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I'm really uncomfortable with the way Truck is breaking the fourth wall here. 'Are you this guy's father? You, the reader? Well, if I remember my Roland Barthes then, yes, indeed, you could be described as a metaphorical parent to both of us...’

—Spunky The Wonder Squid
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For the love of God, Blaze!

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Apartment 3-G, 9/12/04

This gets my vote for one of the creepiest installments in the comics since I started doing this blog. There’s something deeply weird about Lu Ann’s need to atone for her ancestors’ slave-owning ways by closing herself into this Underground Railway hiding place. Since she went through a bout of agoraphobia last year, when she didn’t leave her apartment for weeks, we know she likes enclosed spaces, so maybe her desire to learn in this way is a little self-serving. It’d almost be kind of kinky, if Lu Ann weren’t such a sexless goody-goody. The weird way she’s colored in this strip, with her lips the same color as the rest of her face, make her look almost corpse-like — just adding to the creepiness of entombing her.

In subsequent installments, we learn that Lu Ann’s harrowing, life-changing experience in that dark chamber has led her to boldly confront her past by researching slavery on the Internet. Maybe someday soon she’ll meet an actual black person!

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Thank heaven for little boys

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Family Circus, 9/11/04

The emasculation of the young American male proceeds apace in this installment of the Family Circus. First, Billy, his hand in the form of a fake gun, cheerfully sprays hot lead in the general direction of his beloved little brother. But once that ball-crusher Mom, with her short, modern, “career woman” haircut, comes onto the scene, our little hellion is reduced to morosely downgrading his fantasy to a harmless squirt-gun fight. (Presumably pretending to shoot a gun is verboten, but pretending to shoot a pretend gun is P.C. enough to pass muster.) Mom may be happy, but we only need to look into the sad faces of Billy and Jeffy (it’s fun to get shot at!) to know that an essential bit of boyhood has been lost, and the encroaching feminization of our once-proud nation is unstoppable. As the piece de resistance, the crudely hand-drawn date in the lower left is there as a stark reminder of what fate awaits a civilization of gun-eschewing girlie men. Bil Keane: a lone voice of manly strength in a corrupt and decadent world.

Incidentally, when I went to the Family Circus Web site to download this cartoon, I received an error message that read “The page cannot be displayed: There are too many people accessing the Web site at this time.” The idea of this site being overwhelmed by traffic is so laughable that, well, it made me laugh.

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Hey, if you flick your eyes back and forth real fast, it’s like a strobe light!

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Panels from Herb and Jamaal, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, Shoe, and Doonesbury, 9/10/04

One of the many things about Gary Trudeau that I like is that he’s admitted that, at least initially, he wasn’t very good at drawing. A lot of early Doonesburys consisted of one character sitting in front of the TV for four consecutive identical panels, and while there was a certain pop-art charm to this, I think most people would agree that his strip has improved leaps and bounds since then, especially after his extended early-1980s sabbatical.

Anyway, for me, one of the defining features of modern-era Doonesbury is the “shadow panel,” where the characters are rendered as white against a black background (or vice versa) for a single panel. This is a technique that has spread in one form or another to other comics as well (or maybe it was always there, though Doonesbury is where I noticed it first). It’s kind of arty, and like a lot of art, I don’t have a clue what it’s supposed to mean. I think it’s safe to say that it doesn’t represent a momentary shift in ambient light, or a massive nearby explosion. Sometimes, as in both Herb and Jamaal and Barney Google and Snuffy Smith today, it’s part of a shift in perspective, generally representing something too far away to render details. (Though I should point out that in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, the shadowy characters are not, in fact, too far away to render details; in fact, with their white hands, they look alarmingly like Aunt Jemima figurines.) With the other two, though, we’re looking at the same scene from essentially the same angle, so it’s representing … what, exactly? Time passing? A change in scene? A desire to not draw the same damn details on the same characters for a third time in one day? Anyone who knows more about drawing comics than I do (and Lord knows there must be enough of you out there) should please edify us all.