CSotD: Handy Andy
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When I interviewed Jan Eliot back in 2003 (it says "1993" there, but don't be fooled), she described Luci's only-slightly-older brother Max thusly: ""Max is almost like a pet … He's a little sprite, meant to be always clinging to Joan's leg, that little piece of chaos which is the reality of a mom's life. He's not a 'ball and chain' because I'd never be that negative about him, but he's part of the reality that, when you have a small child like that, everything has to center on him."
In the intervening years, Max has become slightly more aware of what's going on around him and determined to be part of it, while the baby, Luci, has been introduced in "Stone Soup" and, yeah, she's not quite a 'ball and chain' either, but she does require constant tending.
It could be worse, Andy old chum. At least you aren't facing the potential for a fountain you'd have had to deal with if you'd been around when Max was in diapers. As a young father, I discovered the solution to that was to peel back the diaper and expose the lad to the cool air, then replace the diaper while you rounded up your supplies.
But, as seen in today's strip, you do have to keep an eye out. The last grandkid I tried to change was the most resistant child I have ever dealt with. Not angry, just active. It was like trying to diaper a salmon, and I thought, the first time, that it was because he wasn't used to Grandpa, but, no, several changes later, he was just as wriggly and determined to resist.
And I used to say, back in the days of corded phones, that the way to teach the baby to roll over was to lay him on the couch and then get on the telephone with your mother-in-law. The flip-thud-scream sequence was inevitable.
(Now, there's a once comic-worthy dilemma that technology has eliminated — being tethered to the wall by conversation. The little salmon's mother called me a few nights ago and we talked for almost an hour and a half. By the end of a conversation that had begun in the livingroom, my kitchen was clean. Such multitasking is a function of technology, as is being able to scoop up the baby before it hits the floor while maintaining a semi-composed tone of voice.)
So anyway, here's this kid Andy who may be the only just plain "good kid" in the funny pages, or at least, the most three-dimensional and the one who is most integrated into the strip.
There are some well-behaved moppets who occasionally rear their heads in other strips, but usually only to react to something, not as genuine players in the drama, and Rex Morgan recently wrapped up a story arc that featured a high school kid he sometimes mentors, but Andy is genuinely part of the ensemble at Stone Soup, and he has a more active role than simply "the teenager."
A large part of the appeal of the strip is how it both portrays and models behavior. There are times when, yeah, you know she's making a point, but it's done in good faith and the characters don't break out of their normal roles, so it works pretty well.
Other times, it's as simple as this: The lead up has been that Luci's mother, Joan, is going about her work wearing headphones, which kept Andy from being able to hand off a stinky baby by simply complaining aloud. He would have had to get her attention and indicate the problem and, well, she wouldn't have even had to take off the headphones to give him a "Whaddaya telling me for?" shrug.
But we didn't see a strip where he went from kinda hoping to weasel out of it to actively seeking to shirk the job.We've all pretended not to notice a stinky diaper as we innocently handed off the baby, but there's a point at which you have to man up and …
… and that's a metamessage lurking behind today's gag.
Andy is not portrayed as the ideal kid. He's portrayed as a good kid, and there's a difference: He goofs off and he goofs up and he does all the things a real high school kid does, but he's not the stereotypical comic strip slacker. He's basically a good kid and he knows his role in a functioning household.
The girls are a little more locked into "funny brat" roles, which is in part because that's an appropriate way to portray tweens — rocketing back and forth from nice to insufferable without a lot of warning or cause — and because, given that they were part of the original cast, there has been a process of rounding out their characters as the strip found its feet.
By contrast, Andy was introduced once the strip was very well established. He's the nephew of Joan's husband, Wally, and is living with them because of unspecified issues with his parents, which was a good premise for introducing an older kid to the cast, while Eliot's well-developed grasp of her craft by that stage meant that he was able to hit the ground running.
I recently read about a study showing that portrayal of alcohol in movies has an impact on young people's drinking behavior, and then New Hampshire Public Radio interviewed one of the researchers last night.
Among the things he noted was that, as the alcohol companies pay for product placement, moviemakers try to work brand-name alcoholic beverages into their scripts, so that even a movie that isn't "about" drinking may feature it more prominently than it might have otherwise.
Well, Stone Soup is not a comic strip about how kids ought to behave, lord knows, and today's edition is not a sermonette on the topic of how real men change diapers or how high school kids should take a responsible role in their families.
It's a gag about how little babies flip around on the changing table. And it's pretty funny.
And if it has any impact beyond that, well, so much the better. Little drops of water can wash away boulders.
Oh, and, Andy? Nice catch, man!
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