Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Marinated Rice, Like Revenge, is Best Served Cold
In my house, we take the comics pretty seriously, and I don't mean in the way that we take, for example, Survivor seriously. We love Survivor. We love some comics, too, but those aren't the ones we take seriously. The comics we take seriously are the ones that we hate.
For example, I've got some pretty serious hostility towards Sally Forth. Not because it's not funny - that I can live with. Plenty of comics aren't funny, and most of them don't keep me awake nights feeling the kind of hostility that Sally Forth does. It's also not the fact that, as my mother is fond of pointing out, Hilary looks like an adult male with a growth defect and pigtails - certainly more masculine than Ted. No, what pisses me off about Sally Forth is that all characters are always smiling. Always. This is especially obnoxious during punchlines, when the characters appear so repulsively self-satisfied with what they apparently believe to be clever remarks. I don't know how many of you poor souls read it, but remember the recent storyline where Ralph got fired? Did it strike anybody else as odd that everybody was smiling for that entire episode? I'm hoping that a future storyline will feature Sally falling into an operating rock tumbler (smiling, natch). I hate you, Sally Forth: please die.
We're also none too fond of Luann, which is a soap opea-ish comic about a post-adolescent girl. Again, this is not a terrible thing in and of itself. What's truly bad about it is that it's written by a fifty or so year old man who is clearly even more clueless about the lives of post-adolescent girls than I am. Greg: stop being so creepy. Write what you know.
Oh, and does it upset anybody else that the creator of One Big Happy apparently believe it's funny when Ruthie or Joe misunderstands a word? I mean, Oscar Wilde was a funny man, but man oh man - a small child using a word incorrectly in a sentence while practising for a spelling test? Whew!
When I've got more time, I plan on coducting a research project to determine exactly when For Better of For Worse started replacing punchlines with sap. Because I was going through some old strips - like, fifteen years old - and they were actually funny. Not sidesplittingly funny, mind you, but more Baby Blues than Rex Morgan, M.D. Now? I can hardly read the damned thing without having a great urge to bat my uvula around with my index finger.
Still, though, I have to admit that our home's champion of comic-hating is my sister, for the absolutely visceral hatred she aims at Hi and Lois. I don't want to draw crude comparisons, but there are Catholic Bishops who hate gays less than Heather hates this strip. She wants Trixie to experience SIDS.
My point in bringing this up was going to be our amazement that yesterday's Hi and Lois strip featured some pretty blatant sexual innuendo, which shows some promising new directions for the strip. However, that point no longer seems relevant, so we'll end this.
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In my house, we take the comics pretty seriously, and I don't mean in the way that we take, for example, Survivor seriously. We love Survivor. We love some comics, too, but those aren't the ones we take seriously. The comics we take seriously are the ones that we hate.
For example, I've got some pretty serious hostility towards Sally Forth. Not because it's not funny - that I can live with. Plenty of comics aren't funny, and most of them don't keep me awake nights feeling the kind of hostility that Sally Forth does. It's also not the fact that, as my mother is fond of pointing out, Hilary looks like an adult male with a growth defect and pigtails - certainly more masculine than Ted. No, what pisses me off about Sally Forth is that all characters are always smiling. Always. This is especially obnoxious during punchlines, when the characters appear so repulsively self-satisfied with what they apparently believe to be clever remarks. I don't know how many of you poor souls read it, but remember the recent storyline where Ralph got fired? Did it strike anybody else as odd that everybody was smiling for that entire episode? I'm hoping that a future storyline will feature Sally falling into an operating rock tumbler (smiling, natch). I hate you, Sally Forth: please die.
We're also none too fond of Luann, which is a soap opea-ish comic about a post-adolescent girl. Again, this is not a terrible thing in and of itself. What's truly bad about it is that it's written by a fifty or so year old man who is clearly even more clueless about the lives of post-adolescent girls than I am. Greg: stop being so creepy. Write what you know.
Oh, and does it upset anybody else that the creator of One Big Happy apparently believe it's funny when Ruthie or Joe misunderstands a word? I mean, Oscar Wilde was a funny man, but man oh man - a small child using a word incorrectly in a sentence while practising for a spelling test? Whew!
When I've got more time, I plan on coducting a research project to determine exactly when For Better of For Worse started replacing punchlines with sap. Because I was going through some old strips - like, fifteen years old - and they were actually funny. Not sidesplittingly funny, mind you, but more Baby Blues than Rex Morgan, M.D. Now? I can hardly read the damned thing without having a great urge to bat my uvula around with my index finger.
Still, though, I have to admit that our home's champion of comic-hating is my sister, for the absolutely visceral hatred she aims at Hi and Lois. I don't want to draw crude comparisons, but there are Catholic Bishops who hate gays less than Heather hates this strip. She wants Trixie to experience SIDS.
My point in bringing this up was going to be our amazement that yesterday's Hi and Lois strip featured some pretty blatant sexual innuendo, which shows some promising new directions for the strip. However, that point no longer seems relevant, so we'll end this.
