by zbicyclist

They Say That Making Up is Hard to Do …

Jack Applin has a few questions about this one:

“McKenzie is making a makeup video narrated by her boyfriend.
1) Does she even have a boyfriend?
2) Why did the lipstick have no visible effect?
3) Where will she put the mascara? She has no eyelashes.
4) Did the boyfriend say something in the middle panel that made her sad in the last panel?
5) What the !@#$% is going on?”

8 Comments

  1. Unknown's avatar

    No, McKenzie does not have a boyfriend. The boyfriend is imaginary. She plans to post the video on social media. Perhaps she intends to insert dialogue later. I’m not sure if the last panel is her pretended reaction to something the pretended boyfriend said, or simply depression at reflecting on the absence of a boyfriend (although romantic longing is not really characteristic of her).

    As background, this strip is about three young adults who are roommates and have unrealized dreams. McKenzie, a delusional would-be influencer, is stunningly ill-suited for the role and has almost no followers on social media. “GRWM” is a social media abbreviation and stands for “get ready with me.”

  2. Unknown's avatar

    The lipstick did have an effect, it’s just a subtle application rather than big cartoony red lips. And we can’t see her eyelashes because she hasn’t put the mascara on yet.

  3. Unknown's avatar

    I wondered about this when it came out. I think it may be trying to suggest that as she was doing this, she realized that there was no boyfriend.
    Thus in the fourth panel, Hark! She listens!
    And in the next she realizes there is nothing to hear.
    Finally, she reaches to turn off the camera.

    (Or all of that is pretend, to try and give the impression that she has a boyfriend who just said, “Not gonna narrate” so she turned it off.

    That’s the best I can do…

  4. Unknown's avatar

    [geezer rant]
    Never underestimate kids’ ability to be disappointingly unclever… I’m looking at “grwm”, going, now what does that mean? and finally settling that it must be “groom” with a possibly clever use/misuse of “double-u” “w”: grwm –> gruum –> grume –> groom (vroom, vroom!)
    But no, apparently it’s “Get ready with me”, lame, lame, lame!
    [/rant]
    (wish I could also turn the geezer off, but alas, time…)

  5. Unknown's avatar

    And what’s with the (some) backwards and (some) upside-down letters in WANNABE in the first panel?

  7. Unknown's avatar

    I qualify, age-wise, for geezerhood. However, I do know what GRWM means. Even if you don’t view that sort of video, if you spend much time on YouTube you’ll get them recommended to you. There will be the occasional one that spells it out in the thumbnail.

    The wonders of the YT algorithm are many, meaning “I wonder why it recommended that?!” Every now and then it decides that I must be hungering for news videos from India or South Korea. I don’t have any history of viewing news videos (ugh) or videos about those countries.

    Now, in those cases it doesn’t just float one to see if I will click on it, but rather will recommend ten of them at once. And keep doing it for a while. Then I have to beat down the algorithm by disliking videos and blocking channels.

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