CSotD: Kissing for Fun
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If you aren't already reading "The Heart of Juliet Jones" over at Comics Kingdom, this would be a good time to jump aboard.
The main reason to read the strip, of course, is not to actually "read" it, but to enjoy Stan Drake's artwork. However, the stories are not bad and much of the appeal of his art is how he captures emotions and reactions, particularly in the main characters with whom he had apparently become most familiar and comfortable.
You can certainly see that in today's (Feb 8, 1957) strip, in which the world-famous best-selling author who has only been in the strip for about two weeks is somewhat wooden while Eve is mobile and fresh and far more expressive.
That's not a blanket condemnation of Drake's minor characters: The mysterious bohemian type who found Eve the job at the literary agency in the first place is far more lifelike than the author. But even he can't flow from the pen the way Juliet and Eve and Pops do.
In any case, that's not why I asked you here today.
There's no bad reason to follow an arc in which Eve has the lead role. Even as a sprat too young to know what was going on in the strip, I wasn't too young to know that Eve was, well, rather hot.
And I suppose that it's a little creepy to call her a "teenager" and note her hotness at the same time, but let's start there: The fact that Eve is out in the world and has a full-time job as a typist at a literary agency is an indication that there was a time when "teenager" stretched right up to …
Well, let's insert the video here as an interlude rather than a wrap-up at the end:
Boone's trademark "white bucks" did not refer to young men with dubious intentions and the above tune was matched by a best-selling book of the same title in which Pat Boone handed out advice to teenagers.
I can't sum it up any better than this. If nothing else, you'll need to click on that link to find out where I got today's headline. But it's worth it.
And I can't wait to see what Grady Worlock learns about teens from following Eve around, but here's a serious point: It's not just that older girls like Eve were still considered "teenagers." It's that seven-year-olds were not.
There's something to be said for a time when kids were allowed to be kids.
Still, we can chuckle, as long as we don't go full-skeptic-wiseass about it. There has often been some timeless wisdom in even the most old-fashioned advice.
There's a modern/retro twist making the rounds: "Popular: Vintage Wisdom for a Modern Geek," a memoir in which 15-year-old Maya van Wagenen reports on her year attempting to live by the advice found in the 1950s book of advice, "Betty Cornell's Teenage Popularity Guide," which has been reissued for anyone who wants to also give it a shot.
Or you could go with this 2014 tome, "Being a Teen: Everything Teen Girls & Boys Should Know About Relationships, Sex, Love, Health, Identity & More," by Jane Fonda, who is 76 but is able to give advice to today's teenagers because she has kids who are only 46 and 41, so she understands today's young people, and also because she has never in her entire life accepted any opportunity, however large or small, to STFU.
Which I will now do.
In a minute.
Meanwhile, back in the classroom:
Luann really is moving rapidly towards closure on her teenage years, having just gone through senior prom and now seen in that lovely last week or so of classes.
I remember my last class senior year, mostly the fact that our classroom clocks had no second hands but did have the kind of minute hands that jumped forward a click at a time, so you weren't sure exactly when deliverance would come until it suddenly did.
The instant that final bell finally rang could not have been any better if Chris Kraft had counted it down over the intercom.
And, yes, we had wised up to all our teachers, most of whom were as delighted to see us graduate as we were to be going.
The class before us had been a remarkably compliant group of good students, but we were smart jocks and not only had we, yes, picked up on all our teachers' quirks, but we'd perfected all the end-run strategies for dealing with each one of them.
An uncharacteristically harmless example: My social studies workbook was almost entirely filled out with satire and joke answers, based on the certain knowledge that our very burned-out teacher would continue his policy of walking down the aisles to see that we had each filled in the blanks and would never, ever pause to read a single word. And I can show you the diploma that proves me right.
Which is to say, the class before us had been Dobie Gillis and Thalia Menninger and Wally Cleaver. We were Maynard G. Krebs and Zelda Gilroy and Eddie Haskell.
If the school door hit us on the backside, it was only because they were slamming and locking it.
In any case, if you haven't been reading Luann recently, give it another shot. It's been much rebuilt in recent years and this next chapter will prove interesting.
Smells like teen spirit …
… or something else entirely
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