Good call. 
Substitute “Andy Capp” for “Leroy” and you had about 95% of that strip.
You really feel that Loretta and Leroy hate each other and find little or no joy in life and haven’t for years and years. The Lockhorns really impart a feeling of soul crushing misery that Andy Capp does not.
“It was a goat!”
That’s my impression of the comic, too. I’ve never seen it as a comic to be “followed”, though- just an (allegedly) amusing “one-off” that occupies some space in the paper and makes older people smile whimsically when they come across it occasionally.
You both forgot that
- Loretta is ugly with a capital Ug, no matter how much time and money she spends in beauty parlors/on beauty products
It’s been years since I’ve read Andy Capp, but I always got the impression that he and his missus did actually care for each other, even though they fought a lot. On the other hand, I always felt that the Lockhorns were a prime example of why no-fault divorce is a GOOD thing. Loretta is clearly ambitious, and if she’d gone into business instead of being stuck as a housewife (and since she’s stuck in middle age in the 1960s, she doesn’t have much of a choice) she might have been moderately successful. Leroy, on the other hand, is a party animal. He might have been perfectly happy to remain a bachelor, and flirt with young girls all his life, and stay in a dead end job with no hope of promotion. As long as he can get his drunk on, he’s happy, with or without the flirting. And this sort of loveless marriage was pretty common before no-fault divorce.
Dude, I’ve been reading the Sunday paper for over 50 years. I know how it works. It’s only lately that they have decided to purposely make it difficult for readers to find popular sections by putting them in the midst of the ad inserts, or by wrapping the funnies in ads, or using other annoying tricks.
The 11th one is going to be a Parade finder and number 12 will be a way to keep kids off my lawn. To think I used to be avant garde.
That’s what gets me about the Lockhorns.
Semi-dysfunctional marriages are a staple of comedy, but for the comedy to work (Edith and Archie, Homer and Marge, Fred and Wilma) there has to be an underlying feeling that the spouses care about each other and fight because of personality quirks or misunderstanding.
Whereas Leroy and Loretta just flat-out hate each other, and stay married because . . . well, I guess because respectable people didn’t get divorced when the strip was created.
But now they do, and it isn’t funny any more.
The couple in the Bliss strip (or panel) hate each other, but do it in a much more fresh and interesting way than the Lockhorns. Plus they have a cute doggie.
Does anyone else find Parade to be the perfect bathroom-reading material? To me, that’s why it’s so frustrating to have to dig for it…I gotta go, damnit!