A couple of interesting things I've noticed in comic strips

Cafe Society
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Posted by Governor Quinn:

Well, that’s normal behavior, isn’t it? I mean, for an overimaginative, thorazine-deficient kid like Calvin.

The Family Circus has a lot of peculiarities – Keane’s use of perspective is often sloppy, and the kids and mom have strangely melon-shaped heads. And then there’s the strip’s whole suburban white Christian middle-class 1950s-time-capsule theme and style. The Dysfunctional Family Circus was a hilarious online parody – various contributers would take existing strips and make up their own nasty captions, often involving incest, drug use, murder and suchlike jollities. The strip deserved every bit of it, in my opinion. The DFC website ran from 1995 to 1999, when it was shut down due to legal pressure from Bill Keane, Inc., and from King Features Syndicate – you can read the story at http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,21853,00.html, and at http://www.gettingit.com/article/124.

You can read archived DFC cartoons at http://www.wildsea.net/dfc/; http://rotten.home.cyberverse.com/i/f/fc.html; http://www.zompist.com/dfcindex.html; http://www.giantsofscience.org/dfc/archive/1.html; http://www.wildsea.net/dfc/textindex.html; http://giantsofscience.org/dfc/; http://www.medmeta.dyndns.org/dfc/. And at http://www.clarkschpiell.com/home/wfc.shtml, you can find “The Wholly Functional Family Circus” – a parody of DFC!

Some of my favorite DFC cartoons:

Billy and Jeffy are having an angry cushion-fight on the sofa. Dolly, in the foreground, says, “Billy said moral relativism was the downfall of 20th century man, and then Jeffy said reality is unknowable because we lack a priori sense data.”

Dolly is in her pajamas, kneeling on her bed in prayer, while Thel looks in through the door. Caption: “Ia! Shub-Niggurath! Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!”

Jeffy is getting up from bed but he’s obviously sick. Caption: “Man! I’ll never try to match Dolly shot-for-shot again!”

A door-to-door brush salesman is standing at the front door – various brushes sticking out of his pockets. The kids, who have answered the door, are running down the hall cheerfully shouting. Caption: “Hey, Mommy! It’s a BRUSH salesman! He must think it’s still 1955!”

Jeffy is on the phone, holding a pencil and a notepad. Out of the speaker come the words: “$500 an ounce?” Caption: “Hey, mack, this is the good stuff. You want the cheap crap, call Linus Van Pelt.”

Most of them are much, much worse than these.

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Interesting–do you feel the same way about Peanuts?

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Thanks for sharing those.

I remember *Mad*  magazine doing a similar parody, although I was a little to young at the time to really get it. The folks from *Mad*  imagined the way various cartoonists might interpret classic movies. *Taxi Driver* , as drawn by Bil Keane of Family Circus, featured the dad, in a mohawk and Army coat, delivering Travis Bickle's famous "You talking to me?!" line.
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Peanuts doesn’t really exude a perfect world sort of situation. A lot of it is quite depressing, at least from my point of view.
Keane on the other hand, sets up this perfect family that would make most people vomit, and then gives punchlines that (to me) fall a bit short of funny. If someone didn’t parody it, I’d be rather surprised.

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My favorite is “Baby Blues”, another strip that’s being done in real time.

I don’t like the animated version on TV though. It seems kind of darker, somehow.

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Yeah. All the Peanut kids are, frankly, pretty neurotic. Linus, of course, has panic attacks if he can’t find his security-blanket, and Charlie Brown is a loser and realizes it.

One of my favorite Peanut strips…Charlie Brown is laying in bed, thinking “Sometimes, at night, I lay in bed and ask, ‘What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I succeed?’”

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Yeah. All the Peanut kids are, frankly, pretty neurotic. Linus, of course, has panic attacks if he can’t find his security-blanket, and Charlie Brown is a loser and realizes it.

One of my favorite Peanut strips…Charlie Brown is laying in bed, thinking “Sometimes, at night, I lay in bed and ask, ‘What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I succeed?’”

