Due to one editor being on vacation this week, we’re going to imitate the comics by repeating some classics. This one is from June 2018, by Bill
B.A.: Okay, so… a comic about the future that uses what’s already a Geezer reference (Blockbuster/VHS tapes). But I still don’t understand what the joke’s supposed to be.
Though the Cow pinch-hitting for the Squirrel does give us a passable “Oy”.
Usual John calls out to Geezers: “Any reference to Little Lulu, which stopped publication in 1984, is pretty much for geezers, but Dell did not publish the title after 1962 and John Stanley stopped working on it around 1959.”
This reminds me of a fine example of resume enhancement.
I was preparing to interview a candidate who was getting an advanced statistics degree from Northern Illinois University, a respectable institution. He had a link to his website, so I checked that before the interview, and saw that all across the top of the page he had a large picture of himself in front of the building housing the statistics department … at Northwestern, a very respectable institution.
When asked about that, he said, “I was on the faculty at Northwestern”. And, sure enough, he’d listed a faculty job at CTD, Northwestern. As it happens, I knew that CTD stood for the Center for Talent Development, a summer program for middle schoolers and high schoolers on the Northwestern campus. My daughter had attended that for some summers; the instructors were good, but not regular Northwestern faculty. In fact, my daughter was one of the instructors herself one summer. So, he’d actually taught a group of middle schoolers math during one summer, and had expanded this into being on the faculty at Northwestern.
He did not get a job offer.
This is a (very) long post, and I hope that it will generate an equally large amount of discussion. Everyone here is of course free to express their own opinions, and while I do not expect that everyone will agree with everything that I have written, I hope that you all will continue to observe the customary standards of decorum that have become a hallmark of CIDU.
Over the past few months the Daily Cartoonist has reported extensively about the way that Gannett has “restructured” the comics for all of their newspapers. A more recent TDC report theorized that one motivation for Gannett’s microscopic menu was misogynistic chauvinism, and Georgia Dunn adapted this hypothesis into Breaking Cat News:
It is undeniably true that newspaper comics have been a male-dominated business for over a century, but I think it both misses the point (and weakens the argument) to ascribe Gannett’s motivation exclusively to chauvinism. Gannett has simply selected old, reliable, and non-controversial mainstays. The average age of the strips on their “approved” list is approximately half a century, and back then virtually every single comic author was male. Gannett is not discriminating directly against “women”, the company is discriminating against all new authors, no matter whether they are women, men, or transgender.
As I already commented at TDC, “Gannett has selected a tired collection of dull, ancient (mostly zombie) strips, and has presumably negotiated a massive volume discount from the syndicate, because they are in a position to impose this lame collection onto dozens of defenseless editorial offices, in complete disregard of what readers would actually prefer. This is just window dressing for the sake of being able to claim that the Gannett papers still offer a comic section; the corporate leadership doesn’t care one iota whether anyone would bother to keep a subscription to read any of those features, and Gannett would probably prefer if all of their papers dropped the comics entirely.“
In addition, I also do not think that it is fair to assume that only a woman can create a convincing female character. Although female authors have always been in short supply, there are nevertheless a number of strong, positive girls in the comics, each of which goes a long way to dismantle the antiquated stereotypes set by “Blondie“, “Momma“, and “Nancy“, or (even worse) in “Andy Capp” and “The Lockhorns“.
