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Panels from: Rex Morgan, M.D., Beetle Bailey, and Blondie, 9/1/04

It’s safe to say that a substantial majority of cartoonists are men; inertia ensures that most of those men are middle aged. I know this because I can see the names on the strips and look up how long they’ve been writing them, but even if all I had to go on was the artwork, I think I could hazard a guess on the gender and age of the artists.

Let’s be blunt: cartoonists like to draw women with big tits. Today we have a bumper crop (so to speak), though it’s by no means far beyond the norm. At one end of the spectrum we have Beetle Bailey’s Miss Buxley (Miss Buxley! C’mon!), who’s drawn with a certain bathroom-wall crudity; there’s Blondie, who sits demurely through her dinner party, stylized, wasp-waisted, and looking like she’s going to tip over forward at any moment; and then we have Rex Morgan’s Heather, caught in photorealistic mid-jiggle, the shadow work on her mid-torso receiving almost as much attention from the artist as Rex’s chin cleft in the previous panel.

Now, I think it’s well-established that a substantial number of literary and artistic geniuses got their start by channeling frustrated sexual energy while in high school. How many great novels have been written varsity-letter quarterbacks? I’m hoping that this is the driving force behind all this buxomness, anyway, and that it isn’t all some incredibly misguided attempt by King Feature Syndicate to compete with Maxim. Heather’s nice looking and all, but I don’t think she’ll be hanging up on the wall of your local auto body shop anytime soon.

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Blondie, 8/9/04

Ziggy, 8/9/04

If we know one thing about Dagwood Bumstead, it’s that he likes to eat. I just never thought he’d get to the point where he’d eat his own pet. One wonders if he’s going at least have a go at becoming emotionally attached to the new member of the family before he boils it alive and eats its flesh. I’ll bet Daisy will work extra hard at being entertaining after that!

In an excellent book on the history of languages called The Power of Babel, linguist John McWhorter goes into an interesting discursus on Charlie Brown’s head. In the 1950s, he says, baldness was a universally understood shorthand for general dopiness; this meaning soon vanished from the popular mindset, and Peanuts got modern in many ways (with black people and jokes about the metric system and such), but Charlie Brown’s anomalous bald head persisted. Blondie has been around since the days of Prohibition, so perhaps there is some fascinating and forgotten cultural significance to Dagwood’s bizarre get-up — the bow tie, the single enormous button just below his sternum, the long, outwardly flowing locks of hair above each ear. Mostly I just think he looks like a freak.

Anyway, it was with the troubling image of the Bumstead family feasting on its pets in mind that I read Ziggy. This is no doubt why my first thought was that the friendly Eskimo-gram at the door was actually holding several pounds of exposed and neatly cubed whale blubber; and not only would such a thing be environmentally problematic, but would make a mess of Ziggy’s doorstop as well (click here to see what I mean, assuming you haven’t eaten lately). Sadly (or, well, maybe happily), the colored version of the comic demonstrates conclusively that our Inuit deliveryman is in fact holding a neatly wrapped parcel, so Ziggy will be able to put down some newspaper before opening his big box o’ blubber. My endangered-species objections still stand, though.