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Kudzu, 7/27/04

Kudzu is a good example of why I read all the comics every day. 95 times out of a 100, I find it preachy, smug, reactionary, and generally annoying. The strips where Ida Mae serves as a liberal strawperson to pick on infuriate me; the strips were the Preacher Will B. Dunn reads from a “modern translation” of the Bible are just lazy.

But then you get to stuff like today’s strip. In today’s American religious climate — where most people don’t go to church, and the fastest growing churches are large “nondenominational” generic Protestant churches — where else but in Kudzu can you find jokes about the different religious sensibilities of Baptists and Episcopalians? Where else can you pick on the quirks of the Methodists? The church league baseball/basketball/bowling/whatever installments are even better. I keeping waiting for a “one hand clapping” joke about the crowd whenever Preacher Dunn’s team plays the Zen Buddhists, though it never comes. These strips almost make up for the awful ones where the preacher’s parakeet comments on reality television. Almost.

As a side note, I think the title of this strip is a good example of comic semantic drift. When I first started reading it, I thought it was just a sort of nonsense word title, or maybe a reference to the strip’s overgrown Southern locale. It was only about a year later that I realized that there actually was a character in the strip named Kudzu. Kudzu is an everyman character who was probably intended to be the viewpoint character early in the strip’s history. Presumably the artist quickly realized that, like most everyman characters, he was boring beyond belief.

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Hagar the Horrible, 7/26/04

As a former professional historian in training, I can assure you that the Vikings were a thoroughly nasty lot. They pillaged, destroyed, raped, maimed, enslaved, and looted their way across northern Europe for several centuries. There was a set prayer in the Irish church’s prayer book that went, “From the fury of the Norsemen, oh Lord, protect us.” Thus, I have to believe that the spirits of thousands of Viking warriors in Valhalla moan with disgust every day when they read Hagar the Horrible.

Two aspects of this strip caught my eyes. First, the flag: frankly, I’m impressed that Chris Browne executed a semi-decent Scandinavian flag here. Hagar supposedly lives in Norway, so maybe that’s what the flag is supposed to be, though the shoddy coloring job makes it look as if it’s the flag of Normandy. If we take the Old Norse sagas as our guide, though, it’s probably more accurate to imagine that it’s his own personal banner, and that as Hagar says, he’s carving out a private chiefdom for himself in this bleak and deserted land, where he will preside over his men’s council as they spar over women, fight their blood enemies, and loot the weaker races around them. Thus it’s all the more disappointing that Hagar talks real estate with the first local he sees, rather than roasting him alive in a sacrifice to Odin.

Which brings me to my next observation. What exactly is the deal with this guy’s outfit? People in Hagar the Horrible have very specific clothes based on their profession, so I’ve seen this get-up before, but I can’t for the life of me tell what it’s supposed to represent. He looks not unlike a goth pastry chef, to be honest.

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Zippy the Pinhead, 7/25/04

Zippy the Pinhead is living proof that middle-of-the-road treacle isn’t the only thing that syndication inertia maintains past its sell-by date. With lots and lots of words, a cast of annoying and largely indistinguishable characters, and an unrelentingly negative attitude, Zippy is the Cathy of the surrealist/postmodern set. Occasionally I find the strip interesting and funny — I’ve particularly liked the daily strips for the past couple weeks, with various modern artists’ works on display in a high-falutin’ freak show. But more often the strips just feature Zippy having inane conversations with various enormous fiberglass roadside statues, or, even worse, Griffy simultaneously railing against the commercialization of art and whining about his inability to land an animation deal. If you’ve ever seen Wonderland, a fascinating documentary about Levittown, you know that Bill Griffith, who grew up there, is a bitter, bitter, bastard, and more and more that’s been coming through in Zippy the Pinhead. Usually, he’s just bitter about the world around him, but lately he seems to be increasingly bitter that his readership hasn’t taken his strip as a manifesto to, like, fix it or something. Today he seems to have reached a breaking point, declaring that running a bag factory would be better than continuing with the strip.

I’ve always why Zippy doesn’t take up more space in the Sunday paper than it does. Maybe it’s so darn anti-establishment that it can’t be held back by your rules that say that the Sunday comic is supposed to be bigger than the daily strip, maaaan. I should also mention in this context that, when I was a kid, a friend of my mom’s spotted a graffito under a bridge in Buffalo that read “ZIPPY THE PINHEAD — CITY IN FEAR,” and seemed to think it was a harbinger of a gang-ridden urban apocalypse, a la The Warriors. I didn’t have the heart to tell him.