CSotD: All the news that’s fit to draw
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It's not remarkable to find politics in a political strip, and Prickly City is a political strip, one of a couple of attempts to find a responsible opposing voice to Doonesbury.
Which quest has posed two major problems: One is the assumption that Doonesbury invariably presents the "liberal" point of view, and I put "liberal" in "quotation marks" because it's a word that has "lost" all "meaning" in the hands of "partisan hacks."
The other problem is that conservative True Believers — the ones who remember when Trudeau gored their ox but not when he was going after anyone else — are humorless twits. This makes it difficult for them to appreciate a strip with any semblence of nuance or, y'know, jokes and stuff, and they tend to think that political criticism consists mainly of personal insults.
The result has generally been ghastly, humorless partisan diatribes like Mallard Fillmore and the now-cancelled State of the Union.
However, somehow somebody accidentally signed up Scott Stantis to do a conservative strip, and Stantis, who subsequently got the editorial page gig at the Chicago Tribune, created "Prickly City," which is conservative, nuanced and funny. Which is what makes this week's arc remarkable.
As part of Kevin the Lost Bunny of the Apocalypse's ongoing attempt to secure the Republican nomination, the gang is back from Guam (they lost) with Randy the Coconut Rhinoceros Beetle as their new ally.
Except that the government, under the mistaken impression that Guam is a foreign country — someone demanded to see his "long-form infestation certificate" — and under the correct impression that coconut rhinoceros beetles are potentially a harmful invasive species, is trying to wipe out the little fellow with a drone attack.
Assassination-by-drone has been the subject of critical cartoons by liberal artists, mostly at the edge of the spectrum. I haven't seen any conservatives going after it, despite having a Democrat holding the joystick these days.
Which makes me wonder if the people who repeatedly get their knickers in knots over Doonesbury are reading this and saying, "wait a minute … "
Okay, it doesn't make me wonder that at all. I'm quite sure they don't, and I'm equally sure it isn't because they feel good that Anwar Al-Awlaki bought the farm as the result of a drone strike.
It's just that they have more important current issues, critical matters of worldwide importance, on their minds.
(I would like to apologize to the people of South Africa, except that it's really not my fault that they know anything at all about this. However, somebody owes them an apology for this cultural hegemony run amok.)
What I found even more interesting in today's comics is how the political climate that created the drone issue has managed to ease its way into the non-political world of Judge Parker. In this well-crafted strip, the current arc is drawing to a close, and I was struck by the calm remark in the second panel.
April is a young woman with a background in intelligence work who was being stalked by a hired assassin. She eventually got the drop on the woman and all is well. Except for the would-be assassin, who has apparently disappeared into the bowels of the system, a fate that doesn't appear to strike anyone here as particularly remarkable:
In the fictional world of James Bond or Tom Clancy, that sort of shrug is expected. It's not something you expect to find on the funny pages, however, particularly since Fatima was revealed to be both an amateur and something of a stooge.
But, whatever she was, she's gone now.
*shrug*
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