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Bingo Bango posted:this is an abomination 
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Sep 1, 2020 04:34
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I've never changed the thread title with a heavier heart.
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Sep 1, 2020 19:07
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BigDave posted:"Let's watch the Lisa videotape together in the dark!" 
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Sep 3, 2020 02:37
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Pick posted:Someone in another thread was mentioning the for better and for worse author, are there any posts that highlight what the heck is going on with that? The basic gist is that a lot of people see a lot of evidence of bad or antiquated parenting in the strip. Some of this is just because it's a strip about parenting that's over 40 years old, part of it is because it's a bit of a roman a clef in some ways and some of Lynn Johnston's idiosyncracies pop up in bizarre or worrisome ways. There are a few things in particularly that come up frequently in this thread-- largely stuff that came up in interviews over the years, in particular weird intersections between her own life and the semi-autobiographical lives of her characters. Primarily, IIRC, there's a plot-line adapting an incident in which her real-life son goes to photograph a fatal car crash (for the school paper?) and only realizes later that he knew the victim, whereas in the comic the victim is his crush and he rescues her. Her son is also gay in real life, while in the comic he goes on to marry the girl he rescued from the crash. I can't find the interview at the moment, but I remember it coming up in an older iteration of this, where she talks about her anger issues and relates tossing one of her kids out into the snow and locking the door at some point, before getting ahold of herself and letting them back in. She's also talked pretty frankly in interviews about her own childhood in an abusive home and sort of her issues shaking bad habits from that environment, so idk, I don't think any of it is actually particularly funny and ranges from standard goon hyperbole to legitimately sad and shocking things. I think this all has taken on a life of it's own in relation to For Better or For Worse in particular because it's pretty goofy and has had a bunch of memorably dumb bits over the years-- I remember like, over a decade ago reading some GBS thread about it and seeing this specific strip:  Which is pretty characteristic of her efforts to stay hip and happening. During that period of the late aughts when the strip was in its twilight years (pre-BSS maybe?) there were a ton of memes about the ongoing melodramatic plots which I think have lingered around. Hopefully somebody more invested in FBofW can correct me on anything I flubbed and fill in some of the gaps-- it's really bugging me that I can't find the quote about throwing her child into the snow. Anyway, here's a 2008 blog post in which Alison Bechdel loses her patience at the whole affair.
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Sep 3, 2020 08:18
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Ghostlight posted:https://www.hoganmag.com/blog/the-lynn-johnston-interview Oh, thank you. I think that whether you like FBofW or not it's a pretty interesting interview and worth perusing.
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Sep 3, 2020 08:28
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I've been super busy adjusting to teaching online and also hammering away at dissertation revisions so I haven't had a ton of energy to post over the past few days, so here are two Ruthless Rhymes. There are not a ton of these-- or at least, I don't have a ton of them-- so I'll get back to DtWOF when I run out. Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants (8/21/1913, 8/24/1913)   So once again we see that Harding is writing within the context of the UK-- which kind of makes sense, since the foreign and remote activism of British suffragettes were much more aligned with these characters than their US counterparts (Alice Paul's National Woman's Party wasn't founded until 1916, and boasted tactics much closer to Pankhurt's than those of earlier American suffrage groups), but also odd since Harding was an American artist publishing in the Brooklyn Eagle. It's not really a mystery but it is a little off-putting. You'll also note a tendency in the earlier strips really start to come to the forefront here-- none of Harding's suffragette figures are very conventionally good looking. He draws them as either stout and bulky in an "unfeminine" way, like the older woman in the second strip here and the very muscular, athletic looking brick-thrower, goofy and gangly looking like the young torch-wielding girl, or very eccentric, elderly, ungainly characters . The suggestion is that these politically radical women who want to usurp the civic prerogative and social position of men are in fact the failed-states of femininity-- ungraceful, unladylike, unwieldy, unable to inhabit or fulfill the roles they seek to reject. The intense misogyny of Hardin's polemical point begins to dovetail with the aesthetics of the comic. That being said, I still think these ladies rule.
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Sep 4, 2020 06:51
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Professor Wayne posted:
tbf if I remember that story correctly he came to rescue her because a guy was getting really aggressive and invasive with her, which like, I think that's a really common and valid reason for a woman in college to want somebody to come escort her out of there and back home. In general sure it was a really goofy story though and like, the idea of a wild party was just basically people being noisy in a room.
