Whirlydog!

Newspaper comic strips. I do like the good ones, and here in NZ we tend to only get the good ones; or at least the not-awful ones. The pages and pages of laugh-free strips I remember seeing in newspapers in the U.S. are unknown here; instead our newspapers invest their strip budget in a small number of reliably good strips. And also the Wizard of Id.
The Dom Post has been running classic Peanuts, and this year it has hit a bunch of strips I’ve never seen before, back when Snoopy was still 90% dog and several long-running gags were only just being set up. Really neat to see. Sparky was a delightful cartoonist.
And, while mentioning Schulz, I always appreciated that he thought highly of legendary local strip Footrot Flats. That’s also in reruns, and is currently approaching the end, when Murray Ball finally gave some of his characters closure – so there’s Wal getting married to Cheeky, and Cooch finally admitting his feelings for Kathy. Its an amazing strip, and worthy of high-quality collection one of these days.
But what’s been catching my attention this week is Doonesbury. Trudeau’s long-running political strip has hit a whole new level in the era of the second Gulf War. This week’s storyline has injured veteran B.D. (who had a leg blown off in Iraq a few years ago) encounter a fellow veteran – a woman who suffered sexual assault from her fellow soldiers while in Iraq.
This is pretty incendiary stuff. Sexual abuse of U.S. servicewomen serving in Iraq has been slowly coming into the mainstream discourse over the last few weeks, with the New York Times running a lengthy story on the subject on March 18. The article centred on Suzanne Swift, who suffered sexual abuse during her first tour in Iraq and went AWOL rather than return to more of the same. I’m not sure what the lead times are on Trudeau’s strip but I wouldn’t be surprised if the current storyline is a direct response to this article. In any case, keep an eye on developments in your local paper if it carries Doonesbury, or online at Slate if it doesn’t.
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It feels like all I’m doing at the moment in this blog is linking to stuff. (But that’s okay, because it’s cool stuff!) Tom’s first post at ProjectX about his Wellurban blog reminded me that I’m overdue for a bit of taking stock at what this blog is doing for me, and what I want to be doing for it. I’ll get to it. In the meantime, this counts as more linking to cool stuff – if you’re a blogger, check out that post at ProjectX for some food for thought about what you’re doing.
In other silly link news, check out the other Buffy season 8, and from the movie mash-up genre, A Hard Day’s Night Of The Living Dead…
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And be ready, for on Monday this year’s installment of the Birthday Wisdom quotathon will be upon you…