A post about Sally Forth, the main character in Sally Forth
Sally Forth, 1/19/05
Today, we’re going to talk about a fun game you can play when if you’re bored. It’s called Exposition. Here’s how it works. You and a friend wait to encounter a mutual acquaintance, or for a famous person known to you both to come up in conversation. Identify him or her first by a role that he or she plays, and then by name. Whoever can offer the most crushingly obvious description wins. Examples:
“Look, Ted, it’s your wife, Janice Kerploski.”
“Did you see the speech on TV given by the president, George W. Bush?”
“I sometimes wish that the lead singer of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Jimi Hendrix, hadn’t choked to death on his own vomit.”
Check out the worker drones in the background of this strip. Sally and Alice are so busy worrying about their new manager, Jefferson Jowdy, that they forgot that today is Wear-Only-White-Or-Black-Clothes-And-Shoes-And-Powder-All-Exposed-Flesh-A-Ghoulish-White Day. Those kids over in HR really know how to cut loose!
January 20th, 2005 at 12:42 am
Jowdy!
January 20th, 2005 at 12:53 am
It’s a feat that Sally doesn’t look ’sly’ when she delivers her line in the last panel. Any Sally Forth strip wherein the main character, that being Sally Forth, doesn’t give that sly- “I’m saying something witty” -look is a miracle.
If you see someone giving their newspaper the finger, there is a good chance that it is directed at Ms. Forth’s condescending half-closed eyes, and the clever quip that is inevitably attached.
January 20th, 2005 at 7:14 am
I second the “Jowdy!”
January 20th, 2005 at 8:43 am
Hard to believe they gave Ralph’s job to Jowdy instead of Sally — she has mastered the art of carrying around reams of blank legal paper and skinny mugs. Curse you, glass ceiling!
January 20th, 2005 at 10:12 am
1. What happened to Ralph? He was always good for a non-laugh.
2. Does it appear to anyone else that Alice and Sally have only been copied (and slightly enlarged) from panel one to panel three? Apparently the “Jowdy effect” freezes cynical employees in their tracks. Or maybe the “Jowdy effect” freezes employees who have never worked a day in their lives. Either way, the Jowdy effect reminds me WHY I HATE THIS STRIP.
January 20th, 2005 at 10:57 am
A Sally Forth strip without the ’sly’ look is like a “For Better or Worse” strip without an epiphany, a rare thing.
January 20th, 2005 at 11:49 am
Thank-you! I’m glad to see I’m not alone in being annoyed by expository dialog. To paraphrase The Simpons:
Homer: Well, here we are at the Brad Goodman Self-Help Seminar that we all agreed to go do.
Bart: What an odd thing to say.
January 20th, 2005 at 1:08 pm
Sally Forth is one of the absolute worsts. Always with that sly look (usually coupled with the cliched “women are better than men” zinger), and a child that acts like an adult (also with the “kids are smarter than adults” look). I remember cheering when a local paper dropped it but then reader complaints brought it back. (!) The artist even tried a more realistic style once, but people again went nuts and it was gone in a week or two. Lesson learned: not only do we want pablum, we want it good and prechewed.
January 20th, 2005 at 2:55 pm
I’m a guy. I read “Sally Forth” and like it the way I used to like “Make Room for Daddy.” It’s amusing, easily understood, and there isn’t much in the way of secret messages or ideological twist.
But it is only mildly amusing. The once in a while real laugh I get is just icing. I don’t expect it.
To explain: If I had five pages of comics every morning, I’d read them all. And so here’s another one to read. Again, only mildly amusing.
So Sally breaks down under the stress of real examination. (Love your work, Joshua) But the real humor of making fun of Sally Forth isn’t in this particular strip. You’re right, the drawings are primitive in this episode. You’re right, the characters seem copied. You’re right, the creatures in the background seem like bad architectural stencils. But I just have to pull for the family. I have to want Sally to keep her job. I have to want that daughter (what’s her name?) to find a boyfriend when it’s time and you know I’m waiting to see who exactly Sally’s old man is going to cheat with. And how he’ll explain it.
Absurd. It’s a silly little strip. It works for a sigh and a giggle. And I read “I read the comics so you won’t have to” every day, pretty much.
