Letters to the Editor
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For balance
...Berke should have a girl gone wild next week.
After that, a secretly gay fundamentalist minister in cowboy boots riding on a saddled dinosaur.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/drjonboyg/526893292/in/set-72157600301874014/
Then, a clueless midwestern couple in t-shirts and shorts who believe that Saddam had WMD, was behind 9/11, and that their gas guzzling careening SUV is not only absolutely safe but also absolutely green.
And then a blue haired librarian. I say that only to shake some people here up.
Oprah fans vs. Jerry Springer fans vs. American Idol fans vs. whatever that dancing show is.
A guy who blows up whenever guys are knocked or when he sees a woman dating a 'bad boy.'
Brave Sir Anonymouses.
And so on. There are plenty of living stereotypes out there and they are alive and well and ready to be used.
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It's a Funny Strip, but What Did the Dad Do Wrong?
I don't get it...was it breaking the TV? Watching baseball? Wearing a foam-titty hat? What exactly did the dad do to become worthy of the inference that he deserves to be excised from his kid's life?
Okay, breaking the window was probably a bit much...but let's face it: if this is supposed to be the stereotypical "Leave it to Beaver"-type Dad, then he probably paid for that house and will probably pay to have the window repaired, post-haste.
So why is this dad such a bad guy? Was it the display of emotion? The cursing? Newsflash to Binkley and Opus: for a modern-day Dad of 2007 to afford the kind of lifestyle where his kids can sit on a quiet front porch and ponder the vagaries of life, ol' Dad probably has to bust his ass 10-12 hours a day at some shitty job, and if the only way he lets off steam is by screaming at a major-League pitcher on TV, then they should count themselves relatively lucky.
Don't get me wrong: it's a funny cartoon. And Breathed is a funny guy. I just want to question a few basic assumptions. As one of the millions of kids who grew up with a single mother and no father at all, I'm trying to see what's so bad about this Dad.
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sexism
To all those saying lighten up, anyone can see it's just a joke, blah blah blah, do you react that way when it's a woman being given a stereotypical negative depiction? I thought not.
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I Am a Berkely Breathed Fanboy
Steve Dallas (the "dad" in this strip) is one of Breathed's oldest characters. Dallas appeared in Breathed's first regular strip, The Academia Waltz, as a boorish frat boy and a caricature of 80s Reagan-era "conservative" excess. There's a great flashback strip in Bloom County where an adolescent Dallas tells his elementary school teacher that he prefers the Three Bs (Babes, Buicks, and Buckley)over the three Rs.
Breathed has always consciously used stereotypes, not to generalize, but to caricature and critique. His work is extremely self-aware. There's an entire series of Bloom County cartoons in which Dallas has his brain transmogrified by aliens, which results in a 180 degree flip of his personality and beliefs (in a process jokingly referred to by the aliens as "Gephardization"). When he's returned to Earth, he's an overly sensitive vegetarian feminist Jesse Jackson presidential campaign volunteer who gets a perm so he'll look more like Alan Alda. Seriously.
Not all of Breathed's characters played as stereotypes (Oliver Wendel Holmes and his family, to give but one glaring example).
To the woman who claimed Breathed's comics were sexist (???), Breathed has been using Steve Dallas to critique male sexism for almost 30 years. Outland's Men's Couch? The entire Hazel the Hedgehog series of Bloom County strips? No?
To the people bitching about Breathed's reverse sexism, young Binkley was raised by his father alone, who is, by all accounts, a decent man and father (except for that one time when he finds Jesus and leads the movement to have Opus evicted for unbridled penguin lust).
Calm the fuck down people. Quit projecting your insecurities onto poor Mr. Breathed. He has enough of his own to deal with.
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Fanboy
While I appreciate your rich contextualizing of the strip, I also think most people who read a particular week's strip are not going to be so steeped in Breathed's history of cartooning as to place a single bit in the long context your describe. Most entries into the cultural matrix have to do some standing on their own, no matter how self-aware the artist may be, or how artist-aware some readers may be. Part of doing art is to anticipate and, if one is interested in the sociopolitical ramifications, try to manage how a piece may be received in the cultural moment it enters by the real people who see it. The fact is, to many readers, this strip will play (regardless of Breathed's or your long history with the characters) as fighting one stereotype by deploying another, and as someone else noted, the stereotype of the puerile white male is deployed an awful lot these days.
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One Guy
Every strip comes with a context: developed characters, back story, running jokes, etc. That's the whole point of a comic strip. With exceptions (Far Side, Close to Home, etc.), they're serial in design. Strippers (Breathed's term, not mine) don't write strips for occasional readers. They write for daily or weekly readers.
What you suggest is that comics writers should do everything in their power to avoid inadvertently offending every conceivable emotional disposition that comprises their readership. One word for ya: Ziggy.
If I were Breathed, I wouldn't give a rats ass how the strip played to either casual readers or the seeking-to-be-offended set, be they "liberal" or "conservative," and to his credit, he never has.
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So JM Walker
advocates a strip that rips on women all the time. As a break from the ubiquitous world of constant male bashing, I would like that strip. Many others would too.
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brightstar65
So JM Walker advocates a strip that rips on women all the time. As a break from the ubiquitous world of constant male bashing, I would like that strip. Many others would too.
Huh?