More on Get Fuzzy and Doonesbury.

Two takes on the same scenario: GI loses leg. In Get Fuzzy, Willie is brought in as a tragic figure, but it's hard to relate to him. I don't remember him from the strip so he seems to have been introduced just to make a point. Really, he's just another GI back from Iraq, albeit missing a limb. The whole scenario is awkward.

BD, on the other hand, is a familiar face and you don't expect a regular comic character to lose a limb or have some other tragedy befall him. Imagine jughead dead of AIDS. The Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday strips were humourless glimpses of the aftermath of whatever hit BD. The doctors glib remark in Thursdays strip, the first cynical barb of the week, came as a welcome reminder that life goes on.

It is still too early to say, but I would imagine these two strips will be making pretty much the same point: Support the troops, don't support the war. A small part of me wonders if there is collusion between the two authors. That the authors of both of these strips set out to communicate the same message at the same time is extraordinary. In the absence of any proof of collusion, these two strips speak volumes about the American public's growing discontent with the war in Iraq and makes it clear that this discontent is wide ranging, present in all manners of public discourse including comics.

In a sense, each strip represents part of the dichotomy of tragedy. It is wishful thinking that bad things only happen to other people (Willie) and the sad truth that bad things can happen to anyone (BD).

I guess they aren't the funny pages anymore

The New York Times has this to say.   posted by jmd ¶ Friday, April 23, 2004 0 comments

 

Two comics I regularly check out, Get Fuzzy and doonesbury, are each dealing with a character who has lost a leg in Iraq.

The Iraq war will likely be remembered as the maiming war. There are a lot of soldiers back from Iraq that are missing limbs. They don't get talked about the way that dead soldiers do. The numbers are tallied only in passing and so far no number has stood out as a benchmark. Is there a tipping point for the maimed? The dead get measured against conflicts past and present, the latter already waged long enough to have established benchmarks of its own. At some point public opinion will tip the other way. Who will measure the maimed?

  posted by jmd ¶ Thursday, April 22, 2004 0 comments

 

thoughts on thoughts on thoughts  posted by jmd ¶ Tuesday, April 20, 2004 0 comments