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Sep 4, 2020 18:07
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Sep 4, 2020 22:31
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I don't want to think about Fred and Rosemary West when I'm enjoying my coffee and trying to catch up on Dustin. I get that there are a lot of lovely comic strip parents and much of the "fun" in engaging with Dustin or Foob or One Big Happy is saying "ah, look here, beneath the cheerful facade a big pile of rotten ants" but please remember that at the end of the day these are cartoon characters. We can appreciate that Ed Krudlick is a bad and withholding father without having to resort to "remember this gruesome sequence of sexual assaults and serial killings."
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Sep 5, 2020 15:56
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riderchop posted:Rae the Doe's web archives Brutally accurate punchline.
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Sep 12, 2020 01:09
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amigolupus posted:The way the teens are shorter than the adults makes me think they're supposed to be around 13-15, it's just that the art makes them all look like they should be in their 40s instead. If you're unfamiliar with the characters and don't see their heights as a context clue, it's easy to confuse them with the rest of the grown-ups. In Punk Cave you grow up fast.
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Sep 12, 2020 04:51
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Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants (8/25/1913) Back on it for a bit after a mega busy week, although dissertation stuff is heading into a really really hectic phase so who knows. Prussic cyanide, better known perhaps as hydrogen cyanide! From its initial discovery and isolation in the 18th century it very rapidly came into broad use as a poison, notably on harpoons on whaling vessels. However, it also worked on humans, as this strip suggests-- one of its earliest recorded uses for murder was in the very sensational case of John Tawell, a London chemist who used it to poison his mistress in 1845 and who has the dubious distinction of also being one of the first murderers to be tracked down via telegraph, boosting the then-new invention's public profile. While hydrogen peroxide would eventually be used for historically appalling acts of mass murder-- it was tested as a chemical weapon in WWI with mixed success and was the primary ingredient in Zykon B-- when Harding wrote this strip it was more associated with murder on the domestic scale. Note too how Harding portrays the "simple soul" here-- glassy stare, mouth half-open, stiff posture, blocky head. As I noted last time, he consistently portrays the women in these strips as physically abnormal in some way, whether ugly, eccentric, or, as here, drawn with the stereotypical early 20th century phrenological signifiers of severe mental illness. For the most part when he pulls this strip the ladies are so exaggeratedly strange or wild looking that I really like them, but I think Peg here feels more pointedly mean. The depiction really kind of bugs me in a way that few of Harding's other strips in this series do. I did have to read a bunch of phrenology books for work several years ago and I hated every second of it so maybe I'm just still carrying that around with me. Anyway if I ever get arrested for any reason please be aware that this is why I was looking up hydrogen cyanide at 2:00 AM on a Saturday. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Sep 12, 2020 |
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Sep 12, 2020 06:11
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Haifisch posted:I have no idea why you posted this but Dilbert's back. skipThings posted:or I am just bitter I do not get to make money off of my anxiety I think it would be very difficult for her to create art that didn't express or disclose her anxiety, and the fact that she is making a comic strip makes it easy for her to couch that disclosure in jokes. I don't think there's anything unseemly about this...? I'd be very very surprised if she was appropriating or travestying anxiety just for kicks-- it feels sharply observed and honestly felt. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Sep 12, 2020 |
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Sep 12, 2020 19:15
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Edit: Forgot which buttons do what
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Sep 12, 2020 19:17
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Gamer Dilbert is as valid an inclusion as like, Mr. Boop, and if you're doing Gamer Dilbert you might as well do Powerup Comics. I guess they'd fit in either here or in the webcomics thread so having them in here is fine with me. Anyway here are some Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants (8/29/1913) 
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Sep 13, 2020 05:13
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Gamer Dilbert is made by a funny writer and not by a deranged racist hypnotist.
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Sep 13, 2020 17:12
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Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants (2/15/1914) I guess this woman shot down 17 cops. This strip would have come out as violence between suffragists and the police (and other reactionaries) came to a head-- throughout the end of 1913 and the beginning of 1914 an inner circle of the WSPU specially trained in self-defense helped smuggle an increasing number of women under police surveillance to safety and in early march participated in the "Battle of Glasgow," a mass brawl with the cops. Just a few months later, with the onset of World War I, much of the WSPU's leadership pivoted away from women's rights to assisting in the war effort, leading to a de-escalation of tensions, and sure enough Harding's strip petered out by early July.
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Sep 13, 2020 21:11
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Shugojin posted:I assumed it was constables running away like cowards but this is even cooler I think your reading is probably correct but maybe in my mind I think cops evaporate upon death like vampires.
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Sep 13, 2020 21:17
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Obviously Rose is Rose is odious but Nancy's stuff on teaching remotely also feels a little off. I thought my students would be pretty disengaged but I think a lot of them are really eager for something to do and for an environment where they have to be in a conversation with a bunch of other people.
