Post Content

As foretold in prophecy, Unity Day 2018 is finally here! How are our most important cultural commenters, newspaper comic strips, dealing with the scourge of bullying? Honestly, not great!

Six Chix, 10/24/18

Speaking as someone who was a tremendous nerd as a child and also someone who loves etymology, I can assure you that there are few things more likely to earn a swift punch in the mouth than attempting to parry bullying by delving into some word origins. Also if you’re wondering how exactly bully came to change meanings in this way, it turns out that “a connecting sense between ‘lover’ and ‘ruffian’ might be ‘protector of a prostitute,’ which was one sense of bully (though it is not specifically attested until 1706).” So if our young victim here wanted to show off her bookish nature but avoid violent retribution, she might want to point out that by calling her tormenter a bully she’s also calling him a pimp, though this might not have the sting that she originally intended to deliver via etymological factoids and might instead just puff up the lad’s self-image.

Hagar the Horrible, 10/24/18

Anyway, we all know there’s only one kind of knowledge that bullies respect: knowledge about how to impose your will on others with violence.

Dennis the Menace, 10/24/18

Speaking of which, what’s the “Unity” of “Unity Day” stand for, anyway? Well, as today’s Dennis the Menace demonstrates, it means that smaller, weaker children should “unify” with one another and face down their lone larger tormenter, uniting into an angry mob that can tear their bullies limb from limb in an act of horrific orgiastic revenge.

Mary Worth, 10/24/18

Mary Worth, meanwhile, cuts through the feel-good bullshit to get at the real truth. You see, the whole point of this storyline is that if you bully a sad old man grieving his dead dog long enough, he’ll eventually relent and adopt another dog. And isn’t that a good thing? Why are you against bullying? Do you want sad, abused dogs to languish in shelters, forever?

Post Content

Dick Tracy, 10/23/18

The new-look Dick Tracy creative team loves to go to the strip’s 87-year-deep well for old favorite characters, but also introduce new ones, and since I’m still a defiant Dick Tracy Philistine after more than a decade of making fun of the strip, I have to check in with the invaluable Dick Tracy wiki to tell which I’m dealing with. That’s how I learned that Vitamin Flintheart has been in the strip since the ’40s, and that “In 1998, Vitamin was living in New York City, appearing in a production of Hamlet. He discovered his friend Dick Tracy, who was suffering from memory loss after eating tainted food on an airline,” a storyline that I’m devastated to have missed. Kandikane, meanwhile, is a recent addition, having been introduced in the last Vitamin storyline as a documentary filmmaker/candy cane obsessive who wanted to make a movie about the old fellow. Anyway, looks like he knocked her up! Just in case you wanted to think about May-December sex stuff involving Dick Tracy characters! Now you have to think about it! I have to think about it, so you have to think about it!

Six Chix, 10/23/18

I’m honestly going to be spending days mulling over the typography of the “At The Negative Commenters Association Meeting” sign. Why is “negative commenters” in a different font? Why are all the words all-capped except for “the”? Why is “at” in weird little extra box at the top of the sign? If this really were the Negative Commenters Association Meeting and that were really a sign letting you know where you were, wouldn’t that “at” be kind of weird and not-quite-right? Anyway, this is yet another Six Chix in honor of Unity Day 2018 (or, sorry #UnityDay2018), so good luck trying to figure out how this cartoon relates to bullying, at all! Oh, sorry does that make me a negative commenter? I don’t care! This cartoon is a baffling affront to the spirit of Unity Day 2018! (Please share this blog post on social media using the hashtag #BafflingAffrontToUnityDay2018)

Crankshaft, 10/23/18

Well, it looks like Crankshaft lost control of his bus on a rain-slicked hillside, killing him and all his passengers. Was his fiery death worth the suffering of all the innocent children who perished with him? Yes, yes it was.

Mary Worth, 10/23/18

At least someone around here understands the concept of consent.

Post Content

Mary Worth, 10/20/18

Most medical practitioners are, or should be, trained to understand the interpersonal dynamics of patients under their care, and recognize when someone may be there against their will, possibly as part of scenario of domestic violence. Usually people don’t just come out and say “It’s not my decision to be here!” but that’d be a pretty strong signal, in my opinion! Fortunately for Mary, our hapless shelter worker hasn’t been trained to notice these telltale signs. “What a nice old man,” she thinks about a person loudly proclaiming he’s been kidnapped. “I wonder how many puppies he’s going to leave with?”

Hagar the Horrible, 10/20/18

The central gimmick of Hagar the Horrible, of course, is that it reproduces the tropes of mid-20th century American middle-class life (which have been largely ossified into place in newspaper comics even though they don’t always reflect the reality of 2018) in a 9th or 10th-century Scandinavian setting, and one of those tropes is of men retreating to a bar to escape their wives. Anyway, today’s Hagar acknowledges that these bars are depressing places that monetize misery, which just sort of takes what I’ve always taken as the subtext and makes it explicit.