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Why do you read this thread anyway? This poll is closed. |
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|---|---|---|---|
| I enjoy reading contemporary newspaper comics. |
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64 | 26.02% |
| I hate reading contemporary newspaper comics. |
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42 | 17.07% |
| I enjoy reading historical newspaper comics. |
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88 | 35.77% |
| I enjoy reading newspaper comics from foreign countries. |
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52 | 21.14% |
| Total: | 246 votes | ||
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I also think it was quite common to have nice leatherbound editions of Goethe's work in quite a few volumes. The thing is that unlike Shakespeare who really just wrote a bunch of plays and a healthy handful of poems, Goethe wrote A LOT OF STUFF and a lot of it is fairly dry if you're just a middle-class family trying to class up your home library a bit-- scientific inquiries, bureaucratic papers, travel journals, etc..-- there's a LOT and most of it probably sat on living room shelves untouched. Back when I had first graduated college I was really trying to master my reading German and was doing a lot of translations of German poets and novelists, and I had a close friendship with these two guys in my city who ran a small but very eclectic bookstore that had a side thing with rare/antiquarian books. They did a lot of buying from estate sales and auctions and of course some stuff you can plan on selling and some stuff you can't, so they would occasionally just give me like a big cardboard box full of German books they had no real use for. So I wound up with like-- three different editions of all of that Goethe and even as someone who really likes Goethe, it really did just eat up a poo poo ton of shelf space. So I think the joke here is in part also that Goetheswerk was a very common thing to own and a rather less common thing to actually comprehensively read. Also, I had a hell of a 2021 and due to many reasons was just not able to keep up with Dykes to Watch Out For. I had health issues, and moved into a very fixer-upper house, and sadly in the scuffle I still have no idea where a bunch of my Bechdel is (incidentally I did hold on to all of my Goethe but it is...also trapped in a mystery box somewhere in the basement or attic). But when I find them, I really would like to get back into posting them?
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Jan 1, 2022 21:44
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Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel, #143 (1992)  Since it's been awhile: Lois, Sparrow, and Ginger are three lesbians who I guess at this point are in their late 20s who live together, and are all nominally friends with the strip's main character, Mo (although by 1992 I feel like we're already in the midst of a pivot to more of an ensemble thing). Lois, the short-haired character with blonde hair, is kind of the punk of the group although that gets toned down as she kind of ages out of punk. Sparrow, the Asian woman with the pointy bob, begins as the New Age-y one but gradually Bechdel phases her out of that role too as "the New Age-y one" [temporarily] fades as a major lesbian signifier. Ginger, the black woman who meanders in halfway through the first page, is a grad student, and, in a stroke of bleak realism, remains a grad student for like a decade worth of strips. She's in a long distance relationship which had been somewhat recently established at this point. Toni and Clarice are a long-term couple (this strip was made well before the legalization of gay marriage) trying to have a kid, a long-running subplot which structures a lot of the early 90s strips. They're markedly more affluent than Mo, who works at a struggling bookstore, and the Lois/Sparrow/Ginger triad, and over the years Bechdel does a lot with the shifting economic signifiers of lesbians as the years go on (Clarice is a lawyer, Toni is an accountant, and in general they're shown to be more interested in respectability and assimilation than the rest of the cast-- something Bechdel tackles with a characteristic degree of nuance). Not too many historical notes on this one! Bechdel is just keeping the plot wheels spinning and letting her cartooning carry the punchlines.
