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I hope somebody reading this is assiduously printing out every Smokey Stover and completing their daily cut-up for grown-ups.
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Jun 26, 2020 22:58
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Selachian posted:And playing with the Brenda Starr paper dolls, too. I wish I could find it now, but I recently saw a poster or promotional thing for the 1933 adaptation of Little Women that featured paper dolls to put on Katherine Hepburn that reminded me of the Brenda Starr stuff.
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Jun 27, 2020 01:30
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Johnny Aztec posted:Jesus, it's like the Pat/Nice Pete dynamic, if you smoothed all the edges off. 
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Jun 30, 2020 04:23
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Who would like to be "The Stylish Stout." Who will step up to the plate.
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Jun 30, 2020 09:22
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This page is very rich in phrases. I love the Ella Cinders WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT. I really love "I was too eager in play." Comics are such a gift.
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Jul 2, 2020 16:26
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I wonder what the generational divide is with being spanked or slapped by parents. I know it was something that happened when I was a kid but by the time my little brother was born public perception had shifted or something because I remember seeing him get away with a time out for stuff that I'd been corporally punished for at the same age and thinking "hey, what gives." I don't think my parents were abusive or anything but I think they definitely just bought into doing things in the way they were familiar with at first. As I get older and can talk to my mom more frankly about her parenting philosophy I think she's proud of giving me and my brother a lot of freedom to explore and figure out what our own deals were and has some regrets about how much the way that parenting is "taught" has changed over the last decades and how she could have done certain things differently. I think it's definitely the case that for me the idea of laying a finger on a child is unthinkable and I think every parent my age that I know feels the same way-- I think that's an encouraging sign. Aleph Null posted:It's not the casual sex with a hot nerd; it's the fact that she got so shitfaced she barely remembers it and might feel like she made choices she wouldn't have made sober. I reread the comic again because of this and I don't see Xena's chakrams in the nerd guy's display, so I'm choosing to believe that Zelda just carries chakrams around just in case.
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Jul 2, 2020 18:05
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Yeah, basically. Black households are treated abominably by CPS and it's often used as a very much carcerally-adjacent tool to harm and destabilize families. The article isn't saying "it's not fair that people get in trouble for hitting their kids," it's pointing out that in many cases the CPS will be looking for an excuse to exercise punitive powers when it's a black family in question.
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Jul 2, 2020 19:02
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Green Intern posted:In my own experience, it's something I see with parents who are now in their 50s and 60s (and post on facebook about how their dad whupped their rear end and they turned out fine so why can't the parents of those protesters and rioters do the same Yeah that's precisely the age bracket my parents are in, and they both definitely grew up in households where corporal punishment was absolutely normalized. My mom in particular went through horrid poo poo. I believe she also went to Catholic school at a time when corporal punishment was the norm there too. It's horrifying that within living peoples' memories it was totally accepted that children misbehaving merited physically striking them. Even look at the changing representation of that poo poo in media-- I think that if the Simpsons were to debut in 2020 you definitely wouldn't see jokes about Homer strangling Bart, for instance. I think it's a testament to my parents that they're never like "back in my day" about it but like I said seem generally mortified that when they were new parents spanking was taught as a normal and even humane thing to do.
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Jul 2, 2020 19:08
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). My parents never practiced spanking or slapping as far as I know; not with myself nor my older brother.
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That Val in the last panel would be an exquisite avatar and I'm chomping at the bit to give it to somebody.
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Jul 4, 2020 01:47
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Kennel posted:Mods: please probate everyone who hasn't saved the stamps. If I'm ever admin you will be forced to show your Prince Valiant stamps at the gate before entering BSS
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Jul 4, 2020 02:04
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The best way to read it is to get the huge reprint editions and lie down on your belly and read them all the way through.
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Jul 4, 2020 05:39
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I believe Alec Robbins also made a reverse dating sim where you have to break up with everyone you know that I remember being really funny. He's a super funny guy.
