CSotD: The Explainers
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"The Explainers" was (and is) a classic collection by Jules Feiffer that featured multi-panelled cartoons of suburbanites endlessly explaining themselves. There is a fair dose of that in "Between Friends" on a regular basis, except that Sandra Bell-Lundy is much more direct in letting out the hot air in all these explanations.
I suspect — which means I haven't really looked into it and don't intend to make much of an effort in that direction — that the emergence of women in cartooning has greatly increased this kind of humor. If you look at women's magazines, they are full of ways you can alter who you are to become who you want to be, and men's magazines that have tried that formula invariably fail, because men don't see the world in terms of who they are but rather what they do, or what they have.
To put it in a more obvious context, compare the amount of introspection in a Bruce Willis or Steven Seagal movie with that in, say, "Fried Green Tomatoes." Yes, you can sell Bowflex machines to men, but it's much easier to sell them widescreen TVs and Barcaloungers, because they aren't all that obsessed with becoming the types of men they admire. Vicarious existence is just fine, thanks, and the male sense of guilt is not easy to tap into.
I don't know if Jules Feiffer's work actively inspired any of these women, or if it perhaps influenced the editors at syndicates so that, when they saw strips that were largely explaining people's choices, they laughed and were willing to give them a shot. Perhaps it was a combination. In any case, you don't have to go to the Village Voice or the New Yorker for introspective humor anymore, and, meanwhile, the former is barely a shell of its former self and the latter is buying a lot more cartoons from women.
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