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Jan 2, 2022 18:03
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Dykes to Watch Out For #144, Alison Bechdel (1992)  Mo broke up with her live-in girlfriend Harriet a few strips ago, or, uh, early 2021 in BSS time. This was over a number of things but it basically played into where Bechdel is at overall at this point in the strip in general and this strip in particular, which is that the characters she introduced as furious and radical lesbians in their early twenties are all careening into their thirties and having to figure out what that means. Mo is the last hold-out of a lot of the original characterization of the cast-- vegan, fiercely anti-establishment, a bit of a Luddite and a Puritan especially compared to the very sex-positive Lois. So as we enter the 90s she is more frequently played as kind of a fuddy duddy. If you are younger, or very straight, you might be raising an eyebrow at the idea of sex clubs in 1992, at the height of the AIDS crisis. Well, life finds a way, and in many places "a way" equaled ACT UP members handing out safe sex kits at clubs or people finding comparatively safe ways to have sex at the clubs. Check out Jeremy Atherton Lin's 2021 study Gay Bar: Why We Went Out for a deeper look at the history of gay nightlife. Here's a fun and informative interview with San Francisco Sentinel photographer Melissa Hawkins about that era. Mo is listening to k.d. lang's album Ingenue, specifically the ninth track, "Tears of Love's Recall." Ingenue released on March 13th so we have a bit of a pin there for making a guess at roughly when this strip was drawn. lang came out as a lesbian in a June,1992 interview in The Advocate, the oldest and biggest queer periodical in the US-- I dunno if this strip predates that actual public milestone, but from what I've gathered talking to older queer people it was not exactly a shock within the community. Basically Ingenue is an extremely Mo album to sit around listening to in a mope. Anyway here's "Tears of Love's Recall" for any unfortunate goons who are going through it Mo-style:
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Jan 3, 2022 18:50
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Dykes to Watch Out For #145, Alison Bechdel (1992)  Occasionally Bechdel does these strips where the characters break, uh... character and interact like they're actors in the story or even collaborators in the plot, in tense labor disputes with Bechdel. It's a cute gag and allows Bechdel a bit of room for cynicism and snark in a comic rather stuffed, after all, with very idealistic and pretty earnest characters in some ways. Since it has been awhile, I'll reintroduce some of the players: -The short-haired woman in the bottom row of page one is Yoshi, one of Ginger's students, who is having a fling with Lois. -The woman with the headband is Jezanna, the owner of the bookstore some of the characters work at. -The woman with the short unruly blonde hair on page two is Harriet, Mo's aforementioned ex. -The woman with long hair and glasses is Thea, another employee at the bookstore. She has MS and there's a subplot about Mo having a crush on her. - I have no idea who the woman talking about Passover is which I guess is the joke. The trans joke makes me cringe but 1992 was a foreign country. There's a recurring pattern in DTWOF in which an issue or identity comes to increased prominence in the lesbian world, Bechdel initially maybe fumbles her handling of the issue, but then gradually brings a more nuanced approach presumably as she educates herself about the subject. We'll see this take place with bisexuality and we'll (eventually) see it take place with trans and genderqueer characters too, and by the late 90s Bechdel will have shifted from being kind of the unofficial cartoonist-in-residence of the Michigan Womyn's Festival to a vocal critic of its trans-exclusionary policies. This was definitely not an unusual trajectory by any means. As we can see here, Bechdel is pretty self-aware about writing as a more or less able-bodied white lady, and the temptation to flatten or tokenize characters from other subject positions. And to be sure Thea at this point has not been that engaging of a character, as one of many in what's by now a pretty big ensemble cast. But she'll continue working on that too.
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Jan 4, 2022 18:45
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Dykes to Watch Out For #146 (1992), by Alison Bechdel  They're of course talking about the 1992 US presidential election, between Bill Clinton and incumbent George H.W. Bush, and a number of third party candidates including Ross Perot and yes, Joan Jett Blakk was a performer, comedian, and drag queen who ran under the slogan "Lick Bush in '92" largely as a way of playfully drawing attention to Bush' dismal record on LGBTQ+ issues and the AIDS crisis. Here's a short video documentary from 1992 about Blakk and the Queer Nation Party's whole deal. I don't know what's up with Yoshi's "Gay Girls Make Me Wet" shirt. Many of the shirts people in this strip wear are either gags, or real shirts that one can see in photos of contemporaneous queer culture, but this one is new to me and googling it just led me to a lot of people asking searching questions about themselves. I could be wrong but I think the Grosse Pointe Gazette and the Topeka Lesbian Tribune are made up newspapers. I'd love to be corrected though.
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Jan 6, 2022 20:39
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He posted once or twice on the discord I believe, very early on when it was unclear if SA would stick around.
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Jan 7, 2022 17:30
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Slammy posted:
Four brilliant avs, ripe for the taking...
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Jan 8, 2022 04:24
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Dykes to Watch Out For #147 (1992), by Alison Bechdel  Skimping on the notes today because I got home late and I'm tired, but I think Mo is full of poo poo here. I dunno if that many goons are actually young enough to need to hear this, but 30 is nothing. In the handful of years since I turned 30 I've grown and changed in ways that I never could've in my twenties, and I'm happier and healthier than I've ever been. So Mo, go sit on an egg. The name of the bagel shop changes between pages but if there's a joke there I don't get it.
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Jan 8, 2022 04:58
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Jan 9, 2022 16:19
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Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message "lol Wilbur Dead," Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
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Jan 9, 2022 20:45
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I AM GRANDO posted:Has Mary Worth ever killed off a regular character before? I feel like Wilbur has been there since the 70s. How quickly we forget Aldo Kelrast
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Jan 9, 2022 23:25
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8/28/2012
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Jan 9, 2022 23:33
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I have never worked a true graveyard shift, but between college and grad school I worked an arts admin job that meant I had to be at work until usually 9:00 or 10:00 every night. At that age it killed me to not be able to go out and socialize in the evenings, and to get out of work and not have anywhere open to go (this was a college town in Maine so even the grocery closed at like 9:30), especially since wife (gf at the time) worked a 9-5 at the same university and would usually only be awake for an hour or two after I got out of work and walked home.
