I used to know a guy who would play this elaborate practical joke on his girlfirend. Every week they would get the Sunday papers and read the comics. And every week he would laugh uproariously when he read Prince Valiant. And naturally his girlfriend would never see what was so funny. So he would “explain” to her again that Prince Valiant was the funniest comic strip in history and he was continuously amazed that she didn’t “get” it. So she’d keep trying to figure out the joke week after week.
I’m starting to wonder if perhaps Denis Kitchen is playing a similar joke on all of the rest of us.
I always thought of Nancy and Family Circus as being primarily for kids.
Johanna, it’s a freaking comic strip. Those speech balloons are less tiny, and considering the output a cartoonist with a daily strip puts out, they aren’t going to be perfectly accurate when it comes to foreign speech. That’s hardly racism.
This had me laughing for a good long time. I’m going to use some variant on
this. (Yes, this is probably a Bad Idea. Yes, it probably makes me a jerk. It’s worth it.)
Nancy was one I always read because it had an element of the surreal to it. I also find something very interesting visually about the strip. For example, this one is just supremely odd in my opinion. And I love it.
You really think so? I thought he was hilarious. And I always thought you had a sense of humor…
Cartooning is a stark medium. It’s all about the intended joke without much time to get to it.
If the Japanese had been real, people (who understood Japanese) would be trying to figure out how it related to the intended joke.
It’s not racism, it’s American comic convention like question marks coming off of a head or $&%@! for curse words.
Nancy and Sluggo go to the zoo. They go the gnu pen, but it’s empty. The zookeeper tells them the gnus got too wild and had to be sent away. Sluggo says “No GNUS is good GNUS.”
That was so stupid it burned into my memory for 30 years.
Fritzi was actually a wannabe thespian. In one memorable strip, she is the understudy for a famous actress. They are filming a scene on top of a tall building in which a dummy of a man is wrestled with and thrown off the roof.
The director tries to send the famous actress down to the street to retrieve the dummy for a re-shoot. But no SHE is too important to do that. Send the understudy down to get the dummy!
So Fritzi has to walk down the flights of stairs to get the dummy.
However, when she gets to the street below, she finds the dummy lying on the sidewalk with its hat upturned. The hat is full of money as people have mistaken the fallen dummy for a hapless drunken beggar. Fritzi wins.
Perhaps off-topic: Fritzi Ritz and Blondie both featured prominently in my childhood masturbatory fantasies. Who could resist Blondie with her night strap half-off her shoulder or Fritzi’s titties? Hubba-hubba.
Imho, Irwin Hasen’s Dondi took the cake for sick, twisted irrelevance and surrealism. Nancy was emminently ignorable, but one could not not read Dondi. It was like picking at a scab.
Mutt and Jeff ran in my paper as a child. It was gentle, trite, much like Nancy is. Nothing special. A good strip for young kids, one to be swiftly outgrown.
God help me for not clinging onto this book into my adult years, but I had a book as a kid, The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics or some such, that ranged from The Yellow Kid through early 1970s Peanuts. Astounding, it was, with examples of just about everything that appeared widely, and whole storylines from the serialized strips.
They had several strips from back when the comic was called A. Mutt. That strip was much edgier, with Mutt constantly in search of a gambling fix, if I recall. He liked the ponies and cards, if memory serves me. Jeff was a minor player at best. So yeah, it changed quite a bit over time.
Blondie had, unquestionably, the best rack in teh dailies. I wish I could drop a lot of acid and have hallucinations about a Roman-style orgy with Blondie, Fritzi, the mother from Family Circus, and Bugs Bunny.