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Jul 5, 2020 16:53
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Dykes to Watch Out For #80, Alison Bechdel (1990)  I need to apologize for a little bit of ambiguity here. This strip actually is in the Essential, I just didn't realize it until after I'd already scanned it and didn't want to make extra work. That means that this is one of the handful of strips about Mo's therapy to make it into that collection-- maybe because in this one the therapy stuff is more about setting up long-term developments in her relationship to Harriet. The more I think about it the less I envy whoever had to trim that book down into one more or less cohesive narrative. Mo is reading a variety of iterations of The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller, a pop psychology book from 1979 that was very popular and kicked off the still-ongoing trend of neurotic adults navel-gazing about what sensitive geniuses they were as kids. In the 80s this and similar books about the peculiar parenting challenges of "gifted kids" were very hot-- I certainly remember my parents having a few on their shelf, and me and my brother ate catfood on dares so draw your own conclusions. This strip also continues Bechdel's exploration of the trope of "lesbian bed death," the stereotype that as lesbians settled into long-term relationships their sex-lives fizzled out. This was a very very prevalent idea throughout the late 80s, owing to a 1983 study on American sexual habits that found a steeper decline in sex between committed lesbians than in any other sort of arrangement. As you might imagine there was plenty of backlash to how this study was conducted and framed but at the time it was a stereotype that found a decent amount of traction in lesbian language itself (like the concept of the U-Haul lesbian). As we move into the 90s I feel like Bechdel seems to get kind of fed up with this and decides to give her characters more lively sex lives. Again, in this case it definitely feeds into ongoing and developing stuff with Harriet and Mo. I also want to apologize for the long hiatus. I spent the last week of June totally sidetracked by bigger goon fires and then had a burst of headway on dissertation revisions, then I lost track of where my Bechdel books went in the midst of books for work being carted around from room to room in a frenzy. I also had a minor crisis of conscience about posting such a frequently depressing comic in here during frequently depressing times but I do think it's a funny strip and a really well done one-- I still hold that Bechdel is one of the all-time geniuses of the medium-- so who knows I think it's worth the trade-off. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Jul 8, 2020 |
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Jul 8, 2020 17:41
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And just to keep things rolling I guess: DtWOF #81, Alison Bechdel (1990)  The She-Ra reference threw me off at first because I'm mostly familiar with the character as a modern cartoon lesbian, but of course she's originally from the 80s Masters of the Universe franchise, debuting in her own show in 1985 as a girl-friendly counterpart to He-Man. Much like He-Man, she was a waifish girl who could say some magic words and turn into a huge ripped Frazetta-style hunk.  Both series had tremendous camp appeal so the explicitly queer reboot of more recent years isn't really surprising. The lesbian rugby player is also an evergreen cliche. We'll see a bit of Lois' youth later on but there's a note of tension here between the stereotype of the butch college rugby athlete and the contrast between Lois' adult self-fashioning as butch versus her more strait-laced adolescence. Lois' discomfort here overall is nicely portrayed and nuanced. She comes across as awkward without acting out in dramatic but unrealistic ways. There's the obvious element of her feeling like a sixth wheel, but also a note of discomfort in not being able to feel like the transgressive, confrontational element in the room. I think she liked the fantasy of showing an older straight woman the proverbial ropes, and suddenly finds herself in a setting where her persona is defanged or, worse, reduced to dress-up-- as in the son borrowing her cool leather jacket to pretend to be a Hell's Angel. She's not in a position to stick it to the squares and I think that that puts her on the back foot. Oh also, as curtadams mentioned ages ago, here's the rare appearance of Emma's silent husband. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Jul 8, 2020 |
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Jul 8, 2020 18:01
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The Bloop posted:That's a pretty major spoiler image there for the series finale of a 5 season show that just recently concluded Edited it out, sorry!