“Then I hear a voice, saying, ‘This is gonna take more than one night…’”

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The peanuts cartoon display an image of a “typical” school. You have Linus the neurotic wimpy person who is scared of anything. You have snoopy who is always happy no matter what the situation & his friend woodstock who is a little more sane. You have Lucy who is the loud obnoxiuos person. You have the musical talent Schroeder. You have the messy guy, Pig Pen.

Surprisingly Snoopy has i think 8 cousins. All were represented in small ceramic figureines. I used to have 3.

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Those were Snoopy’s brothers and sister, not his cousins. I think that he had 7 of them.

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I just wanted to step in and thank BrainGlutton for posting the DFC links. When Spinnwebe’s (or was it Zompist’s?) links went dead, I thought the thing was gone forever.

You are my hero for the day!

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I believe Keane let it slide for a while, but he became more agressive when the submissions started to become more obscene (which I think was also one of Spinn’s complaints).

Some of the running gags that came up are hilarious, such as “Good on you, mate!,” “The poop holds the tent wher it is,” and of course, “Whoooooa I’m trippin my nutsak in a frenzy of dik play.”

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Don’t forget Uncle Roy!

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Well, I myself wonder where Sluggo’s parents are. He lives in this ramshackle house with leaks in the roof, and child services hasn’t stepped in yet?

I also wonder when and why it became acceptable for a comic to have no punchline whatsoever. Funky Winkerbean for the past two years or so comes to mind.

I also wonder how Robotman is doing since he left earth several years ago.

I also wonder why Fritzi Ritz is single. She is the hottest lady on the comics page, followed closely by Hagar’s daughter.

Also, I miss B.C. My paper stopped carrying it after the tempest-in-a-teapot a few years ago where some Jewish readers were offended. Now we have Baby Blues in its place.

The Dilbert “guest cartoonists” thing was interesting, but I had only heard of two of the guests’ strips. The rest are not familiar to me.

I also wonder how Pasquale (“Rose Is Rose”) learned how to speak coherently all of a sudden one day after years of “adorable” baby talk.

I also wonder why Andy Capp stopped smoking. His whole schtick is to be politically incorrect. Was someone worried that a lazy alcoholic would be funnier or less offensive if he didn’t smoke? By the way, this is the one comic that still regularly delivers a chuckle from me. For example: in a strip from a month or two back, someone on the street asked Andy for directions. He replied, “See that tavern over there?” “Yes,” says the stranger. “Well, get out of my way; I’m trying to get there.” Just a small chuckle, but a chuckle nonetheless, which is more than any of the other comics usually deliver.

I also wonder why Jason Fox (“Foxtrot”) is wasting his time in public school 5th (?) grade, when he could clearly be doing so much more with his life.

I also wonder when Trixie will tire of the Sunbeam.

I also wonder why Thirsty’s wife doesn’t leave him. Or, much like Andy Capp with the smoking (and Barney Gumbel with his beer drinking), will Thirsty quit drinking someday?

I also wonder, does ANYONE read “Apartment 3G”? I’ve yet to speak to one person who does, yet it is still carried in my local paper.

I also wonder if anyone has ever kept track of Gil Thorpe’s career coaching record in baseball, football, and basketball. How many championships has he led his teams to?

I also wonder if “Henry,” the unfunny strip from my youth about the kid with no mouth, is still in circulation somewhere.

Finally, I wonder why I, a 32-year-old man, literally cannot start my day unless I read the comics, most of which I don’t really like that much anyway?

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The dialogue of The Family Circus and Dennis The Menace could be interchanged, minus the names, and I wouldn’t know the difference. But for some reason, Dennis is hilarious and Family is nauseating.

