Non Sequitur, 9/13/04
I have nothing to say about this comic, except that I think that the word “jackassery” is funny, and that I’m proud to live in a country where it appears on the comics page. Try to work it into casual conversation with a coworker or loved one this week.
Apartment 3-G, 9/12/04
This gets my vote for one of the creepiest installments in the comics since I started doing this blog. There’s something deeply weird about Lu Ann’s need to atone for her ancestors’ slave-owning ways by closing herself into this Underground Railway hiding place. Since she went through a bout of agoraphobia last year, when she didn’t leave her apartment for weeks, we know she likes enclosed spaces, so maybe her desire to learn in this way is a little self-serving. It’d almost be kind of kinky, if Lu Ann weren’t such a sexless goody-goody. The weird way she’s colored in this strip, with her lips the same color as the rest of her face, make her look almost corpse-like — just adding to the creepiness of entombing her.
In subsequent installments, we learn that Lu Ann’s harrowing, life-changing experience in that dark chamber has led her to boldly confront her past by researching slavery on the Internet. Maybe someday soon she’ll meet an actual black person!
Family Circus, 9/11/04
The emasculation of the young American male proceeds apace in this installment of the Family Circus. First, Billy, his hand in the form of a fake gun, cheerfully sprays hot lead in the general direction of his beloved little brother. But once that ball-crusher Mom, with her short, modern, “career woman” haircut, comes onto the scene, our little hellion is reduced to morosely downgrading his fantasy to a harmless squirt-gun fight. (Presumably pretending to shoot a gun is verboten, but pretending to shoot a pretend gun is P.C. enough to pass muster.) Mom may be happy, but we only need to look into the sad faces of Billy and Jeffy (it’s fun to get shot at!) to know that an essential bit of boyhood has been lost, and the encroaching feminization of our once-proud nation is unstoppable. As the piece de resistance, the crudely hand-drawn date in the lower left is there as a stark reminder of what fate awaits a civilization of gun-eschewing girlie men. Bil Keane: a lone voice of manly strength in a corrupt and decadent world.
Incidentally, when I went to the Family Circus Web site to download this cartoon, I received an error message that read “The page cannot be displayed: There are too many people accessing the Web site at this time.” The idea of this site being overwhelmed by traffic is so laughable that, well, it made me laugh.