BLOG TO COMM

I hate the entire concept of "woman" as it stands these days...y'know, the whole rigmarole that we've all been inundated with since kiddiehood about how the opposite of man was this roaring lion that could do anything those brutes like us dingalinged ones can only better as espoused by such potent to current day mores publications like MS. and of course Billy Jean King trouncing Bobby Riggs in a tennis match that he obviously threw. (I'm surprised that when the erroneously-named "B.J." revealed her bush sniffing side a few years later Riggs didn't blurt out to the world "SEE, I WAS PLAYING A MAN AFTER ALL!!!!" But as we all know Billie Jean and Bobby made nice later on and that's OK by me.) As you all know I like ladies who look nice even if they don't particularly ascribe to any sensible ideals of what beauty is and are all petite and smell good and do away with unnecessary body hair (a hard task to do if you live south of Austria) but this "woman" thing...yech!

It's so sad seeing just how the female race has degenerated since the thirties when these DIXIE DUGAN comics (available from Golden Age Reprints) appeared in the late-thirties. Here the women, even the older and baggier ones, look rather hot and of course Dixie and her galpals are beauty beyond belief coming off so fetching in their appealing fashions and even more so when in various stages of undress.You know the tale about how Dugan was modeled after Louise Brooks (no slouch she) and just what a popular strip it was (even spawning a number of cheap Tijuana Bible knockoffs) until the mid-sixties. By then sex was so prevalent in real life who needed her, even though I gotta admit that the gal just didn't look so hot with forties-styled and beyond hair and clothes as she did in the thirties but maybe that's just because I don't think ladies look as hot then as they did in the twenties and thirties, or fifties and early-sixties. The war must've done something to the fashion industry of the day I'll betcha.

But man in the thirties was Dixie the kinda woman who made yer then adolescent grandpa sneak the funny section into the bathroom, and if you don't think I've spent enough time staring at a particularly potent panel for minutes on end as the bedside boom box spun away endlessly then you don't know the meaning of autism!

Even if the gags go flat there are still a whole buncha good 'uns that catch you by surprise just like they did with all of your old time faves. And that coupled with the exemplary art (sheesh, I'll bet it took more'n twenny seconds for artist J. H. Streibel to draw a panel) sure made DIXIE DUGAN such a funtime strip that I'm positive made the whole fambly happy, and that includes cyster when a page would be devoted to paper doll cutouts, or brother when those cutouts included a drawing of Dixie in her undergarments!

Mention must also be made of Imogene, Dugan's niece who appears in quite a few of these sagas. A young 'un of about five, this particular character comes off a whole lot like Bushmiller-era Nancy only with a meaner streak with a mayhem level approaching Dennis the Menace's and I'm even talking "Look what I found in Mr. Wilson's head" for that matter! One particularly gruesome strip had the brat fishing in Dixie's galpal's aquarium after being bored when the two began gabbing about dresses! She even caught a bunch of exotic ones and strung 'em up just like she woulda done with the carp, and for some reason the sight of this made me puke even more'n the queer seeing the cop kiss the feet of a priest!

I wonder if, like in the case of NANCY, Imogene coulda taken over the strip making her yet another precocious pudge uncontrollable brat type guaranteed to bring the audience in. Who knows what ramifications it woulda had on the funny pages, and frankly I say the more suburban slob turdlers seen in the comics the better! Hey, we needed those kids to look up to then and I'm sure more'n a few need the same kinda bastids to admire even in these cyborg times!