The Prickly City strip is, of course, so slanted it makes the Tower of Pisa look straight. Last week, it spent an entire week repeating the wingnut talking points on the discredited Pelosi plane story. This week, the strip has moved on to global warming. (Basic theme: liberals are saying you should believe in global warming because the media has bought into it, and who should question them? Scientific consensus - what’s that??)
But in today’s strip, the conservative character asks:
“Rather than scare people with some apocalyptic global-warming scenario, wouldn’t it make more sense to convince folks that fewer people, especially kids, would have asthma and emphysema if they stopped pumping gunk into the air?”
‘Gunk’ in the air indeed aggravates conditions like asthma. But carbon dioxide isn’t ‘gunk.’ Until we realized there might be a problem with greenhouse gases, we didn’t even consider it to be a pollutant, except in confined indoor situations. Carbon dioxide emissions have no known connection to asthma or emphysema.
These are two separate and unrelated problems. You could sell efforts to combat global warming that way, but it would be a lie. And two minutes on Wikepedia was all it took to verify that.
The Chicago Tribune dropped this pile of crap a few months ago. But, of course, to appear “fair and balanced”, it also dropped the liberal-leaning (but genuinely funny) Candorville at the same time. Sigh.
A couple of months ago he had some deal where a bunch of other artists were drawing the strip, and the change was reflected in the storyline. The storyline was introduced when they fell through some dimensional portal and turned into Manga. The manga segment was an accurate reproduction of real manga, and I though “ah, so he really does have drawing talent - the normal look is just his style…?”. Then I looked closer and found the actual cartoonist’s signature. That was the case throughout the storyline - the normal author was credited in the official printed title, but you had to look closely for the signature to found out who really drew it.
The Tennessean just picked up in lieu of Mallard Fillmore. It’s just another talking head political strip with neither characterization nor plot. I would almost prefer they bring back BC. At least that guy can write.
Seriously…BC still has very occasional funny moments. But they’re severely outnumbered and overshadowed by two other types: outright fundamentalist drivel and stuff that used to be funny 30 years ago.
Try the 60’s, and you might be closer to the target.
At least with Prickly City he occasionally (OK, rarely) points out stupidity on the right.
The art DOES suck. It’s like he thinks he’s channeling Bill Watterson, when he’s actually channelling Geoff Watersan, a bored 5th grader in Tuscaloosa, doodling in English class.
And today’s strip (Friday, 03/02/07) repeats that tired old canard to the effect that “In the 70s scientists all warned about global cooling – those eggheads don’t know what they’re doing!” I had to write about a thousand words to explain to a friend why this was bullshit, and it didn’t take; for a lot of people this really is a political stance, based on their existing political leanings, and not affected by any evaluation of available scientific data (or even simple facts of recent history).