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Well, this blog’s varied and intelligent readership has met the challenge of last week’s baffling Ziggy cartoon. Josh “The Sedermeister” W. has this to say: “You presume that information cannot be extracted from the eyes/eyebrows of the characters. Well, my friend, I do believe you presume too much. Forget about Ziggy for a moment. The parrot’s eyes are quite telling. He has the half-closed eyes often associated with an evil or mischievous thought crossing a cartoon character’s mind. The eyes of a schemer. Case in point: ‘The Family Guy’s’ Peter Griffin, after seeing ‘free Tibet’ signs at a rally, informing China from a payphone that he has acquired Tibet and will trade it for ‘that’s right, ALL the tea.’ But I digress. Next take a look at the dog’s eyes. He has wide open (albeit small) eyes — the eyes of an innocent. So what you have here is less naive character corrupting his pure-of-mind companion by explaining a painful ‘truth’ to him — Lassie is a ho’. Imagine an older brother saying to his younger sibling, ‘You know, mommy and daddy tried to put you up for adoption but no one would take you — even when they offered a large sum of money to sweeten the deal.’ In this context Ziggy’s expression makes total sense. He’s the parent walking in on that conversation, disappointed in the lack of maturity being displayed by his progeny … while wearing no pants.”

The delightful and talented Laura continues with the no-pants tack: “Does the fact that Ziggy is naked from the waist down, and possibly pulling up his shirt to expose even more of himself, enhance the meaning of the strip in any way?” (That all depends on what you mean by “enhance,” Laura.) “Maybe the dog and parrot have something against nudists, and Ziggy’s annoyed that they’re mocking him and his dangly bits.”

By the way, I have already railed in this space against the evils of coloring in daily strips; in this case, it highlights the fact that the Ziggy’s artist is too lazy to draw Ziggy’s pants (which is still a lesser crime than being too lazy to put on pants, believe you me). A quick glance at the Sunday comics reveals that I don’t get Ziggy in the Sunday comics, so anyone who can add information on his pants-wearing in that context should chime on in.

Meanwhile, Willy n’ Ethel has proven a tougher nut to crack. One reader who chooses to go nameless says, “‘Will there be anything else Master?’ is a clear allusion to I Dream of Jeannie. And the bandage refers to the episode where Tony gets amnesia and forgets who he is. If you think of it that way, it all seems kind of obvious.” That “it seems kind of obvious” bit worked on me in my Apartment 3-G quandary, but it doesn’t quite convince here. I’m still holding out for a more logical explanation.

This is as good a time to any to offer a linkback to Subdivided We Stand, who makes an amusing reference to “Wilbur the Combover King.”

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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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Prince Valiant, 8/8/04

Click here to view the full-sized comic in a new window.

I made a cheap shot last week when I cited Prince Valiant in an entry about the comics and “failed” classicists (though as a failed classicist myself, it was largely meant to be self-deprecating). As a well-informed but anonymous reader pointed out, the storylines for Prince Valiant are written by John Cullen Murphy, a medieval history major in college and current managing editor for the Atlantic, the hem of which publication’s robes I am not worthy to touch. Prince Valiant is in fact one of my great, non-ironic pleasures in the comics. Back when I was in grad school, in the waning days of the Clinton administration, my specialty was in what was then trendily called “the Late Antique” (no doubt it has a different name now), which covers very broadly the period from about the third century A.D. to about the seventh. It’s later than the Ancient Rome of I, Claudius, and it’s earlier than the knights-in-armor-and-damsels-in-distress middle ages; and so, while burdened with the dire poverty, grinding workload, and blighted social life that afflict all graduate students, I also had the additional problem of describing to normal human beings what the hell it was I actually studied.

Now I wish that I had been familiar with Prince Valiant then, because if I had, I just could have said, airily, “Oh, you know, it’s the stuff that happens in Prince Valiant.” In a country where anything that happened before World War II is generally considered ancient history, in the comics pages every Sunday we have a strip dedicated to goings-on sometime in the middle of the 500s A.D. While of course the characters’ adventures happen more or less outside the realm of real history, in my several years of following it I’ve yet to spot any real historical goofs.

One thing I’ve noted over time is the absence of any references to the magic and wizardry that most people associate with the time of King Arthur. In addition, although the characters live in a world that is obviously Christian (Galan is seeking the Holy Grail, after all, and has met with the Pope on his quest), that aspect is significantly underplayed. The current action features a hermit on the spot where Moses supposedly received the Ten Commandments reading from an unnamed “sacred book.” He tells the story of the Assyrian seige of Jerusalem from 2 Kings 18-19 — except that where the Old Testament has the Assyrian army struck down by an angel of God, our hermit attributes the victory to the King of Judah’s ingenuity in blocking up a spring. One imagines that the people who are up in arms about creeping secular humanism in the funnies are shooting off angry letters to the editor about this comic (written by a major player in the East Coast liberal media elite, no less!). Personally, I’m just glad to have a counterweight to Johnny Hart.

Of course, Prince Valiant is beautifully drawn, too. It’s impossible to find current strips online, though, which is why I haven’t commented on it earlier. I ended up scanning this one from the paper myself, cutting it up and reassembling in with image editing software, which was a big pain in the ass. So I insist rather forcefully that you click on the link to the full-sized comic above and appreciate the artwork, particularly in the dark and moody middle panel.