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The Phantom, 12/4/04

If you’ve read this feature regularly, you’ll know that there’s nothing that turns me on more than hot, hot discussion of geographical and cultural signifiers embedded in dialect. Thus, it’s rather surprising that, until I read today’s strip, I never really considered what sort of accent the hero of the Phantom might have. I mean, let’s see: scion of a family of mysterious obscenely wealthy vigilantes, of European descent, born and raised in somewhere that is probably southeast Africa, married to an American, which all should result in him sounding something like … Teresa Heinz Kerry, maybe?

Anyway, the thing that threw me in this strip is that our grumpy superhero displays his disdain for American sports scheduling by exclaiming “Blast!” In my experience, the only people who ever use this word as an interjection are British. Well, I mean, not my experience as such, as none of the British people I’ve known or encountered personally have ever done so, but, well, can you imagine a native English speaker shouting “Blast!” in any accent that isn’t British? Yeah, me neither. That might also explain why the Ghost-Who-Watches-Television-In-His-Hotel-Room is so discombobulated by the schedule: in the Commonwealth Formerly Known As The British Empire, their so-called “football” games are on TV essentially all the time, instead of the rational once-a-week schedule we’ve established here.

I still can’t linguistically explain that “Huh!” at the beginning of the sentence, though. But it’s worth noting that lovable wolf Devil eschews the pedestrian “Woof!” for a more naturalistic “Wrf!”

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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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Mary Worth, 12/2/04

“Sure, I’ve been married for years, now, but … hey, yoga instructor! Bendy!”