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Jul 8, 2020 18:36
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Dykes to Watch Out For #82 (1990) -Alison Bechdel     (Edit: the above might be totally wrong, as I realize that "off our backs" was not a weekly in 1990 and the cover looked nothing like that. The name of the paper she might be riffing on is on the tip of my tongue but I can't get there right now. If anybody else wants to chime in please do, otherwise I'll try to figure it out tomorrow.) Just as a reminder, here's how the strip was formatted for oob:  Compare that to the long two-page format of the Firebrand editions and the one-page format of the Essential. It's definitely a compromise that effects the flow of some strips and the pacing of some of the jokes but I think it's definitely readable in all three formats. On the other side of the issue you have Howard Cruse's Wendel, which switched format when The Advocate changed page sizes. The collected Wendel solves this by printing the early strips horizontally before switching to vertically-oriented pages for the strip's later years-- a nice stance for artistic integrity but one which makes the book kind of hard to read and a real pain to scan from. Mo's irritation here stems from a recurrent issue in the strip-- the tension between queer people becoming more visible in the mainstream, and the accompanying thread of queer culture being diluted or compromised. Bechdel's joke here is pretty typical of a certain type of upwardly mobile late 80s/early 90s queer person-- yuppie-ish, invested in protecting and increasing their personal wealth, and definitely not interested in the aura of radicalism or subversion that had accompanied queer identity for decades. Mo is upset at the conflation of those two things-- the idea that as she cites, being a "dyke" meant doing stereotypically leftist or "hippy-dippy" stuff like eating tofu or having unshaved armpits, but she's also taking umbrage at people who do do that stuff (like her and most of her friends) are outmoded. It's pretty upfront about this-- Mo's "whatever happened to feminism" against Lois' idea that being able to grow out of a monoculture is a potentially good thing. The strip consistently pits the idea of queer identity as solidarity, and often a political solidarity at that, versus the emerging notion of queerness as a facet of identity that could as comfortably assimilated into middle-class, upwardly mobile American culture as any other. "Selling out" is one of the main themes of the comic throughout the years, as is growing old, and this strip finds Mo at the juncture of those two in a more subtle way than say, Clarice and Toni's concurrent stuff. Anyway I also want to put a pin in this particular argument between Mo and Lois because in this particular strip it's quite easy to be on Mo's side since the yuppie "nondykes" lady sounds kind of awful, but we'll return to this conflict between a very entrenched and historically specific vision of lesbianism on Mo's part versus Lois' more easy-going and capacious vision a few more times throughout the years, and in those instances (in particularly, regarding bisexuality and trans women) Lois comes off much better. I can tell that there are little jokes in the four panels where the front page is visible but I have a hard time with Bechdel's cursive. I can make out "for perverts of all persuasions" on the second page but the first three are a mystery to me. The first might be "Lesbian, gay & bi weekly" which is another hint that I was totally off-base in calling it an ersatz "off our backs." . How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Jul 10, 2020 |
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Jul 10, 2020 07:38
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Tiggum posted:
If anybody wants it I can queue it up gratis!
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Jul 12, 2020 12:44
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Dykes to Watch Out For #83 (1990) -Alison Bechdel  I reread this one with curtadams' last comment about Mo and Harriet's relationship in mind and I see it pretty clearly. There are fractures showing up in the relationship that in some ways feel like a pretty organic development and in other ways feel like characters trying to catch up with plotting-- Mo is especially snitty in this one although I guess I've been in that position of starting dinner too early and sulking about it not being hot'n'fresh for guests. Anyway if you enjoy cooking along with Mo, here is a decent Szechuan stir fry in lieu of more interesting commentary. Tofu isn't mentioned in the comic but I think it rules in a stir fry.
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Jul 13, 2020 19:57
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curtadams posted:I think Batiuk is more often successful in his Sunday strips which at least have the space to accommodate more complex structures. I think you need a different system to do dramedy successfully in a daily format. An obvious one is some drama strips and some comedy strips, although the webcomic Dumbing of Age does that some and it's not entirely successful either - there's a kind of "whiplash effect" from going back and forth. It could be the writer, though, because I get that from his fight sequences as well. This is a really good point and it makes me think again about what Howard Cruse has said about not wanting to do Wendel anymore if he had to squash it down to a gag strip and only resuming work on it when the Advocate offered him a full two-page spread again. I believe in everything I've read about it he cited comedic timing specifically but Wendel also had quite a bit of a soap element to it, and while I don't think Cruse's characters are quite as vividly realized as Bechdel's, I think he also had a sense that he'd lose out on that element of being able to reveal characterization over time if he was restricted to four panels or half a page.
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Jul 14, 2020 22:33
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Dykes to Watch Out For #84 (1990) -Alison Bechdel   This is one of my all-time favorite DtWOF strips and it's a shame it got cut because I think we rarely see Mo this vulnerable and so up-front about needing to be liked and understood, even though it's subtextually there all the time. I think the second to last panel is really moving-- Mo's happy and relieved to hear that her therapist likes her, but also kind of embarrassed at herself for caring that much, and feeling kind of awkward and off-foot from having the quiet therapy part said out loud. I also really like the bottom row of the first page and how it's bracketed by Mo's "dunno" on the one hand and then the therapist's little nudge on the other, after the cut. The faces and body language are great and it's a little moment I've had in therapy so many times, where I just need to take a minute to follow a thread. In general this particular strip feels really honest about therapy, and that weird transference relationship you have with your therapist. I really wish this subplot had been preserved more in the Essential. I think the canniness and light touch about analysis in it is really useful presage for the turn Bechdel takes in Fun Home and Are You My Mother?.
