to Washington, DC to visit the Smithsonian. My friend wandered off and when he came back hours later he said he'd spent all his field trip money on a hamburger made out of cloned mammoth meat.

Anyway-- Ruthless Rhymes For Martial Militants was a relatively short-lived single panel strip that ran from 1913 to 1914. It was written and drawn by the cartoonist Nelson Harding, who would win the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1927 and again in 1928-- he was a lifelong political conservative who idolized Charles Lindbergh and depicted leftists and boogeyman Bolsheviks as bomb-throwing, arson-loving seditionists.

Ruthless Rhymes is a response to two particular subjects that would have been very timely in 1913, and the overlap between the two is what makes this strip so interesting to me. First is the manifest subject matter of the comic. The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) was a UK-based suffragette movement that was founded in 1903 and quickly gained a reputation for taking what seemed to many like drastic measures in their struggle for womens' rights, ranging from hunger strikes to smashing windows and burning down unoccupied houses, on top of conventional actions such as demonstrations and marches. It was helmed and defined by the firebrand Pankhurst family-- Emmaline Pankhurst and her two daughters, Christabel and Sylvia. The WSPU was also incredibly media savvy, and when popular theater latched onto suffragettes as a source of drama, the WSPU was right there to capitalize on that newfound public interest, embracing drama, cartooning, and satirical writing as valuable rhetorical tools.

As a personal aside here's a little framed reproduction in my home office of the famous portrait of Christabel Pankhurst and her comrade the feminist-socialist Annie Kenney that was given to me for some reason by one of my favorite professors years ago:

Christabel in particular was a polarizing, complex, and contradictory figure-- she pushed for the group's increasing militancy but also wanted to curate membership to center middle and upper class women. She fought for issues like sexual health education and access to birth control but puzzlingly simultaneously argued that opening the movement up to working class women would water down the fight for votes with other issues. Later in her life she moved to California where she became obsessed with Evangelical Christian doomsday prophecies and was a frequent guest on radio and TV shows to talk about that stuff.

As you can imagine Nelson Harding was not a fan, and he mostly takes jabs at what he sees as the absurd gulf between the violent tactics of the WSPU and the (to him) quaint notion of radical female agitators. His vehicle for this is a pastiche of the type of doggerel known as the "Little Willie" poem, which we've seen ITT already. Popularized in the 1890s by Harry Graham writing under the pen-name Col D. Streamer, these poems fundamentally combined one of a handful of simple rhyme schemes with a schema which juxtaposed a shocking act of violence with a bemused or muted response. The really good ones also features some clever wordplay in the stinger but expecting 1890s popular poems to be good is more than the universe is usually willing to provide.

The result is that to a modern audience of a certain bent, these strips, despite being almost certainly published as a critique and a mockery of the WSPU, seem sympathetic in their strident representation of women throwing bombs and poisoning tea. I think that for many people in this thread the strips are more likely to elicit a "hell yeah" than an "oh my."

Here's the first one, from the 4/2/1913 edition of The Brooklyn Eagle, Harding's home-paper.

How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Aug 23, 2020

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

Slammy posted:

And He Did. (May 28, 1917)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoits
I'd never heard of it.

Outbursts of Everett True (August 14, 1917)


Hitz and Mrs. (April 30, 1923)


Dark Laughter (July 13, 1935, click for big)

“Aw, Officer, He’s Only Playin’”

They'll Do It Every Time (February 10, 1941)


I’m rewinding Wee Pals a bit. This is what happens when you’re enjoying a deep dive into African American historical newspapers.

Before Wee Pals, there was Dinky Fellas, Turner’s strip in his hometown Berkeley Post and in the Chicago Defender.
At the same time, he ran additional strips in the Defender.

Reverend Smiley (June 27 & August 1, 1964)



Sepia Smiles (May 30 & June 20, 1964)


I'd be surprised if this title is not an homage to Dark Laughter.

Dinky Fellas starts in July of 1964 and from what I can tell, only ran until the end of that year. I can’t find an archive for the Berkeley Post, but I’ve pulled what I can from the Defender. Sources, including Wikipedia and Turner’s obit in The Washington Post mention that Dinky Fellas featured an all-black cast. That’s not true at all.

There are a lot of similarities between it and Wee Pals, which premiered in May of 1965.

(July 27, 1964)


This is really fascinating, thanks for posting it!

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants (4/6/1913)

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants (4/14/1913)


The last two lines of this poem are borrowed liberally from several earlier "Little Willie" poems.

From Dean Hole's 1895 A Little Tour of America:

quote:

Susan poisoned her grandmother’s tea;
Grandmamma died in agonee.
Susan’s papa was greatly vexed,
And he said to Susan: “My dear, what next?”

From Newton Mackintosh' 1896 A Chamber of Horrors With Profane Passages:

quote:

Willie poisoned his father’s tea;
Father died in agony.
Mother came, and looked quite vexed:
“Really, Will,” she said, “what next?!”[quote]

and from 1911's anonymous Little Willies
[quote]
Willie poisoned Auntie’s tea,
Auntie died in agony.
Uncle came and looked quite vexed,
“Really, Will,” said he, “what next?”

As you can see originality was not really the point of this genre. I wonder if Harding's decision to swap "agony" out for "peacefully" is a little revealing, a distaste for showing an authority figure in the throes of pain.