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Sep 14, 2020 15:42
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Alterian posted:I just don't have bangs. Now's the time to get some!
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Sep 14, 2020 16:14
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ikanreed posted:Let's just say we all know that interaction wouldn't go that way with any real person. Doubling down and getting angry at him for condescending to her is the most likely outcome. Every time I read D&D I initially think "Dungeons and Dragons" so I was like "whoa, sounds like an intense campaign."
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Sep 14, 2020 19:04
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Alhazred posted:Zelda I'm curious when these originally ran? And I agree with Tendales, Lina Neidstrom's style in the more recent strips has been really strong, and the contrast here between Zelda's serious journalist face and her goofy faces earlier in this storyline is striking.
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Sep 17, 2020 13:41
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Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants (3/11/1914) I am feeling ruthless and martial today* so please enjoy this lady who was really looking forward to doing arson. *listless and catatonic
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Sep 19, 2020 18:09
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Kennel posted:Dustin Holy mackerel, Dustin's bedroom has its own bathroom and what appears to be a kitchenette? No wonder he doesn't want to move out, that's wild. Also that mess looks like it would take about 10 minutes to take care of.
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Sep 20, 2020 17:23
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fondue posted:By the middle of the 70s New York was a shithole and a prime example of a bad place you didn't want to visit. Times Square was full of strip clubs, hookers, drug dealers, and garbage. Unemployment was over 8% and there was an ongoing oil embargo making gasoline expensive and rare. Look for a few slice of life movies from the time set in the city to get a good idea how filthy it really was. Mean Streets is a great example. One of my favorite essays of all time is Samuel R. Delany's Times Square Red/Times Square Blue which is in part a counterargument to this sentiment.
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Sep 20, 2020 21:45
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His grandson is Pat from Achewood. He passed down his aquarium rules from generation to generation. Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants (3/17/1914) 
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Sep 21, 2020 04:22
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Some Guy TT posted:after Niedestam went through the very heterosexual act of accidental pregnancy. At least that's what I'm assuming happened, since you didn't specify whether she got married or is in a long-term relationship. This part could use some work! But the speculation is interesting because it definitely feels like they're just hanging out at home without the baby (toddler now?) or Tove's girlfriend around in a way that doesn't seem like a scheduled hangout (Zelda's just lounging and apparently watching a movie on her own which is kind of poor hosting) so I'm curious what the status quo is. I hope Tove's girlfriend (wife?) is still going to be a major character because I liked her and want to find out about her novel. Edit: Also that Niedestam illustration of the goblin den is the most adorable thing I've ever seen.
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Sep 21, 2020 06:46
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fun hater posted:knowing full well what kind of disturbing history lynn johnston has self-confessed to in interviews, i think some of the heat she pulls from posters in here in can be really weird and off-putting. especially when its prying and picking at minutiae like this. i dont think a comic in which the mild observation is "being a mom is a full time job" compares to like...the real things she's done. I agree and generally I let it slide because I get where the animosity is coming from. But at times it veers dangerously close to "ugh, why doesn't this woman just shut up and accept her place" even though I really don't think any of the posters mean for it to come across that way. That being said, I think laying off the moralizing nitpicking would be good for some of the comics in this thread. Parenting is hard, exhausting work and every parent I know finds the limits of their patience eventually. It's ok to frown. It's ok to grumble. We don't need to hear tut tuts about it every single day and as maudlin as Foob can be and as hosed up as a lot of events in Johnston's life were I do think it became popular for a reason, and that reason was that it showed a mother who was allowed to be overwhelmed and irritated, which is a really valuable and healthy thing. Save the vitriol for stuff that really deserves it, not for "mother is tired from having to run endless errands and is not beaming with permanent joy."
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Sep 22, 2020 03:23
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If you honestly think 90% of the character's actions are emotionally abusive than it sounds like the conversation should be about whether it needs to be in this thread.