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Jul 15, 2020 16:59
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Zelda is so much better without that glasses ex guy in it and her "I wanna see the baby" face is really good.
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Jul 16, 2020 09:09
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Dykes to Watch Out For #85 (1990) -Alison Bechdel  Here's another strip where Mo is really set up to take the fall-- where her doctrinaire sense of protectiveness about the boundaries of lesbian culture and lesbian conduct are made fun of by other characters with more flexible and less proscriptive notions of what queerness in the 90s looks like and acts like. Compare this with the very very reified and even ossified sense of nostalgia and "kids these days" that you get in a lot of comic strips-- here, Mo's main foible is being unable to keep up with changing norms, even when, at times, her anxieties and Bechdel's anxieties about the changing cultural profile of queerness seem to align (ie, Log Cabin Republicans, corporate pandering, etc.). Note also the usage of "politically correct" here as a positive ideal-- definitely a strange usage reading in 2020 but not so unusual for 1990. "PC" originated in the 70s as a term within leftist activism, a gently ironic way of talking about internal rules and unspoken boundaries-- see Toni Cade Bambara's edict in 1970's The Black Woma that "a man cannot be politically correct and a chauvinist too" or later, the "Bart Dickon, Ideologically Sound Secret Agent" comics. It poked fun at an in-group tendency to want to find the party line and toe it, but was increasingly used with unironic fondness and earnest (imo useful) interest in talking about finding ways for leftist groups to adopt more inclusive and dare I say even more intersectional language and behavior. For a stretch of time-- and I believe Bechdel talks about this in The Indelible Bechdel, I'll check later-- people went from sarcastically calling their friends and comrades PC to wanting to be seen as PC even if it still carried a whiff of doctrinaire and starchy rigor to it. A perfect word to lob at Mo here, whose leftist is always cut with a little Calvinist streak. It was only really in the mid 80s that PC began to be co-opted by culture warriors on the right-- crystallizing with Allan Bloom's 1987 The Closing of the American Mind, which condensed a lot of the simmering conservative frustration with American academia throughout the Reagan years and continuing on through various talk radio, cable news, and pundit book outlets up through today. The Black Women's Health Book was a 1990 anthology by various black female writers addressing different aspects of health and culture-- it was less a medical handbook and more a collection of personal essays about how race and gender inflected health, illness, and relationship to medical institutions. It ran the gamut from interviews with midwives and community health advocates to essays about PTSD and blood pressure to poems about mental illness. It's a really interesting artifact and worth having a look at, and a fascinating choice for Bechdel to give it a shout-out across several different panels here instead of opting for one of her parody book titles.
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Jul 16, 2020 16:39
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curtadams posted:Jezanna's "combination water-saving showerhead and cappucino maker" is such a perfect sendup of the Sharper Image/Brookstone gadgetry that was all the rage at time. That was just where you went to get a memorable and apparently useful gift. I think this is a period where Bechdel is grappling (successfully I think) with the realization that queer culture as it presently existed was becoming substantially different from the queer culture she was immersed in when the strip began, and she does a good job of charting both changes in the personal lives of the characters as they grow older as well as as their culture changes around them. I think it's apt that the little novella at the end of this volume in particular is an autobiographical thing about Bechdel's relationships called "Serial Monogamy."