What can we do to get more comics?
And hey why doesn’t the net have more comics, particularly the kind of savage satires that everybody who reads this column would like to see?
“-”
January 20th, 2005 at 3:13 pm
Why doesn’t the net have more comics? Are you kidding? My morning internet comic reading list is usually longer than the comic page in the newspaper.
January 20th, 2005 at 4:51 pm
I think it is weird that the women, who haven’t shown any sign that they are going anywhere, are cut and pasted into the third panel but the background has been redrawn. The copy machine in the first panel has been transformed into a desk with computer on it. Nifty.
January 20th, 2005 at 7:33 pm
If you look close enough, you’ll discover differences in the womens shirts, paper stack, arm position, even nose position. They aren’t copied. They are just redrawn very similarly. As for the background.. my guess is the artist is trying to show they are moving?
January 20th, 2005 at 9:01 pm
Mmmmmm….pre-chewed pablum. glllrrlglglglrrrglrrrr…..
January 21st, 2005 at 12:08 pm
The Exposition Game:
Here’s my entry–
Person on Cell Phone: “Guess where I am.”
I actually heard a person say this yesterday. We were sitting at adjoining tables in a restaurant and this woman shouts into her phone “Guess where I am.” The kicker is that we were no place special. She was not on top of the Eiffel Tower or marching in the Inaugeration. She was in a coffee shop.
I was so annoyed with this stupidity that I moved. Stupidity that obvious could be contagious.
January 21st, 2005 at 12:41 pm
Uh, that’s not really the exposition game, though.
It would be if the cell phone talker had been saying “Hi, Bob, my boyfriend of ten months! This is your girlfriend, Cindy.”
And after hearing that, I would most certainly move far away, if nothing else but to avoid being in the opening scene of a very bad play.
January 21st, 2005 at 1:18 pm
Years ago I was on a train in Italy, and watched my college roommate sign a postcard home to his girlfriend, “Love, Brian Smith”
[last name changed to protect the stupid]
January 21st, 2005 at 3:16 pm
Here’s a puzzler: who draws Sally Forth right now? I’ve seen about five different names attached to the strip, sometimes in pairs, sometimes solo. This one is signed “Mac,” but other times it’s two Hispanic names.
It would be bad enough if Sally were the only character to do the sly eye thing, but it’s everybody. Her husband does it, her creepy kid does it. The Sally Forth universe is populated by people smugly satisfied with their wittiness.
January 22nd, 2005 at 12:32 am
The characters in this strip all go to the same hairstylist… and said hairstylist must enjoy hitting the sauce while on the job.
January 22nd, 2005 at 3:23 am
“Look, they’re showing the trial of Michael Jackson, the man who touched your genitals.”
January 22nd, 2005 at 8:44 am
The Exposition Game:
“This is Admiral Jones. He’s in the Navy.”
January 22nd, 2005 at 4:50 pm
Shouldn’t the title of this post be “A post about the main character of ‘Sally Forth’, Sally Forth”?
January 23rd, 2005 at 2:17 pm
I can give you the background on who writes and draws SF. It is currently written by Francesco Marciuliano (note, that’s Italian not Hispanic) and it is drawn by Craig Macintosh (MAC). It was created by lawyer turned cartoonist Greg Howard who originally wrote and drew it. However, he was not a very good artist so King Features hired Macintosh to take over the drawing. That was when the look of the strip changed, much to the chagrin of its fans who had come to enjoy the crappy artwork. So Mac had to go back to something more like Howard’s original style. In 1997, Howard gave up writing duties as well and sold his portion of the rights to the strip back to King Features, who then brought in two ghostwriters, the aforementioned Marciuliano and Steve Alaniz. In 1999, Marciuliano’s and Alaniz’s names replaced the “Created by Greg Howard” byline. Finally, around 2001 Alaniz stopped writing for the strip and Marciuliano assumed all writing duties.
A couple of other notes: just as Macintosh is beholden to the look of Sally Forth, so is Marciuliano beholden to the tone and style. There are certain things that he can and can’t do with it and certain things he has to do, such as remind the readers who new characters are. If you’re interested in seeing what the writer of SF does with his own material, go here: http://www.drinkatwork.com/mediumlarge.html
Regarding the color, oddly enough, that’s out of the hands of both the writer and cartoonist as it is done by American Color before it is sent to the papers.
