Saturday, November 15, 2008

The Middle Ages Go On and On...

Look, boys and girls: we are laughing at Irma Thurston again today! Isn't this fun? Irma is a downtrodden hausfrau with a self-centred ass for a husband, and we snicker at her plight because only an incredibly stupid woman (the womens...the womens...so brainless are they) could have got herself into such a situation. Today, we laugh harder than usual at Irma because it appears Thirsty actually indicated in their prenuptial agreement that he was going to be a sexist bastard...and she married him anyway. Why laugh at Thirsty? A man has a right to be a jerk. It's the woman idiotic enough to marry him who is deserving of our ridicule.

Oh, Hi and Lois...you out-medieval the Middle Ages. You don't do it by being side-splittingly hilarious, a la Chaucer, or by meshing complex and layered theological implications with secular frames, a la my good friend Anonymous, or by contracting the plague, a la far too large a percentage of the population of Europe. You do it by pretending to be progressive--Lois Flagston has an actual job, after all--while actually putting the uppity women in their place. Your pretence at mocking Thirsty while you have a go at Irma would identify you as satire if you were not too moronic to be satirical. Instead, you're simply mean-spirited and petty. Way to go, Hi and Lois. Propel those women all the way back to the late thirteen hundreds...where they belong.

Someday...somehow...someone will publish a comic strip featuring a female protagonist who does not spend ninety percent of her time kowtowing to men, never complains about her weight or attempts to purchase a bikini, and is neither impossibly hot and thus created to be drooled over nor impossibly ugly and thus created to be laughed at. She will not be The Condescendingly Wise Girlfriend. She will not be The Unattainable Bombshell. She will not provoke knee-slapping guffaws as she slaves for her delightfully lazy husband. She will be a real person with real feelings and motivations. I am expecting her to turn up whenever the Middle Ages are over.

That should be any century now, really.*



*I live in hope.

4 comments:

Brian said...

Or should that be "Ich liue yn hope"? And don't we all? I made this far into this century on little more than hope....

john said...

Someday...somehow...someone will publish a comic strip featuring a female protagonist who does not spend ninety percent of her time kowtowing to men, never complains about her weight or attempts to purchase a bikini, and is neither impossibly hot and thus created to be drooled over nor impossibly ugly and thus created to be laughed at. She will not be The Condescendingly Wise Girlfriend. She will not be The Unattainable Bombshell. She will not provoke knee-slapping guffaws as she slaves for her delightfully lazy husband. She will be a real person with real feelings and motivations.

If my comic-scribbling efforts ever get off the ground, this is one of the things I'm totally going to try for. I just don't know if I'll ever get anywhere with it...

Angry Kem said...

John: I've tried for this as well, but in a webcomic, not in a newspaper strip. Interestingly, webcomics actually have a similar problem...not because they're stuck in the past but because certain webtoonists have found that the easiest way to attract readers is to draw big-breasted women who are always losing their clothing for various hilarious reasons. It's as if the assumption is that every potential webcomic reader out there is a fourteen-year-old boy.

I really hate this assumption, but my lifelong struggle against it sometimes feels rather like punching a lake and has similar results: it leaves absolutely no impression, and I end up covered in pond scum.

InsertMonikerHere said...

I rather like the webcomic Thorn

http://www.mimisgrotto.com/thorn/

the protagonist is an elementary-school age girl who is an aspiring world dictator in the 1950s.

word-verification amusement: "pookish". Sounds like a perfectly cromulent word to me :-)