I never really read it till lately. First of all I know it’s officially Barney Google and he isn’t featured anymore, but anyway
First of all, what’s with the tongues. I’m assuming it’s a style, that all the comic strip characters have tongues hanging out of their mouths
Second what’s with Loweezy? Can’t she afford a bra?
Also is she wearing a scarf around her head all the time. I ask 'cause if it is a black scarf the she wears it even when she’s wearing a hat, which makes no sense.
The tongue thing is part of the style. Curtis has the same tongue thing going on, and I think it’s an unattractive feature.
Loweezy (and the rest of the characters) are hillbillies, that is, very poor mountain folk. None of them have much cash money. The doctor frequently takes payment in chickens or eggs or some other form of food. Snuffy is portrayed as being quite lazy, and prefers to steal than to work on the homestead or look for a job. Even if he was a real go getter, though, he would have a hard time finding a job. Loweezy (and the rest of the women) are used to doing most of the chores around the place, from cooking to plowing. Because money is so tight, most of the women don’t buy or make what they consider fripperies…including bras. She wears a scarf because she probably doesn’t bathe or wash her hair more often than once a week, and it might be less often. Oily hair is unattractive and hard to manage, and she has a lot of work to do. It’s easier to just wrap a scarf around her head.
I haven’t seen this strip in maybe 30 years. One thing that struck me as odd was that Loweezy wears a solid black head scarf in the dailies and a red polka-dot head scarf on Sundays. Is this still the case?
ETA: Apparently not, this may have died with Fred Lasswell, the second major artist on the strip.
There where some farm women I saw when a kid that dressed like her. A bandanna on the head or a big straw hat. The straw hat being tied to the head so the wind didn’t take it off. Their long hair was in a bun under the hat. They dressed for chores work just like her. The head covering helped protect the hair from the dirty conditions. The hat with bandanna tie down protected from sunburn, and heatstroke. They stayed on the farm and worked. These people didn’t go to town very often and the visitors that stopped by were dressed for practical work like them. The special clothes came out only for special occasions so they didn’t ruin them. Their was a lot of home repairs with patches on patches on the work clothes. My Great Grandma was a sock patcher until the sock was all patches. Everything we owned when she babysat me had patches on it even before you got a hole in the knee so the knee didn’t wear out. She would sew on a new patch to replace that one at times. The pants would wear out but the knees were fine under the patch. Her cooking pots were also full of bolted on washers to repair holes wore in the pots.
I also suspect Loweezy has a 2 quart jar of buttons that were removed from every garment that was beyond repair and cut up for patches.
Snuffy once worked fairly hard at his trade, but he had to give it up in a flurry of political correctness some years ago.
Y’see, Snuffy was a moonshiner. His still was euphemistically referred to as his “place of business”. Now he’s just out of work. And perfectly happy that way.
I’ve seen a picture of my great-grandfather from Blue Hole, Kentucky, and damned if he did not look and dress exactly like Snuffy Smith. The shape of the hat is spot-on.
The coloring is variable because most of the comics aren’t colored by the artist anymore. They’re farmed out, with no or vague instructions as to what is to be what color. Sometimes the color shop is not even in the US and the colorists don’t understand much English, which is why sometimes even when the color of a piece of clothing is part of the joke of the day, the piece of clothing ends up not being the color it’s supposed to be.
Actually, that jar is probably much bigger than two quarts. I have to admit, I also have a button jar, and it does come in handy. What else am I supposed to do with the two leftover buttons when I make a blouse or shirt, but put them in the button jar? I also save the leftover bits of seam binding and braid and such.
Many old timers had regular workday clothes and then they had Sunday best clothes. Loweezy probably did the essential chores on Sunday in her everyday clothes, and then changed into Sunday best clothes. Essential chores are things like feeding the chickens and collecting their eggs, and otherwise taking care of the livestock. She probably doesn’t do things like plow or plant on Sunday. She’s almost certainly an evangelical fundamentalist Christian, and she remembers the Sabbath and keeps it holy.
Our local newspaper converted to a tabloid size several months ago (supposedly they were the next-to-last paper in the country to do this) with the advent of a new multi-million-dollar printing press.
There was much reconfiguration of sections, etc., and one of the other changes was that the daily comics now suddenly all appear in color (well, all but four, which are relegated to an internal page).
My question: on what level is this color applied? There seems to be no variation from strip-to-strip…the same basic reds, greens, etc. seem to appear in all of them. This makes me think that the color is not specified at the individual syndicator level. On the other hand, it would seem to take a lot of work for someone locally to determine colors every day.
I’d be curious to know the score from other dopers as far as your own hometown newspaper. Daily comics in color, or are they still all black and white? Any other insights into the process would be welcome.
I would have thought you were talking about the San Francisco Chronicle if it weren’t for the detail of the four inner-page strips. (Only Dilbert appears in the daily Chron off the comics page, and it is colorized like the rest.) But there’s one strip in the Chron that isn’t handled the same as the all the others: Lio is always colored with only a single tint, which changes from day to day.
The ancient mountain women I used to know as a kid (one of my grandmothers among them) wore bonnets rather than hats or scarves. Not plain bonnets, but colorful calico jobs like this one. Or this. Or this.
As a matter of fact, I still have one of my grandmother’s old bonnets tucked away in a box somewhere.
Bonnets take more sewing than simple scarves do, and the Smiths usually do things as quickly and easily as possible. Loweezy is a hard worker (someone in that family has to keep them fed) but she’s not much of one for doing more than is absolutely necessary. Or at least, that’s the way she was back when I read the strip on a regular basis, which was some years back.
Even more unsettling than the tongues: Their mouths are where their cheeks should be, and when they face the other way the mouths move to the other cheek.
