Letters to the Editor
JM Walker
Published Letters: 205 Editor's Choice: 4
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Leave It Up to Me While I Be Livin' Proof / To Kick the Truth to the Young Black Youth
[Read the article: Who gets to use the N word?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thrasher wrote:
JW's game of defining racism is not new and in truth is a modern spin often offered up by many whites as a defense to either thier own racism or a deliberate ploy to blame those who seek to defend/defeat white racism.
If you can't define racism, how can you recognize it? If racism is so cut and dry, why would anyone need to write a book about it? Why would there be graduate level classes devoted to it? Why would we be having this discussion? Heaven forbid you actually think about any of this.
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OK Thrasher
[Read the article: Who gets to use the N word?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]People are not limited by your myopic views and interpetations of racism... It exists and does not need to pass any litmus test of a white person to be real and have a lethal impact..
Thrasher, I'm past polite.
What the fuck are you even talking about? Do you have any idea? At all? Seriously? Racism exists. Congratulations. You can point out the obvious. That racism exists was never in question. If you can't even delineate the criteria by which a statement, belief, or action is racist, then just shut the fuck up, man.
Racism is not what Thrasher unilaterally decides it is. My assumption is that you've never really given it much thought. Why should you? Ad hominem attacks and insinuations are much easier than measured, polite, constructive conversation.
Why should you give any of this careful consideration when you can accuse me of being white merely because I suggest it's our collective responsibility to discuss what we mean when we utter the word?
You're a fucking idiot, and it has nothing to do with the color of your skin.
Does anyone care to discuss these things rationally? Are we beyond that? Are we hopelessly and utterly fucked?
Sometimes, I do despair.
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I Am a Berkely Breathed Fanboy
[Read the article: Opus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]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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One Guy
[Read the article: Opus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]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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brightstar65
[Read the article: Opus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]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?
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One Guy
[Read the article: Opus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So you think an artist shouldn't care about how a very large portion (quite possibly the largest portion) of readership on any given day reacts to his or her work? Here's a news flash: Most people are too busy living to make a life's work out of following a given artist and making sure they know just how every little intended nuance might be inflected by previous context. A great deal of artwork is consumed by people who have only passing familiarity with the artist. If you're going to write them off, then you're writing off most people around you. And if you don't care how they respond, especially when a work of art has substantive sociopolitical ramifications, then you are an irreponsible artist indeed. Just because someone's longstanding houvre might inflect a piece a certain way doesn't mean that in fact that piece is going to be processed that way by most readers. In fact, the cultural work it does may be quite the opposite.
Ridiculous. It's a comic strip. I read the entire comics page in less time than it takes to smoke my morning cigarette. Opus doesn't require hours of study and a masters degree in comparative literature to interpret.
You're a stay-at-home dad, right? Kudos. I humbly suggest you not take your Sunday comics so personally. Exercise your Constitutional right not to read things that might offend you. (I'm sure it's in there somewhere. :)
P.S. Correction to an earlier post: Oliver Wendell Jones