Post Content

Peanuts, 10/10/04

Never mind your adorable plush Linus dolls and your Snoopy-branded Met Life insurance policy, Peanuts is one of the grimmest strips in comic history. Charlie Brown’s running battle with Lucy and the football is of course well known, but in today’s rerun the whole thing is layered with overtones of Old Testament fatalism. Usually Charlie Brown attempts to at least talk himself into the idea that this time, somehow, Lucy isn’t going to pull the football away at the last minute; but today, as his grim aspect in the rightmost panel in the second row indicates, he has no illusions about the ultimate outcome of this exercise. Like Isaiah, he can rage against it all he wants, but he knows what he’s got coming. The vision of ruined cities, plucked from one of the Bible’s less uplifting passages, is a nice touch. It’s cheery stuff.

Post Content

Family Circus, 10/9/04

This has to be the meanest thing I’ve ever seen in the Family Circus. Dad smiles at his own cruel taunt, but little Billy’s face, contorted in a rictus of rage, shows that he’s now at the age where such make-believe games no longer soothe the sting of forced child labor. You can’t spend leaves at the store, Dad, and I’m guessing you’re not coughing up any real money at the end of this chore, either. Decades from now, someone’s going to be describing this moment to a therapist.

Comics sweatshop watch: no doubt the hapless soul who did the coloring for this strip is shackled to a drafting table somewhere in the steamy tropics, and can therefore be forgiven for making those fallen leaves a vibrant, mid-summer green.

Post Content

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/8/04

Fellas, don’t let the ladies fool you when they talk about wanting men who are “sensitive”, “caring”, “literate”, or “not felons”. Since time immemorial, girls have always gone in for bad boys. No matter how nicely they dress, with their big fluffy pastel-colored bows and such, they’re inevitably hanging around places where bad boys go — bars, detention, prison — waiting to get their hands on some surly, untameable stallion.

It’s good to see that the teachers in Hootin’ Holler, untouched by the educational reforms that have swept over the U.S. since the end of the Hoover administration, are still publicly humiliating naughty children Cultural Revolution-style. Also, Whar Th’ Boys Are would be a great beach movie in which four hillbillies, or possibly four pirates, came to Ft. Lauderdale on spring break in search of a little action.