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B.C., 12/3/04

For me, one of the surprises in Jonathan Franzen’s Peanuts essay (yes, I’m plugging it again; you really should read it) was that his favorite comic in the newspaper he read as a kid was B.C. Since I refuse to actually spend good money on a B.C. anthology, or even risk being seen thumbing through one at the bookstore, I must pose this question to you all: was Franzen a little kid with no taste (not a crime; even I, current culture snob that I am, was under the spell of Garfield until I hit puberty), or was B.C. at some point in the distant past actually, you know, funny?

Since all I have to go on is what I read in the funny pages, though, I must humbly assert that B.C. is not, in fact, funny. Do I harp on this point? Well, it’s true. It also has too damn many characters, and it seems to arbitrarily introduce and get rid of them, and maybe if you’re Jonathan Franzen you’re familiar with them all, but I swear I’ve read this strip every day for years and this Queen Ida is new to me. I mean, yeah, ants have queens, and she’s a real queen, with a crown and a, um, robe and everything, but really: What the hell? I ask you.

This strip also offers a good example of a common comics misconception, which is that if you put two half-funny bits in a row in the same strip, you get an actually funny strip. Though “half-funny” might be too kind a description of the “Yankee Stadium” gag, or of the “then dig one” gag, which, I assume, against all logic, is the punchline.

And one last thing before I move on: What’s the deal with the “HBQBJ” thing at the bottom right of the third panel? Is it a secret code? A private joke? A Jesus thing? It’s a Jesus thing, isn’t it?

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Well, no doubt like many of you, I got swept up in holiday madness last week, and am still playing catch-up in the non-gorging-on-turkey aspects of my life. What with the two Thanksgiving dinners, the Christmas gift exchange with the cousins, the rousing chorus of folk songs from the labor movement, the avant-garde play performed by elementary school children, and the specter of 24 straight hours of uncontrollable vomiting hanging over it all (what, your week wasn’t like that?) I haven’t had time to read the comics so you don’t have to. In both the spirit of the holiday and a desperate attempt to play catch-up, I offer you a week’s worth of comics and corresponding sentence-long things that I’m thankful for.

B.C., 11/23/04

I’m thankful that B.C., having already pissed off both Muslims and Jews, is now going after the Irish, ensuring its departure from the comics pages any day now.

Dilbert, 11/24/04

I’m thankful that public discourse has coarsened to the extent that the phrase “cow’s butt” can now be printed in the comics pages, because I think cow butts are funny.

Beetle Bailey, 11/25/04

I’m thankful that Beetle Bailey has discovered postmodernism, at long last.

Mary Worth, 11/26/04

I’m thankful for Boston, because they rock, man.

Family Circus, 11/27/04

I’m thankful that at least one member of this family is beginning to question the oppressive patriarchal suburban hell in which she lives.

Doodles by Mac and Sack, 11/28/04

I’m thankful that Mac and/or Sack were polite enough to add “please” to their request that I add horns and a bell to the grazing bovine in the bottom middle panel, though I admit that I could have done without the freakish hula-hooping cow above it.

Kudzu, 11/29/04

I’m thankful to Bill O’Reilly, who’s provided days and days of jokes to desperate comic strips everywhere.

B.C., 11/30/04

And now the handicapped. Yep, any day now…

Oh yeah, and one last thing I’m thankful for is this Jonathan Franzen essay about Peanuts from the New Yorker. It’s, like, good and stuff.

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B.C., 10/20/04

OK, so I keep trying to make sense out of the continuing B.C. presidential race and keep failing. Is it just “ha ha, politicians are stupid and/or funny?” Or is it supposed to be a metaphor for ours? Obviously the current candidate who most fits the “linguistically challenged” category is Bush; so is this an attempt to link Kerry with “elitist grammarians,” possibly the most hated group in America today? Does the interrobang represent Kerry’s oft-mention flip-flopping ways? Or … or … what the hell?

Still got all those birds in the background, though. B.C.’s always got the background birds covered.

Not to sound like a despised elitist grammarian myself, but I defy anyone to explain the punctuation in the second panel to me — particularly the ellipsis and the em dash.