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“Blondie” is an interesting case. Although it’s one of those “stuck in time” strips from yesteryear, they seem to periodically update certain aspects of it. Dagwood still wears the same old bowtie, but things change around him. For example, Blondie is no longer only a housewife, but now runs a catering business (although she still seems to do all the cooking and presumably all the housework at home). Dagwood now carpools to work, which I don’t think he originally did. Today’s strip features what appears to be a digital alarm clock in his bedroom, and I believe I’ve seen cell phones used in the strip before. And the children’s clothes seem to get updated somewhat. On the other hand, Blondie’s hair is still horribly out of style, and Dagwood is still physically abused by his boss on occasion, which is definitely not PC in this day and age.

BTW, I like when strips make self-referential jokes. A recent Blondie strip featured Dagwood complaining, “Do you have any idea how hard it is to find shirts with just one big button?”

A Dilbert strip had Dilbert stuck in another dimension, where he says, “It’s just like Calvin & Hobbes without the artistic look to it.”

And there was a strip a long time ago (I don’t know if it still exists), which IIRC was called “Eek & Meek”. It was drawn in a very stylized, not very realistic-looking manner. One strip had the main character walking down the street with 2 realistically-drawn men pointing and laughing. The same kind of thing was later done on The Simpsons when Lisa and Bart suddenly changed into realistic-looking children.

Anybody else get Ballard Street in their paper? It seems to be a strip devoted exclusively to depictions of strange people either wearing odd home-made costumes or inventing odd home-made contraptions. That’s it - pretty much the same thing every day. I can’t remember it ever being funny.

And Herman is so oddly-drawn that it’s virtually impossible to tell what kind of facial expressions the characters are supposed to be having, and sometimes even to tell what they’re doing.

Final thought: Why do men in comic strips almost always have noses that are several times larger than the women’s noses?

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Come to think of it, there are a lot of stuck-in-time strips! Gasoline Alley, for instance – the characters grow and age and change, but the world around them doesn’t! Joel and Rufus and Melba are proletarian types that probably haven’t existed at all in the U.S. since the 1950s. Same with the hillbilly world of Snuffy Smith – no electricity, homemade clothes, mule-drawn plows, one general store, a one-room schoolhouse – neither Arkansas nor West Virginia is that primitive any more! And does anybody in the hills really talk like that?

Posted by blowero:

Ermm . . . paging Sigmund Freud?

Actually, it’s probably because, in real life, men generally have (slightly) bigger noses than women – men’s whole bodies being larger; and in cartoon art it’s customary to exaggerate such differences.

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On the topic of Snoopy’s siblings, am I the only one who remembers seeing a strip where Snoopy says that he was an only puppy? I think that it was part of the story arc where Sally was born. And no, I’m not that old; I think I saw it in an old collection.

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Some more thoughts on Snuffy Smith: Is there anyone in the Appalachians or the Ozarks who finds this strip offensive? I mean, maybe they don’t talk or act or live that way, but their not-too-distant ancestors did. The strip is like a minstrel show, with hillbillies acting like clowns instead of blacks! But I’ve never heard of anyone taking offense.

Did anybody find Li’l Abner offensive? (I mean hillbillies, not the hippies and peaceniks and liberals whom Capp routinely skewered.)

For some reason, self-identified rednecks don’t seem to find Jeff Foxworthy offensive, either; they’re his biggest fans. But then, ethnic humor is not always offensive to the target group. Most Jewish jokes seem to have been written by Jews.

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Chronos that sounds familiar, now that you mention it. Might have been somewhere in the vicinity of the strip about him sleeping with a clock, the ticking of which was supposed to soothe him, and him hitting the ceiling when the alarm went off…

(Well, he’s remembering the event from when he was a puppy, in the strip in question.)

Time to hit the archives, I guess…

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I just have to reply about Funky winkerbean cartoon. I suppose it might have relaevance to alot of people but I sear this is my high school. I attnded Westside high and many of the teachers looked juxt like the cartoon characters. My dad was the guidance councelor, he always wore short sleeved shirts has glasses and a flattop haircut. Mr Fairgood looked just like him when the strip first started. My high school also had a stupendous losing streak. There were other simlarities at the time it first came out, we were all looking around trying to figure out who was the artist.