King George V, Queen Victoria's grandson and the guy who renamed the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the less aggressively Germanic House of Windsor in the midst of WWI, was crowned in 1910 and ruled until his death in 1936. I'm not an expert on this but a brief look around didn't turn up any major plots to poison him but he did reign during a huge tumult of new social and political movements, many of which were happy to position the awkward and stern monarch as the face of reactionary and ossified "old ways" in contrast to the new possibilities presented by the 20th century.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
Periodic reminder of the Ed Krudlick Clause: don't say gross stuff about overweight characters even if they're in bad comics.

Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants (4/21/1913)

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

The Bloop posted:

I agree in spirit, but I'd be more intimidated by the Everett True Rule tbqh

If you make fun of Everett True I think the universal understanding is that you're on your own and there's nothing god or society can do to help you.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
Please do!

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

Mercury Hat posted:

Unless I'm misreading it as an American, but this seems a very posh accent to mimic. If it is, I wonder if it was meant to paint the women's suffrage movement as the dalliances of the upper class and not something regular women care about.

Not that it would be surprising if this was the case: this is a tactic used in political cartoons to this day (timg'd for Mallard Fillmore).


That would make sense. Christabel Pankhurst was definitely not sympathetic to the working class and in many ways she set the tone for the popular conception of British suffragists (even though Harding was an American cartoonist this comic generally tends to code its protagonists as British, as we've seen-- a kind of 'do you want our women to go as berserk as their women???" cautionary gesture responding to the more visibly radicle tenor of the womens' movement across the Atlantic).

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Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

Parahexavoctal posted:

In this installment of The Timid Soul, I have no idea how Caspar could have gotten himself into this situation.

I'm fairly sure that the word "sissy" always had homophobic and misogynistic connotations, but I doubt Webster took that into consideration, just like the use of "gyp" to mean "cheat", without any consideration of it being anti-Romany.



"Sissy" had come to mean "weak, foppish, or effeminate boy or man" by the mid 19th-century. The OED has attributions from the 1870s onwards, and the sense seems to be "lacking manly qualities that are associated with brawn or grit" e.g. a "sissy" could be a boy who was afraid of getting dirty or too fastidious about his clothing. Sometimes this meant "like a girl," but at other times the sense seems closer to "like a modernized, domesticated man," like in this little bit from the 1916 Rhymes of a Red Cross Man:

quote:

We're only beginning to find ourselves;
we're wonders of brawn and thew;
But when we go back to our Cissy jobs,
Oh! what are we going to do?
I don't think the implication is that the speaker here is going back to work necessarily coded as feminine, but perhaps to something white collar and sedentary.

That being said, the very earliest uses of "sissy" in English were applied to women and girls. From the 1750s at the very latest it was in use as a term of endearment-- often a condescending or coddling one-- for a sister. In the mid-20th century "sissy" was even applied to pieces of womens' clothing that were especially frilly and ornamented: the sissy dress of the 30s or the sissy dress of the 50s, with lots of frills and ruffles and bows and stuff.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants (4/24/1914)


Here again Harding is borrowing from a familiar rhyme:

quote:

Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been?
I've been to London to visit the Queen.
Pussy cat, pussy cat, what did you do there?
I frightened a little mouse under her chair.

As with the previous examples of this tendency, originality and innovation don't seem to be Harding's strong suits. Like the lower echelons of "Little Willie" poems there seems to be less of an interest in clever wordplay or a surprising twist to the form, more of an interest in just hitting the basic beats of showing a bit of excess and violence.

"Pussy cat, pussy cat" the nursery rhyme was first recorded in 1805's Songs for the Nursery but is very likely of older provenance. It reached its apotheosis in 1983 with Adam and the Ants' "Puss 'n Boots" and that's all I have to say about that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6zstmlOjLs

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants (6/18/13)


As several people have pointed out already, yes, British suffragettes in the early 20th century were hardcore. Maybe not hardcore to the point of poisoning the king and putting dynamite under the queen's chair, but they did not gently caress around about their cause and were more than willing to smash windows, burn buildings, and organize strikes-- all tactics that did, significantly, largely work in publicizing and popularizing their message.

As Elizabeth Crawford writes of Lillian Lenton, a WSPU member who burnt down a tea pavilion at Kew Gardens:

quote:

Lilian Lenton has stated that her aim was to burn two buildings a week, in order to create such a condition in the country that it would prove impossible to govern without the consent of the governed.
WSPU members largely focused their arsonist attentions on unoccupied houses, letter boxes, and public spaces, but there was also an abandoned campaign to set fire to the homes of parliament members who opposed voting rights for women, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, did have a house he was having built hosed up.

In general 19th and early 20th century progressive movements were quite prepared to get their hands dirty.

How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Aug 28, 2020

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

amigolupus posted:

If you're going to be trash-talking how Zelda's being forced to just watch as the guys play video games, you could at least do a basic fact check about Final Fantasy and see that it's a single-player game.

Maybe they're playing FFXIV and Zelda is taking her first cautious steps in the majestic and action-packed world of Eorzea for a multiplayer epic where you and fellow heroes worldwide can team up to take down breathtaking dungeons and ferocious bosses. Maybe Zelda is a catgirl now.

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

Ardeem posted:

Why does nobody remember Crystal Chronicles?

The recent remaster was pretty disappointing and not very fun to play, I think the guy is probably just trying to protect Zelda from the truth.

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How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas

Shugojin posted:

if this is the case we should see Zelda come flying out of somewhere holding a giant sword and screaming REJOIIIIIIIIIIIIICE

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