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Family Circus, 1/20/05

Normally, I try to avoid directly discussing the writers and artists of comics in this blog, on the logic that they’re real people whose feelings would be hurt after being on the receiving end of cruel mockery from yours truly. Today, however, I’m making an exception on the part of Bil and Jeff Keane, since I figure that they have the love of millions of children and parents around the world, along with their enormous piles of money, to emotionally sustain them. Anyway, it’s fairly well known that the Family Circus family is not-so-loosely based on the family of artist Bil Keane. Now that Bil’s son Jeff, who apparently has enough clout to not be known professionally as “Jeffy,” has taken over most of the creative duties, I’ve been keenly interested in how young Jeffy is treated in the strip. And, as near as I can tell, he is almost always treated badly. If Jeffy is ever featured in the daily panel, he’s almost always being yelled at (as he is here), being shot at, saying something stupid, or otherwise being crapped on. He’s not the oldest, he’s not the baby, he’s not the girl: he’s just Jeffy, and he has a lot of anger to work out. One wonders if he goes out of the way to make the art as crude and talentless as possible (and the jokes as stupid as possible) when “Billy” takes over in a pathetic attempt to get back at his parent-favored older brother.

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Sally Forth, 1/19/05

Today, we’re going to talk about a fun game you can play when if you’re bored. It’s called Exposition. Here’s how it works. You and a friend wait to encounter a mutual acquaintance, or for a famous person known to you both to come up in conversation. Identify him or her first by a role that he or she plays, and then by name. Whoever can offer the most crushingly obvious description wins. Examples:

“Look, Ted, it’s your wife, Janice Kerploski.”
“Did you see the speech on TV given by the president, George W. Bush?”
“I sometimes wish that the lead singer of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Jimi Hendrix, hadn’t choked to death on his own vomit.”

Check out the worker drones in the background of this strip. Sally and Alice are so busy worrying about their new manager, Jefferson Jowdy, that they forgot that today is Wear-Only-White-Or-Black-Clothes-And-Shoes-And-Powder-All-Exposed-Flesh-A-Ghoulish-White Day. Those kids over in HR really know how to cut loose!

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Apartment 3-G, 1/18/05

Jiminy Cricket, that is one ugly paperweight. The image quality isn’t very good, so you may not be able to see that the little tag hanging awkwardly off the side of it reads “Butterflies are free.” It’s sad, but probably accurate, that the sort of people who would be nice enough to send a holiday gift to a pretty young middle-class white stranger who was briefly forced to work in a sweatshop are also the sort of people who would be charmed by this kind of heinous kitschy crap.

Ironically, the paperweight itself was almost certainly made in a sweatshop somewhere in Southeast Asia.

In the aftermath of her release from captivity, Margo had threatened to start thinking of others before herself and worrying about important issues in the world at large. In other words, she was on the verge of becoming as dull as LuAnn, though admittedly smarter. Fortunately for Apartment 3-G lovers everywhere, the outpouring of sympathy and devotion she’s receiving here will no doubt soon inflate her ego back up to its appropriate level.