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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.

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Ziggy, 8/5/04

Willy ‘n Ethel, 8/5/04

Several times on any given day, the compulsive comics reader will think to him or herself, That’s not funny. What’s more rare, and therefore more precious and intriguing, are those moments where we think, I don’t even understand why that’s supposed to be funny.

But today, ladies and gentlemen, we have a pair, a two-fer, a bifecta of incomprehensible comics. Take the scene of turmoil at Casa Ziggy. Ziggy is angry (and when’s the last time you saw Ziggy angry?); his little dog is confused, or surprised, or possibly sad (you can only express so much emotional nuance through eyebrows). But why is the parrot’s statement eliciting these reactions? Is the dog upset and disillusioned that Lassie has stooped so low as to pose in the nude? Since they’re all watching TV (and presumably watching Lassie), does Ziggy’s dog realize that they’re watching a nude scene and suddenly feel uncomfortable and weird?

This all might make more sense if I could remember whether Lassie (or Ziggy’s dog, for that matter) was male or female. But then again, it probably wouldn’t.

At least in Ziggy I have a sense of what’s going on, if not the motivations behind the characters’ reactions. Meanwhile, Willy ‘n Ethel, a strip that is not traditionally difficult to parse (Willy is lazy! Ethel doesn’t like it! Ethel’s sister is fat! Willy is lazy!) is on a whole different plane of baffling today. All I’m getting out of it is that Willy got hit in the head, possibly by a T-Ball bat. Other than that, it’s completely opaque. “She”? “T-Ball”? “Master”? Buh?

Anyway, I’m posting these to lend assurance to anyone who’s ever said “I don’t get it”: you are not alone! And if there’s some comics guru out there who does have a notion as to what the hell these two strips are about, please post your explanation in the comments. Your fame shall be everlasting, and I’ll post the best explanations in the blog.