Letters to the Editor
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I like Carol Lay...
...but I always feel like she should just, you know, get over it already. She's clearly got talent, and I think she's got stories to tell if she can just get past tilling the same allegorical ground over and over.
As it stands, WayLay is like a somewhat dada version of Cathy for divorced women.
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i agree
Read by itself, this strip is a fine story. Read in the post-Lay-divorce era, it's one of many "committment sucks, love sucks, my ex sucks and men who remind me of my ex suck" themed strips that have been repeated a dozen or more times now.
All of us who read her comic every week and know the reruns from the new ones know that she's been putting her heart out on window display for over a year now. At some point, rehashing the theme is no longer therapeutic but an obsessive neurosis. Neuroses can make great material if they're humorous and self deprecating. Hopefully Lay will move to that point or find other stories that are not so personal to draw from.
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Dudes projecting anger upon Lay
Tom Davidson - would you write that Keith Knight needs to "just, you know, get over it already" when he does a strip about race relations? Asshole.
Even though I speculated about the context of one "real life" strip, all the cheap shots from guys to this strip is disturbing. It appears Lay referencing her divorce provided an excuse for a certain type of insecure misogynist to dump on her work. If Lay wasn't a woman, or divorced, would this one strip invite such bile, or would it just be poetic?
Lay has always alternated between fables, allegories, surreal serials and personal / political work. Last week was an allegory about mobs, earlier was an ironic tale about flipping a coin. This one about a woman breaking free seems to attract the resentful boy club. As a guy, I find it obnoxious.
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Loved this one
I'm Italian and I live in Rome. I've always found the trend both cloying and endearing: it springs from a pop culture phenomenon - a pair of books and the film taken from them, namely "Tre metri sopra il cielo" (Three metres above the sky) and "Ho voglia di te" (I want you), by Federico Moccia. The books are awful, incidentally.
What I find endearing is that Roman teenagers do believe that their youthful romances will last forever, and will be just like the one between Babi and Step, Moccia's own version of Romeo and Juliet.
Mind you, the weight of the locks actually made the lamppost they were tied to snap and fall in the river. Which is pretty bad. Ponte Milvio is such a lovely place it's a shame it should be defaced.
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softdog
Last week's comic was a excellent but a repeat, as referenced in the letters. All the ones that say "Story Minute" are repeats.
The pain of her divorce is still evident in each cartoon she writes, even the one she takes a swipe at a female artist at Comicon. I've been a fan of Lay since before her divorce. Post divorce her work is almost always tainted by it.
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Getting over it....
Tom Davidson - would you write that Keith Knight needs to "just, you know, get over it already" when he does a strip about race relations? Asshole.
If every comic by Knight were an extended allegory on race relations, sure. (Heck, I'm already getting tired of certain tropes in "Tom the Dancing Dog.") I'd say the same thing about "Boondocks," but for the argument that "Boondocks" is about race relations; it'd be like saying that Jim Davis should just get over his lasagna issues. If Lay has decided that "WayLay" is going to be about how much it hurts to trust men, that's entirely her right -- but as someone who remembers her former versatility, I can't help missing it. I think her catharsis is important to her, but I'd like to see her work through it sooner rather than later.
(In related news, I will never forgive Batiuk for what he's doing in "Funky Winkerbean" right now.)