Here’s a selection of some of my favorites. Most are written by men, but there is one woman and one trans author in this collection:
First and foremost, there are both Amelia and Rose in Will Henry’s “Wallace the Brave“:
Then we have Henrietta (Enriqueta) in “Macanudo” (by Liniers, not to mention whoever does those brilliant English translations; his only translator’s name that I was able to discover was – not surprisingly – a woman: Mara Faye Lethem):
Cynthia in “Barney & Clyde“:
Danae (and her sister) in Wiley’s “Non-Sequitur“:
The last BCN panel shown above refers to “Phoebe (and her Unicorn)”. Personally, I preferred Dana Simpson’s original title (“Heavenly Nostrils“), but I guess it just wasn’t marketable:
Making an exception for a re-run, there’s Alice in Richard Thompson’s “Cul de Sac“:
Making another exception for a zombie, especially because it was inherited by a woman, there’s “Heart (of the City)“:
P.S. The bottom line is that the only thing that publishing companies care about are their own bottom lines. If we are ever going to get an inclusive (multi-gendered) set of new authors in newspaper comics, it will be necessary for the readership to change their fossilized habits and to start petitioning for papers to drop all the reruns that are currently cluttering (even choking) those comic sections. That doesn’t just mean “Cul de Sac“, it also means letting “Peanuts“, “Calvin & Hobbes“, and a number of other popular “zombie” strips go. I regret to say that for obvious reasons, I don’t think this is going to happen any time in the near future.
Here are two suggestions from Targuman, not very similar except that in both getting the joke depends on catching a cultural reference. Not entirely a geezerish enterprise, either — yes, both have roots in the sixties or before, but at least one is still in use in contemporary “intellectual properties”.
“Andy”?? How about Johnny and Henry? (Okay, yes, we know why. But strictly speaking it’s a mistake.)
So, some confusion between Nirvana and reincarnation / transmigration of souls?
Thanks to Dan Sachs for this CIDU-Geezer.
Because the CIDU will be quickly solved by anyone who can fill in the geezer reference, we thought to provide a little more entertainment …. The editors weren’t really familiar with Diamond Lil, so we looked around in some recent strips, and found an interesting mix of OYs, Ewwws, “dad jokes” (a.k.a. bad jokes), and of course a baseline of geezer alerts!
(I like that the Siri or Alexa is named “Surli”.)
This Mother Goose and Grimm is analyzed at Arnold Zwicky’s blog.
I also posted this F-Minus, with remarks, in a comment on that same Zwicky blog entry.
Several selections contributed by Andréa coming up:
“I KNEW IMMEDIATELY WHO THIS WAS, EVEN BEFORE READING THE CAPTION . . . DOES THAT MAKE ME A GEEZER??”
Synchronicity–
This Bizarro from Andréa is also taken up under the Arnold Zwicky analytical microscope. I like his term “a Desert Crawl cartoon” for the main trope here.
“SYNCHRONICITY – ABOUT *NOT* LEARNING A LESSON . . .”
And one final OY contribution:
B&C have been going in for geezer / boomer / retro references a bit lately.
The sender of the Spy v Spy one remarks Prohias stopped drawing “Spy vs. Spy” in 1987, and died in 1998. § Wikipedia claims that the series is still “ongoing”, but I still wonder whether the character in the fourth panel would be recognized by anyone under the age of 50.
Meanwhile, back at the Zippy, more geezer callout action:
William Bendix was among the actors I came to know of from 1950s or early 60s television sitcoms or sometimes drama series ; and found out later had been minor or major movie stars in the 1940s or early 50s. Fred MacMurray, Donna Reed, Raymond Burr…
And from Brian in STL we have a synchronicity of Bill the Cat references:
Sad, sad end!
P.S. Who would be customers here, you ask?
They almost directly tell us whereabouts this geezer reference comes from. And yet … and yet … I DON’T GET IT!
When this was new, in 1965 or 1966 (I can’t quite make the date out — though the 6/16 at lower left is quite clear, as the pigeons have not yet picked it up), probably it was already a challenge to the reader to recognize some already-retro references, to famous real-world couples or other cartoon-world characters. And probably some randomly tossed-in names; and probably some not-famous real-world friends of Mort Walker’s; and certainly some pairing-up jokes (Emmy and Oscar?).
And after the passage of another 55 or 56 years, how many of them can we get? I’m not really much of a comics historian, so maybe … none? But others may do better.
Comics I Don't Understand 