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Jan 11, 2022 05:04
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Dykes to Watch Out For #142 (1992), by Alison Bechdel  This strip takes place in a halcyon era when your friends could visit you when you were sick. Lois has brought over a few tapes: -The Virgin Machine is a 1988 lesbian drama by director Monika Treut, one of the few women to rise to prominence in the New German Cinema. It's about a German scholar who goes to California to study the ways of lesbian. -Sammy and Rosie Get Laid is a 1987 movie directed by Stephen Frears of My Beautiful Launderette fame. It has sex scenes in it-- I think the thread here is that Lois is giving Mo artsy movies with tits in 'em. Which is a fun character beat--- surely Lois has plenty of actual porn to spare, but she'd like her classy friend Mo to have a high culture time if she's going to be sniffling and looking at nude people. -Lair of the White Worm is a 1988 horror movie by the British provocateur Kenneth Russell. In 2022 I imagine she'd bring over the infinitely smuttier The Devils. I imagine she chose this one because Amanda Donahue is kind of an evil snake dominatrix in it who iirc has sex with a demon. Or who knows. Maybe Mo is a big fan of Peter Capaldi. -How to Female Ejaculate might be an actual documentary or video guide from the time but it might also just be a gag.
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Jan 11, 2022 21:10
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That's true, and it's too bad Mo didn't have a VCR because the thought of her processing Kenneth Russel with a cold is very funny.
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Jan 12, 2022 01:04
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Strontium posted:Intelligent Life "Cable from Deadpool"
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Jan 14, 2022 22:04
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A double dose of Dykes to Watch Out For for being incommunicado this past week. #149 and #150, both from 1992, both by Alison Bechdel.   Mo definitely knows who Clarice is, she's just being miserable on purpose. People huffing and rolling their eyes at bisexuals was also definitely a real thing in queer circles in the early 90s and in fact continued to be a thing well into the aughts and beyond, although obviously not to the extent that we see here. The actual term "LGBT" (without the plus or any other letters) debuted in the late 80s and begins to show up in conference minutes and activist literature around 1988. The 1993 March on Washington took place in April and boasted between 800,000 and 1,000,000 participants, building off of the success of the 1987 march to draw attention to ongoing queer issues such as the continued failure of the federal government to address the AIDS crisis and various laws enforcing hiring discrimination against LGBTQ+ Americans, as well as a rising tide of homophobic hate crimes. Here's a list of the march's primary agenda: quote:We demand passage of a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender civil rights bill and an end to discrimination by state and federal governments including the military; repeal of all sodomy laws and other laws that criminalize private sexual expression between consenting adults. You may notice the absence of the T in the flyer's "LGB"-- this isn't an oversight on Bechdel's part but a reflection of the March's planning committee; the inclusion of transgender people in official statements about the march as well as the event's formal title was proposed for the first time but did not get a 2/3 majority of votes. Next up-- a big can of worms I don't feel like getting into!   Bill Clinton won the 1992 presidential election, defeating George H.W. Bush and a host of third party candidates. He was indeed widely seen as an anti-right golden boy for the 90s, in a very uh, Thomas Friedman kind of way, because the early 90s were a huge froth of post-glasnost liberal enthusiasm in a lot of ways. He played saxophone on Arsenio Hall, and seemed to have spoken to a black person ever, so for a lot of moderate Democrats and even, as we see here, optimistic progressives, his victory seemed to herald a promising turning point for a country still meandering out from under the shadow of Reagan and the increasingly visible LGBTQ+ community. As we might know in 2022, Mo's reservations are not exactly her normal apocalyptic griping either. Don't ask me, I was six when this all went down.
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Jan 19, 2022 19:58
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I really love both Ethan Frome and The Scarlet Letter, I like that New England turmoil so much. Why even living in New England now, I'm constantly on the prowl for turmoil. A regular Mo.
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Jan 22, 2022 03:00
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I grew up in what I guess you'd call "rustic suburbs" and when I started driving I found it very, very easy to get lost, just because everything not on the interstate was a big tangle of backroads with similar names, and trees, and very samey looking historical sites, and Wawas. I remember at one point, when I was 17, being unsure of which of two people I should date, and finally making my decision based on "well, I can get to HER house by just getting to where the river is and going right until the Wawa, and then just hanging a left at blah blah blah [...]" Thankfully I got a GPS for the holidays before leaving for college, but that first year and a half or so was rocky and I think this FOOB arc is actually kinda relatable.
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Jan 22, 2022 17:10
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