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Jul 16, 2020 18:05
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Mikl posted:Mods help I'm being doxxed 
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Jul 18, 2020 08:34
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Dykes to Watch Out For #86 (1990) -Alison Bechdel  I've been under the weather a little bit and mostly phone-posting, so apologies for the missed days. I think the commitment ceremony storyline is a lot of fun and one of many notably strong Toni and Clarice threads throughout the life of the comic. Note the full names in the first panel-- Bechdel has mentioned only giving full names when context makes it necessary or important, and I think the sense of intimacy and community throughout this little arc makes this small gesture of disclosure land just right. Note the continuing friction between Mo and Harriet-- in a sense it just carries over Mo's fussing and feuding from the last strip but when taken out of the context of her teasing friendship with Lois and into the context of her increasingly tense relationship with Harriet it feels a lot more loaded and frayed. I like how this is frayed in terms of closeness, touch, and care-- the first vignette has Sparrow asking for Ginger's help in zipping up her dress, and the last has Toni and Clarice sitting knee-to-knee in a somewhat cramped looking tub, as comfortable and happy together as we'll ever get to see them, even accounting for the wryly grumpy faces in the last panel. By contrast, Mo and Harriet are getting dressed without touching each other, or, significantly, even looking at each other. Take a look at the eye-lines everywhere else in this strip, especially in the last two panels with Sparrow and co. and the first panel with Toni and Clarice, then look back at how Mo and Harriet are staged. There's a clear sense of a line of intimate communication eroding away-- the only moment of touch we get between them is Mo's glancing and kind of irritable hair-tousling. Anyway, the Radical Faeries were a countercultural movement, largely made up of gay men, which sort of synthesized a queer rejection of heteronormative social practices and elements of neo-paganism with a wide-ranging and broadly leftist social program. As a point of reference, a key text for them was Arthur Evans' 1978 Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture: A Radical View of Western Civilization and Some of the People It Has Tried to Destroy a wildly syncretic polemic which is still widely read by a certain stripe of witchy (mostly West Coast) queers. Ditto their reverence for Larry Mitchell's 1977 novel/manifesto The Faggots and Their Friends Between the Revolutions (now back in print with the great Nightboat Books), which is essentially an interesting argument for ludic gay cultural seperatism, and which kind of sets up and forecasts a lot of the assimilation-adjacent battlelines being drawn around terms like "dyke" and "lesbian" in the late 80s and early 90s seen just a few strips back in DtWOF. By all accounts they had a lot of fun and the usual amounts of in-fighting and fracturing during the 80s and early 90s. They did a lot of drag and "gender outlaw" stuff, hence, presumably Sparrow's borrowing of a pretty cute frock from one of their members. I hope Adam wore it just as well. John Cameron Mitchell, of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Short Bus, and Rabbit Hole fame, is a prominent contemporary member of the movement. There's a lot more to say about the Radical Faeries-- for one thing they were an offshoot of the much different, socially and politically speaking, Mattachine Society, so they represent a very drastic sea-change in gay activism-- and I think Bechdel giving them a nod here is pretty cool, but a) I'm still feeling crummy, b) outside of very specific milieus like the Berkeley Renaissance, New York School, and New Narrative guys I'm much much shakier on gay male history than lesbian history so I don't want to pretend to be authoritative about this. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 07:45 on Jul 19, 2020 |
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Jul 19, 2020 07:34
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Medenmath posted:Just as a reminder please don't pay money for any custom titles until the current situation is resolved If anybody posts or PMs me a receipt or something showing that they've made a new donation to RAINN or any other reputable anti-domestic abuse charity I'll queue up any avatar they want.
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Jul 20, 2020 01:56
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Thanks to everyone who has donated! BigDave, I'll get your Mo queued right away.
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Jul 20, 2020 03:07
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Dykes to Watch Out For #87 (1990) -Alison Bechdel  I like the payoff about the huge sack of baba ghanoush and the tofu pups bit. As someone who grew up in the waning days of the tofu pup I can attest that mustard only does so much. We also get a rare cameo from Tanya and a nice selection of representative perspectives on gay "marriages" in the early 90s-- from unalloyed support, to skepticism, to cautious optimism. I also really really love Mo's progression from watching the vows with boredom to choking up over the ring exchange. The idea of "jumping the broomstick" developed in the 18th century or maybe earlier as a folkloric and possibly apocryphal way of celebrating an "irregular," or not necessarily legally legitimized marriage-- for example when a couple eloped in a tale and had no recourse for a formal wedding but instead performed this quick but symbolically rich ritual, although in 18th and 19th century Europe the practice was mostly used as a metaphor. It was more common in African American communities in the mid-19th century, when access to legally binding marriage ceremonies was extremely limited. It had a wave of resurgence after being depicted in Roots in the late 70s although it was