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Sep 22, 2020 04:41
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I just want to say that I burst out laughing that Zelda just rolled up with a fresh new baby in the midst of this conversation. I'm heading to bed soon but I'd like to see some more input on Foob because I'm really not sure what the best next step is. I don't like banning strips outright as a rule, but this is also not the first time I have heard someone bring up the issue that the discourse around it is tremendously bleak and more than one person has expressed to me that a desire to not have to read comments about child abuse every day has kept them away from this thread. Foob isn't going to change because, well, Johnston gave up on changing it, so all we can really change is the conversation around it. I hope it's obvious that I don't think only nice comments about Sweet Lynn from now on is a good solution but I don't think the current discourse around it is healthy or entertaining either. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Sep 22, 2020 |
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Sep 22, 2020 05:36
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Ok everybody, thank you for your input. It sounds like the general historical interest of Foob, as well as its importance to the history of SA comic strip threads, merits its inclusion in the thread. I would politely ask that the tone around it be modulated slightly though. I don't personally find hate-reading interesting although I get that it has a long tradition and that it's a useful pressure valve for many people in stressful times, so I don't want to clamp down on that. That being said, I recognize that emotionally abusive or unhealthy parenting behaviors can be read into Foob strips and that as with any other comic in this thread with dated material there's value in pointing that out. But seeing posts about abuse and psychological trauma and neglect etc. every single day is exhausting, especially in the instances where they seem to be paired with relatively innocuous strips. I'm not going to probate these kinds of posts because like, frankly a lot of this is based on my personal tastes and my general desire for people who for one reason or another do not want to post in a thread to be able to post in that thread, but I want to politely ask people to cool it just slightly. Remember that it's a comic strip, with all the formal effects that that entails-- characters make exaggerated facial expressions, have conflicts escalate in a handful of panels, and rely on an often limited rotation of jokes. Foob isn't a memoir even if elements of it can be read autobiographically. So please think about your posts, about the medium, and about whether other people come here to think about child abuse before you click "Submit Reply." There have definitely been shocking Foob strips where I think those kinds of conversations are warranted but I don't think every strip with Lynn in it is an occasion for moral outrage. Apologies for forcing the issue but I'm glad to have everybody's opinions on the situation and why it stands where it stands. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 16:28 on Sep 22, 2020 |
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Sep 22, 2020 16:25
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curtadams posted:Bah, nobody understands Cathy. Cathy is the protagonist but not the heroine; Andrea is the heroine. Cathy is *supposed* to be irritating and irresponsible. Anti-heroes were very hip when it started in the 70's. They still are, really. It was also pretty good for the first few years; but like many strips it ran out of jokes and hung around for decades as a weak legacy strip. Before I started posting DtWOF I was planning on doing Cathy but the earliest strips I could find didn't grab me and it seemed like a big hassle to track down a reasonably complete selection of strips. Maybe when I'm done with my diss I'll use some of that energy to look into it again.
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Sep 22, 2020 21:27
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Cowslips Warren posted:Hey whatever happened to DtWoF? I put it on hold until I run out of Ruthless Rhymes (which will be pretty soon) because, honestly, I misplaced the volume of DtWOF I was on and have been too busy to look for it. I think it fell behind my desk when I was getting set up for zoom teaching, I'm just not in a hurry to push stuff around again. Speaking of which: Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants (3/23/1914)  One of the more spectacular actions taken by the WSPU and their allies was slashing up or otherwise damaging pictures that they saw as degrading to women or representative of the under-representation of women in fine art galleries and museums (still a huge problem!). One of the most famous of these incidents took place just a week and a half before this strip ran, on 3/10/1914, when the Canadian suffragist Mary Richardson slashed Diego Velasquez' Rokeby Venus (1647-1651).  Her statement in the aftermath is worth quoting: Mary Richardson posted:I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas. Mrs Pankhurst seeks to procure justice for womanhood, and for this she is being slowly murdered by a Government of Iscariot politicians. If there is an outcry against my deed, let every one remember that such an outcry is an hypocrisy so long as they allow the destruction of Mrs Pankhurst and other beautiful living women, and that until the public cease to countenance human destruction the stones cast against me for the destruction of this picture are each an evidence against them of artistic as well as moral and political humbug and hypocrisy. About a dozen other paintings were slashed between March and the massive and rapid shifting of gears that the WSPU underwent with the outbreak of World War I. On a personal note, when I was in college a guy told me that he'd drawn a big penis on one of the canvases of Cy Twombly's Fifty Days at Iliam. Later on I realized that the big penis was meant to be there all along. Tricked! 
