April 26, 2018
I will take an essay off from the madness that is Trump: I feel a reckoning coming…and I also miss Aaron MacGruder\’s Boondocks — the most savagely correct comic strip I have ever read…
Having tired of Blondie\’s outdated (and now naive) commentary of work, marriage and family; and finding Dilbert becoming a bit repetitive and vacuous; and Candorville a very on-and-off-again socio-political commentary; and Pearls Before Swine a bit self-absorbed; and Doonesbury just rehashing the old stuff with the occasional Sunday gem; and La Cucaracha sometimes making an ethnocentric point that I can\’t quite grasp; and Prickly City mired in a directionless malaise; and Peanuts — not cutting it for me anymore — I started looking over other strips while sitting in Churchill\’s library — to see if any other comic artist had something relevant to say.
Lio and Bizarro appear too LSD-influenced for me to give them but a passing thought!
I still like Non Sequitur — which seems to have the requisite time and thought put into it by creator, Wiley Miller. And awhile back — I discovered Tundra — which also has a few gems every-now-and-then. And then, since I was sampling everything, I decided to have a look at 9 Chickweed Lane.
The first strip I looked at could only be construed as soft porn, or should I say cartoon porn? I\’m not sure how to characterize the sex the characters have — suffice to say — they have sex in the cartoon. No body parts are shown…just suggestive posturing and rather explicit dialog.
Being a bit titillated by this cartoon — that has hovered in my right eye periphery since 1993 — I wondered: was this \”cartoon sex\” the standard fare of this comic?
I have yet to perform a systematic content analysis — but it seems that the subject of sex in many of its manifestations: foreplay; oral sex; a quickie and-so-on — are recurring subjects.
My hat is off to Brooke McEldowny at being able to fly under the censors\’ radar for so long. I\’m also impressed by her sexual empowerment of her female characters — particularly the one who plays piano. These are not MeToo girls — these are girls who make sure they get their sexual thrills with willing and eminently satisfied males. I gather there are gay characters as well — but I haven\’t seen them in action yet.
In the 4/19 episode — the aformentioned blonde pianist grabs a quickie with her cellist (her husband?) after their performance; and, before going out for an encore. The male cellist bemoans the fact that the encore is musical intercourse instead of sexual.
But they manage to get it on again when they get home — as evidenced in the 4/20 strip. The 4/21 strip had the dog and cat mimicking the sounds of orgasm — with the dog howling to a lower \”C\” than the cat. If I still understand my musical nomenclature — the cat was screaming a sustained \”C\” in the final frame.
Then another couple was introduced (the blonde\’s sister?). They were told to get a room — which they did — and in the next day\’s fare they apparently had had a jolly good thrash!
Brooke McEldowny seems to be the female Hawthorne for our times — as she skirts under that aforementioned moral radar with the greatest of ease.
Not everything seems to be sexual, however — some episodes appear to be LSD-inspired — with images and verbage that don\’t give me a connection to an empirical reality that I have visited…
You can keep your hat on Brooke!