Read what he wrote more carefully. He said he doubted that neither of them existed, not that either of them existed.
Think of some of the drier exchanges between Lacey Davenport and her clueless suitor Jeremy, or any exchange between Lacey and anybody else. For that mater, consider Trudeau’s odd grasp of street argot; the entire strip is filtered through a New England preppie’s perceptions.
Actually, Charles Schulz hated the name Peanuts. He wanted to call his strip Li’l Folks as well, but there was a comic strip already out there called Little Folks, so Peanuts was chosen by the syndicate. The name probably comes from the idea of calling small children “peanuts,” such as the “peanut gallery” on the Howdy Doody Show.
One of the more popular British strips is one with a name familiar to Americans, but has a totally different lead character and sprang up completely indepently of the American one…Dennis the Menace.
The British Dennis the Menace was created independently of the US version by David Law and debuted within days of Hank Ketcham’s Dennis strip. Unlike Dennis Mitchell, who unwittingly gets into trouble because of his good nature and high spiritedness, the British Dennis is more of a hooligan who goes out looking for trouble. Like Dennis Mitchell, this Dennis is hugely popular in his home country with a fan club of 1.5 million and had had a couple of television series produced.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry for Garry Trudeau:
Preppie? Yes, in the sense that he went to a well-known prep school. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all doctors. They didn’t hang out with the usual preppie set though. They ran a tuberculosis sanitarium.
Krokodil writes:
> Think of some of the drier exchanges between Lacey Davenport and her
> clueless suitor Jeremy, or any exchange between Lacey and anybody else. For
> that mater, consider Trudeau’s odd grasp of street argot; the entire strip is
> filtered through a New England preppie’s perceptions.
Lacey and Jeremy are minor characters, and they’re being made fun of in those exchanges. The point of introducing Lacey as a character was for Trudeau to show that he could be sympathetic to a Republican. In the series of cartoons where she was introduced, because Ginny had run against the main, corrupt Democratic incumbent for Congress, she and Lacey were splitting the vote against him and would have caused him to be re-elected. Ginny dropped out and supported Lacey. Lacey is shown as being an old-fashioned, old-money Republican (and before that point, perpetual losing candidate), and Trudeau is trying to show that he respects her views even though he disagrees with them. None of the other characters are preppies, as far as I can remember. I don’t see anywhere that Trudeau has a preppie grasp of street argot. Sometimes he sounds like he’s too far over the hill to understand the younger characters in his strip (but then, I’m too far over the hill to be sure myself).
I don’t think any newspapers would dare print it, but Modern Toss has just got its own UK TV show (that sucks, sadly). However, I find the cartoons themselves rather amusing.
To me, this is the sign of an apalling cartoon- ie, you’ve got to have a level of devotion to the strip that’s only surpassed by Coronation Street fans if you’re to have a snowball in a microwave’s chance of understanding it…
Really? I don’t get many of them at all, and I’m usually pretty-well tuned for British humour…