also adopted as a euphemistic term for marriage throughout the Southern USA, as in, for instance, Brenda Lee's 1959 rockabilly hit "Let's Jump the Broomstick:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZRuge14cIU Jumping the broom also had some popularity in queer commitment ceremonies as a way of acknowledging the legal precariousness of their relationships while honoring historical precedents in celebrating those relationships anyway. (drum circles were also at one point a staple of lesbian weddings but I think I'm too young to know a thing about it and in general if I'm in public and I see a white person anywhere near a drum I just turn around and flee). Anyway, despite future ups and downs in the relationship I think Bechdel does a really great job of depicting this ceremony and making it feel like a loose, community-centric event. Later on as real-world developments occur alongside the strip we'll see Toni and Clarice try to get more legal legitimation for their marriage but as good as those storylines are I think this strip, with it's easy intimacy and comfortable patch-work of practices and rituals, is a highlight of the whole run. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 20, 2020 03:58
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Sweaty IT Nerd posted:That jumping the broomstick has a super witchy feel to me. I know I have a read about a simple sword jumping ceremony as well. Less traditional traditions are the best. Jumping the broom does have a lot of popularity in wiccan wedding ceremonies although I'm not sure if there's a lot of real historical justification for it. C'est la vie. And I agree about "less traditional traditions"-- my wife and I were married in Pennsylvania so we were legally able to perform a self-uniting ceremony, a Quaker tradition I find very beautiful and which meant more to both of us than a more conventional officiant. I also think that the Quaker wedding traditional of "declarations" is more meaningful personally than vows (and, ahem, I liked being to give a much longer spiel). How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 04:08 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 20, 2020 04:05
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Yeah I think the Field Roast veggie dogs are way better than old-fashioned tofu pups. The Aldi brand vegan sausages are also good and grill fantastically but they don't carry them near me, so I have to rely on friends having them when we cook out, which unfortunately is a moot point this summer.
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Jul 20, 2020 04:39
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Shiroc posted:I love this. I think its the first one of the newspaper ones to hit the humor of the web ones. Yeah. I love the webcomic and have been kind of rooting for the syndicated version to hit its stride, and this one got a real laugh out of me.
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Jul 20, 2020 20:16
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Amos and Edna have given their children away to the Fair Folk and it's in everybody's best interest to not speak their names aloud ever again. Beware...
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Jul 20, 2020 23:34
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Dykes to Watch Out For #88 (1990) -Alison Bechdel (NSFW for nudity and sex:)  I find Toni and Clarice's duck lamp to be extraordinarily sinister in this strip, and I also like that despite the Mo and Harriett panels clearly intending to show a fading and fracturing relationship, they include some really real and earthy details. Harriett pointing out Mo's pimple is a really funny bit and perfectly placed-- right in the center of the nine-panel square grid that dominates the page. Obviously this lands differently in editions that don't offer the strips as one page each, but here in the Essential I think it's just perfect.
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Jul 21, 2020 03:55
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Larryb posted:I say go for it, from what I've seen it's a lot better than the newspaper version so far. I'm actually not sure why either aside from a gut feeling that it's a better fit here than in the webcomic thread, and because there's precedent in the wolf comic being grandfathered in. I don't really need to see like, Questionable Content in two threads at once so I don't want people to see a webcomic they like and think "oh neat, off I go to the comic strip thread to share," but I think Mr. Boop is an ok fit for this thread and the webcomic Rae the Doe strips would also be a useful counterpoint to the syndicated strips.
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Jul 22, 2020 04:14
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I usually don't flip out and yell at people on here but the one time I did I got made a mod immediately afterwards so I guess the lesson here is never yell.
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Jul 22, 2020 07:18
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Bruceski posted:It still has the "(animal) has (trait)" issue but I actually like the dynamics of the early strips. Relationship dynamics of a new step-family is a very grounded thing compared to later soap opera plots. The modern stuff with the cat/rat raising his nephew hits the same notes, and can rest on that dynamic instead of drama around characters' exceptional skills and fantastical enemies. Chanel no. A-1 is also kind of a legit joke.
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Jul 22, 2020 11:29
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Two cute bits from the latest episode of Dungeon Meshi. Remember to read right-to-left. 1) The party makes a curry using various ingredients gathered or gifted to them at various steps on their journey. The party leader pauses to think back in gratitude, but his memory isn't as sharp as it could be:  2) Meanwhile, the big bad guy of the manga is sitting in his lair monitoring everything going on elsewhere in the dungeon. 
