CSotD: Where bliss abides
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For any strips with families, and certainly for any that feature kids in starring roles, back-to-school cartoons are one of those tiresome annual required arcs, most of which can be safely ignored, except that then you'd miss a headspinner like today's Agnes.
Much of what makes this work is that it uses the concept of back-to-school without getting tangled up in the mandatory gags. There's a huge difference between acknowledging that kids are going back to school and getting into stereotype-lockstep with those insulting Staples commercials (which I haven't seen in a while, thank goodness) in which children are depressed over the prospect of returning to the classroom while parents celebrating getting rid of the brats.
I won't pretend this is a "poll," but we asked the kids who visit a web site I work with how they felt about back to school. Ten percent chose "My life is over" and another 27 percent picked "Living for the Weekend," but the rest were split between "Summer can be kind of boring" and "There's homework but I'll have plenty of free time." And that seems about right to me.
For my part, I didn't like class all that much as a kid, but I liked being back at school where my friends were, while, when I became a parent, I missed having the kids around after they went back to school. The cliches didn't hold at either end.
But none of this pontificating and projecting has much bearing on Agnes, whose existence is so surreal as to start off the chart and go in random directions from there.
I think I feel about Agnes the way other people feel about "Zippy the Pinhead" or "Hark! A Vagrant!" neither of which I quite get. That is, I understand what they're saying, I catch the references, but it doesn't resonate for me, and they are all strips where, if it doesn't resonate, it ain't happenin', but, if it does, it's as blissful as an abode with Plumtree's Potted Meat.
What the three strips have in common is that they feature references that, much of the time, are amusing enough to be pleasurable but then, more often than chance would dictate, offer up a nugget that is fabulous.
I suspect, however, that it is a rare person who finds equal fabulosity in the gems of each of those three strips. Not a value judgment, simply an observation.
In this case, the gem is the "well, of course" epiphany that these little girls, insightful as they are in their own universe, are utterly indifferent to the pop culture references of another generation, even one that has barely reached maturity itself.
Not "hostile" to them, and not even engaged enough to be "puzzled" by them, but, rather, completely untouched and indifferent to them.
Trout is only mildly curious about sorting out which of the loveable mop-tops was Bailey. It does not matter to her in the least, except maybe as a sort of $100-level Jeopardy question. I give Agnes credit for even knowing who the "Power Rangers" were, except that it's likely that the lunchbox — excuse me, the "lunch loader" — has the words "Power Rangers" written on it.
And I have always adored the way Agnes and Trout accept the economic limits of their world. It reminds me of a story my grandfather told of being a young fellow not much older than these two, and lying on his back in the yard of friend in turn-of-the-century Ironwood, Michigan, a not-so-fashionable mining town on the Upper Peninsula, looking up at the sky and talking about the future.
He said something about growing up and leaving, and his friend asked, in some astonishment, "You'd leave this?"
My grandfather said he raised his head and looked around at the nearly grass-less red iron dirt of the yard, and back at the house, paint-free from the constant scouring of wind-swept sand, and said, "Yes."
Similarly, Agnes plans to get out one day, but Trout is more not so much "resigned to her fate" as simply comfortable with what she's been given, and, if she's more practical than Agnes, she's also less ambitious, the difference between "more practical" and "less ambitious" being, in the majority of cases, a distinction without a difference.
And yet, for all her impatience with the limitations of her reality, Agnes loves her grandmother and accepts that yard sale items are part of life, and that your grandmother isn't expected to quite get what it is you know and care about.
So anyway.
So, anyway, while there are some cartoonists who would probably do better crafting comics for Agnes's grandmother than they would writing them for her or for Trout, there are also those who aren't aiming for either demographic, and that's fine, too.
I doubt, for instance, that Agnes, Trout or Grandma would have a clue about today's "That Is Priceless," but it made me giggle.
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