CSotD: The anti-Blondie
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A landmark moment in one of my favorite strips, as Marla, the beleagured assistant manager in "Retail," gets married.
Retail has always maintained a level of reality that makes its occasional moments of whimsy that much more ridiculous. Its hallmark is the undercurrent of fury that creator Norm Feuti clearly carries for the combination of exploitation and blind stupidity that mark management decisions in the retail industry, and, having worked in newspapers for several years, it's a combination I well recognize, which may be why I enjoy the strip so much.
These are not the formulaic "stupid boss" jokes we've come to expect, and my son, who put in his time at the mall, said he found Norm's scathing takedown of the business, "Pretending You Care: The Retail Employee's Handbook," as painful to read as it was funny. For my part, I have an almost limitless appetite for analysis of bad decisions, especially when delivered with a side order of mordant, well-deserved derision.
It's not a new form of humor in the comics — Doonesbury has been doing it for years, though on a more global scale. While Trudeau is raging against impending global destruction, Feuti is banging his head on the counter over the soul-killing minutiae of daily life. In both cases, there is an implicit bond with the reader of "Are we really the only ones who can see this?" and the resulting humor is not fall-on-the-floor giggling but rather the kind of frustrated, head-shaking chuckle that is an alternative to, and not far from, tears of rage.
So it's appropriate, as Marla gets married, that there is no joke today. In fact, while stupid decisions continue to rule the day back at Grumbel's Department Store, we've seen Marla and Scott make some very sensible choices about their wedding, starting with the fact that it is very small because they decided to spend the money they had saved towards it instead on opening Marla's new store and getting her out from under Grumbel's mismanagement.
This isn't the first time we've seen characters in a comic strip get married, and it's not even the only marriage going on this Sunday that involves major characters: Over in Piranha Club, Ernie is also being wed. Piranha Club is another favorite of mine, but the shift over there is of a completely different flavor and the wedding has been as full of gags as the strip always is.
This wedding is different. This is a seismic shift in a strip that has some other changes ahead, too, according to what Norm Feuti told me in Boston a few weeks ago, and I suspect the fact that Val and Cooper are holding hands in the audience is only the tip of an iceberg.
It's enough of a change for now that the wedding is part of a flow in Marla's life that is removing her from a source of constant irritation rather than plunging her deeper into the same old tarpit. The character of Scott is a bit undeveloped at this stage, but it's clear that we are not going to find ourselves in a morass of socks-on-the-floor and slacker-on-the-couch marital humor: He is being brought in as support, not another irritant.
Which is a very specific way in which Retail retains its identity as the anti-Blondie of the comics pages, given that, when Dagwood Bumstead and Blondie Boop-a-Doop wed back in 1933, their ill-favored marriage was the mechanism that got the young playboy disinherited and ultimately brought him under the bullying thumb of JC Dithers.
I don't know where Retail is headed, but it's certainly worth hitching along for the ride.
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