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Jul 23, 2020 19:44
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Dykes to Watch Out For #89 (1990) -Alison Bechdel  This is embarrassing but I'm not sure which co-founder of the conservative National Review is being referred to here. The conservative writer and fundraiser Marvin Liebman came out in 1990 at the age of 67, and spent most of the end of his life involved with gay activism. Andrew Sullivan, still in his 20s at the time, would later edit the journal and was already known as a conservative gadfly and a very very early advocate for gay marriage. William F. Buckley was not, to my knowledge, gay, and in fact referred to HIV as "the special curse of the homosexual" and openly advocated for marking people with the disease with tattoos. I don't think his financial backer, Willi Schlamm was gay either although I don't know for sure. I'm quite surprised that I can't find an answer to this little puzzle but I've had a migraine all day and I'm operating at like, 40%. Anyway the National Review was founded in 1955 to provide an ostensibly more intellectually rigorous and learned outlet for American conservatism, in juxtaposition to an emerging left-wing avant-garde and the tepid center-right temperature of mainstream American periodicals. Under Buckley's aegis it published a lot of dumbshit nonsense and poison, as well as many of the most celebrated literary voices of the 20th century, including W.H. Auden (definitely gay), Ezra Pound, Renata Adler (of "the radical middle" fame as well as the admittedly great novel Speedboat), Guy Davenport (very definitely gay), John dos Passos, etc.... definitely authors of a certain starchy and rarefied stripe and class position for the most part. While as a publication is generally helped shape and underwrite the conservative demonization and stigmatization of mainstream queerness, it also, as you can see above, made room for a certain kind of upper-class "look the other way-ism" regarding the "right kind" of queer people in the name of nebulous class-solidarity, which paved the way for Sullivan and the magazine's letter importance to the Log Cabin Republican movement. Mo is correct that in 1990 anti-gay hate crimes were on the rise and the 90s would see a wave of high-profile murder cases involving gay or trans panic. Sadly this trend is with us once again, with violent homophobic crime continuing to exceed it's relative low-point in the late 90s, and the SPLC citing a 43% uptick in organized anti-LGBTQ hate groups from 2018 to 2019. As I write this in fact I'm reflexively noaching the gap in my mouth where some dudes knocked a tooth out in 2019 because they didn't like watching out for this dyke on her way out of a Dutch restaurant to put change in the parking meter. It's a rough world out there and Mo's just living in it. Mo is also describing a real news-story in 1990 as the NRC announced a loosening of regulations regarding how to dispose of "mildly" irradiated nuclear materials. It basically lowered the bar for what kinds of materials were considered high-risk versus relatively low-risk. Aside from the consumer goods thing Mo is talking about, this policy also allowed for nuclear waste to be disposed of in municipal land-fills. As you can imagine this provoked a lot of social, environmental, and legal pushback. You can read a paper about it here. In lighter news the last panel is referencing the song "Ya Got Trouble" from the 1957 musical The Music Man. Here's Robert Preston singing it from the 1962 movie version if you need cheering up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI_Oe-jtgdI As just a cute little character moment it works well, but it is also a song about a man finding things to work people up about, with the implication here, perhaps, being that Mo is redirecting her frustration and anger about her relationship into current events, and really breaks down when the real problem on her mind is suddenly brought to the fore. It could also be foreshadowing the upcoming plotline where Lois gets addicted to Captain Billy's Whiz-Bang. I like a lot of the little details in this strip, which is otherwise one of several that are basically structured around "everybody is talking about their personal drama, Mo comes in and gets worked up about the world, until deflated by a return to the personal in the resolution." We have seen plenty of these and will see plenty more. I love that in the second panel she really does look like she's in a real bad fucken mood as she walks up the sidewalk, and I also love the small detail of Digger getting distracted by a fly in panel four. I also like the extent to which Sparrow seems just placidly over Mo's whole deal throughout. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 05:03 on Jul 24, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 02:27
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StrixNebulosa posted:you don't HAVE to post 9 chickweed lane
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Jul 24, 2020 23:58
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Manuel Calavera posted:Rose is Rose I was curious where this desert came from and wondered if it was like the Tinkersons thing of namedropping a local favorite, but the only Aldo's Hideaway I could find was a New Jersey which played a lot of punk and new wave in the late 70s and early 80:  You can listen to what I guess is a reconstruction of a set from 1979 here. It seems like it closed down shortly after a bad fire in 2004. I am almost entirely certain this is a total coincidence but who knows, maybe Rose drove to the austere deserts of Lyndhurst, NJ to buy tacos from the ghost of a burnt down dance club, which you know what, would make her pretty cool after all. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Jul 27, 2020 |
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Jul 27, 2020 07:49
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