How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Sep 23, 2020 |
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Sep 23, 2020 02:38
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Darthemed posted:Hey, whatever happened to Sam's Strip? I have no excuse for this one! Especially since I'd just been taking them from the Fantagraphics collection. Sam's Strip (2/13/1963)  In 1963 Nixon's star was low. After serving as vice president during Eisenhower's tenure he'd lost the 1960 presidential election to Kennedy, and the 1962 California gubernatorial election to incumbent Pat Brown. He did not handle either of these losses especially gracefully How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Sep 23, 2020 |
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Sep 23, 2020 03:38
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StrixNebulosa posted:I will do this until I get bored or burn out Thanks for Cathy-posting, I do want to see how it develops and I feel bad that I didn't have the energy or wherewithal at the time. I might have gone so far as to write up a little OP about Guisewite and the strip last year (I honestly do not remember) if you want to see it for reference. P.S. Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants (4/9/14)  Sam's Strip (2/14/1962)  A vogue for ironic and somewhat dark greeting cards popped up in the late 1950s. Produced by a variety of independent publishers and artists, these "studio cards" tended to be taller and narrower than conventional cards and were pitched towards a more hip, urbane audience. Herb Gardner's comic strip The Nebbishes, for example, spun off of a line of cards, and Bill Box and Bill Kennedy's "Box Cards" had a strong campus following until, eventually, Hallmark squeezed their competitors out of the market. I presume? that this strip is about those cards, although it feels more like a gag about those cards with the sound chips in them. I just don't see any evidence in a very very quick and rough perusal that those kinds of cards really existed in 1962. Of course this shows a big wind-up key on the back of the card instead of a chip. So I have no idea. We share a lot of laughs here in BSS: THE SCREAMING ROOM> Comic Strips 2020: The Neatest Lil' Biddies in Existence but coronary thrombosis is no laughing matter. Talk to your doctor about lowering your cholesterol levels and maintaining a healthy blood pressure. And that's the straight scoop from me, the Keypad Kid. 
How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Sep 23, 2020 |
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Sep 23, 2020 14:32
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I mean they were running circles around Europe in every other scientific discipline for centuries, why not time travel too?
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Sep 23, 2020 16:18
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It is unbelievable how popular and widespread eugenic thinking was in nineteenth and early twentieth century America. Even worse, once you recognize the language and what's more, the ideas behind it, you begin to realize that in a lot of ways it never really went away. There was a long stretch of my pre-dissertation research where I would go to bed completely broken down every night just from being immersed in that poo poo for eight hours a day. Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants 10/10/1914  At this point we're about two weeks out from the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. Neither the WSPU as a dedicated suffrage organization nor Nelson Harding's Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants are long for this world. Suffrage and feminism in general would emerge from the other side of WWI in a quite different place-- women wound up playing an important role in the war effort, with Britain in particular creating a Women's Auxiliary Corp, a Women's Air Force, and a Women's Royal Navy in 1917. In 1918 this all translated into increased although still limited civil liberties. Women gained the vote in 1918, and in 1919 the Sex Discrimination Removal Act made it illegal to fire women from a job on the basis of their gender (although a follow-up legislation gave men explicit priority in filling jobs). Sam's Strio (2/15/1962)  Henry Barnes was appointed traffic commissioner of NYC in 1962 after a successful career in Flint, Denver, and Baltimore. New York in the 60s was in the throes of numerous projects of redevelopment and modernization, with a lot of big egos jostling for priority. Barnes in particular clashed with the notoriously despotic city planner, Robert Moses, arguably one of the prime super-villains of 20th century American public life. The joke here is that traffic in 1960s New York was hosed. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Sep 24, 2020 |
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Sep 24, 2020 14:57
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Every pastiche he does looks so much better than the strip's normal style, so the horrifying conclusion is that he chooses to make Working Daze the way it does on purpose. A little while ago they did a pastiche of that clean lined 1950s style and it actually looked really pleasant! I don't understand at all!
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Sep 25, 2020 02:49
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Discendo Vox posted:I'm doing a long-form posting project (extremely long-form, my first post was almost a year ago) on a very very important, little-reported case of modern scientific eugenics and how it was promoted/spread in the academy here. Holy moley, everyone should check this out. Thank you for the link and for the excellent work.
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Sep 25, 2020 04:40
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Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants (7/8/1914) This is the last Ruthless Rhymes, as far as I know, and by this point Franz Ferdinand is dead and Sarajevo was awash in brutal anti-Serb violence. I don't know if Nelson Harding would have cared very much about that, though, and officially war still a few weeks away. His comic strip about sinister and absurd feminists posing a violent threat to order would no longer seem relevant, his bathetic antagonists replaced for much larger and less easily delineated ones. Note the little "VOTES" pennant waving behind Arabella in this one-- Harding is usually more cagey about why suffragists are engaging in violence, but here he lets the mask slip a little and shows the desire for actual suffrage going hand in hand with the "monstrous thing" of civic violence (in this case the very very jokey and hyperbolic act of throwing a muffin). So here at the very end of the strip we see Harding at his ugliest and his least prescient-- simultaneously totally defanging the suasive power of the WSPU and finally acknowledging a part of their real-life platform. Sam's Strip (2/16/1962)  And..... Dykes to Watch Out For #97 (1990)  
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Sep 25, 2020 14:25
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