By the way, has anyone noticed that Marcie, Ralph’s assistant before Ralph was canned, looks like Ted in drag?
January 24th, 2005 at 9:53 am
“Regarding the color, oddly enough, that’s out of the hands of both the writer and cartoonist as it is done by American Color before it is sent to the papers.”
Are you sure? I thought all the KFS dailies were colorized by Reed Brennan.Media Associates (who serve up the KFS strips on the Web, and are also owned by the Hearst Corporation).
January 24th, 2005 at 11:35 am
You might be right. I assumed it was American Color because they do the Sundays.
June 3rd, 2005 at 2:42 pm
Don’t kill that cat! Let them mortgage the house or something. If you love a pet, $3400 is not too much to pay to save it. Furthermore, the cat needs that operation NOW.
June 3rd, 2005 at 2:43 pm
Don’t kill that cat! Let them mortgage the house or something. If you love a pet, $3400 is not too much to pay to save it. Furthermore, the cat needs that operation NOW.
June 8th, 2005 at 9:00 am
Sally sure lives in a dream world. I think you really chickened out when you decided on surgery for the cat! Either one of you is a vet or you both have money to burn. There are too many cats out there that need to be adopted and soooo many places your “spare cash” could go. You didn’t address the problem.
August 17th, 2005 at 3:57 pm
Now that Kitty has recovered from the operation, there seems to be another problem with him. Sneezing is not a good symtom for animals. I haven’t seen anything more about him. What will be the outcome? Don’t leave us in suspence.
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May 5th, 2006 at 6:14 pm
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The old gang is back! It’s been like forever guys. So what are you all up to? Still trying to redirect the conversation subtly to your respective online industries, eh? Man, you guys….. lol
Whoa, like, remember when we were all at my house playing Horse, and we were talking about middle names (I was so stunned that yours is “Holdem”, Tex — do you forgive me for laughing?) and suddenly Mort was like “I have some surprisingly relevant things to say about down payments income taxation without representation 1776″ and Phent was like “WTS?” Even today I still have no idea what word or words automatically set you off on that tangent, mort — was it the calculation of points? Whatever.
Man, we totally have to get together sometime and hook some naive surfers on gambling or something. Peace out
December 15th, 2006 at 1:08 pm
Seven months later, and I’m trying very hard not to laugh out loud at work at this, Lenoxus. Well done.
October 22nd, 2007 at 11:33 am
I am in the hope that Frank Marciulliano actually reads some of these blogs. I used to like Sally Forth. Now, all the characters are: 1) drifting through life, 2) obnoxiously sarcastic and 3) seem to feel a sense of entitlement (a.k.a. “Seinfeld Syndrome”). Not everyone watched or liked Seinfeld, and I sure as h*** don’t like the strip anymore, either. Get their acts together or retire them all to rocky pasture!!
February 10th, 2008 at 6:16 am
I’d prefer reading in my native language, because my knowledge of your languange is no so well. But it was interesting! Look for some my links:
September 26th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
I think Ted is going to cheat on Sally with Aria at work. She is so hot, and cool at the same time. She will light his fire the way the dispassionate, maternal Sally never could….
November 24th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
what the flip is Sally Forth about? it’s not creative, and the punchlines are not punchlines. the only cool thing is the hottie standing next to Sally. Sally gave me unreal expectations about women – small tatas and wig hair. real women have straight husbands and personalities.
I’m ashamed to have the same name as her.
May 31st, 2009 at 7:51 pm
give me a slice of that beef cake called sally forth. thank you very much! holla if you think she’s hot. honk if you think she’s the coolest girl. lose bowel contol if you think she’s mighty fine. i just can’t get enough
July 19th, 2009 at 1:34 am
I’m trying my hardest not to post on these old ones, but I found something in an Archie comic book the other day that really took the cake. That’s right–the Exposition Game!
“Yipes! It’s your jealous boyfriend, Moose!”
said Reggie to Midge, both of whom were turned around and looking at said boyfriend.
WOW. I know they say some pretty obvious stuff in those comics, but really now? That’s a winner if I ever saw one. *Sally Forth-style sly look*