(1) WOMEN WITHOUT NOMINATIONS. A fully-illustrated protest, “The International Festival of Comics (Angoulême): Women Banned from Comics”, can be viewed at More Words, Deeper Hole.
With the announcement today of the list of nominations for the Grand Prix d’Angoulême 2015 – an award for which we comics creators are asked to vote – the ax fell:
30 names, 0 women.
The creators of the protest called for a voting boycott.
Subsequently, organizers grudgingly added some female names to the list says Comics Reporter.
FIBD To Add Female Names To Grand Prix Nominees List; Makes Long Statement
Maybe it’s missing something in translation — I read it both ways but my French is pretty bad — but that may be the most obnoxious and angry statement I’ve ever read from an official party in a comics milieu. I won’t be going over it again in detail, I don’t think — life’s too short, and it made me a bit ill. There’s a bunch of stuff in there that’s patently not true, though, including bellowing at made-up accusations at the fringes of what’s being discussed, a standard of working cartoonist applied here that hasn’t been applied to past presidents like Watterson or even their current one. There are also, and this is where my French may fail me, one or two extraneous digs at people. Sheesh.
(2) REY BACK IN PLAY. Entertainment Weekly reports Rey will be added as a game piece to future editions of Monopoly: Star Wars.
In response to fan outcry that the board game doesn’t feature Rey, the lead character played by Daisy Ridley in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the toymaker announced Tuesday that she will be added in an updated version.
“We love the passion fans have for Rey, and are happy to announce that we will be making a running change to include her in the Monopoly: Star Wars game available later this year,” a Hasbro spokesperson said in a statement to EW.
(3) TESTIMONIALS. A post from Mary Robinette Kowal quotes from the requests sent by 83 of the 100 people she and other donors gave supporting memberships in the 2015 Worldcon.
Mark-kitteh says, “I noted that there are several that seem to identify as puppy-sympathetic in some fashion; there are of course others that are anti-slate and many that don’t mention the kerfluffle in any way. (In true clickbait fashion, I will say that You Won’t Believe How Eloquent #5 Is!)”
(4) MORE STAR TREK STAMPS. Trek Today has images of new Star Trek stamps.
The United States isn’t the only country releasing Star Trek stamps.
Two other countries, Palau and Guyana, have released stamps based on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
The stamps from Palau feature Deep Space Nine ships including the Defiant, the space station itself, a runabout, a Cardassian Galor-class ship, and a Bajoran solar sail ship.
(5) TODAY IN HISTORY
- January 6, — Samuel F.B. Morse demonstrates the telegraph.
- January 6, 1973 – Schoolhouse Rock! premiered.
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born January 6, 1925 – John DeLorean, creator of the car with the gull-wing doors that traveled Back To The Future.
(7) JEDI STEPS. James Altucher is convinced “The Force Will Awaken in 2016”.
This has been the worst year of my life. So bad I thought I would die, over and over. But then wonderful things happened. Things that will change me forever. And nobody really knew because I practiced my own daily practice throughout. I say this not because I want sympathy. I say it because I’m proud. …
SURRENDER TO THE MOMENT
I am always anxious about the future. Or I regret the past. It’s hard not to regret losing lifetimes worth of money.
It’s hard not to feel anxious about the future for me, my family, my loved ones, my friends, because everything is so frustratingly uncertain.
But recognize when those worries come up, and bring it back to right now. What can I do now to best serve the cards dealt me this moment?
Anxiety will only take away energy (the Force) from the current moment and never solve the problems of the future.
I saw this again and again this past year. What a waste it was to ask “Why?” about moments already gone, instead of trusting my own resources for the next moments.
(8) VATICAN PANS STAR WARS. Speaking of spiritual news – Rolling Stone reports the “Vatican Paper Deems ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Not ‘Evil” Enough”.
But the film’s harshest – and least expected – critic could be the Vatican’s daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, which trashed the sequel for its lack of convincing antagonists. “The new director’s setup fails most spectacularly in its representation of evil, meaning the negative characters,” reads the non-bylined review, via Los Angeles Times.
“Darth Vader and above all the Emperor Palpatine were two of the most efficient villains in that genre of American cinema,” the article continues, noting that Abrams failed to craft evildoers on that same grandiose scale. “The counterpart of Darth Vader, Kylo Ren, wears a mask merely to emulate his predecessor, while the character who needs to substitute the Emperor Palpatine as the incarnation of supreme evil represents the most serious defect of the film. Without revealing anything about the character, all we will say is that it is the clumsiest and tackiest result you can obtain from computer graphics.”
(9) COLBERT EXPLAINS. Rolling Stone also covered Stephen Colbert’s facetious attempt to justify the Vatican’s review.
…on Tuesday’s Late Show, Stephen Colbert examined why the Catholic Church responded so harshly to The Force Awakens.
“The Vatican, and this is true, gave a better review to Spotlight, and I’m not joking,” Colbert said of the film that tackled the child sex abuse scandal in Boston churches.
(10) JETS AT SUNSET. James H. Burns’ article about the New York Jets missing the playoffs contains an ObSF reference to Isaac Asimov.
With all the millions commissioner Roger Goodell is spending on expanding the league’s brand to Europe and other international markets, should he not be spending a bit more attention to the boroughs and burgs that are in fact, his neighbors?
(11) ATTEMPTED HUMOR. Honest Trailers is often better at sounding unimpressed than being funny, as in its latest effort, The Martian.
[Thanks to David K.M. Klaus, Will R., Mark-kitteh, John King Tarpinian, and Joe H. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Shambles.]
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@James They started using “IIRC” in the Renaissance?
Hypnotosov:
Well spotted. That’s the commonest way female writers, artists, and editors get erased from histories. They’re always working and getting published, but they gradually get dropped from successive rounds of “a retrospective look at” books and articles.
As with the New Testament, in the end you’re left with histories in which the only women present are the ones who have to be mentioned in order for a given story to be told at all.
(Female readers get erased too.)
There was also Modesty Blaise, which I’m sure predated Cathy. One of the local papers used to run all three. It was…interesting.
@redheadedfemme: One of my cats has always attempted to take out my Achilles tendon. It’s Clouseau vs. Kato. He is a complete idiot, but his how to kill big things instincts are spot-on. I’d say IIII out of VII days a week, I feel small teeth in the back of my ankle. The other III, I get the claws. He is also the hungriest cat.
Apple Mary was a working woman, too.
And if we’re counting Modesty Blaise, then how about Jane? (A UK strip that lasted quite a while, I believe.)
And Petula Clark, Radio’s Merry Mimic? Wellll… she was in the comic magazines. Withdrawn.
Snowcrash:
All male artists on that one.
What was Mary Worth doing to earn her daily bread? I hope she wasn’t hooking.
Eli on January 7, 2016 at 6:42 pm said:
Oh yes. The bridge gets a mention towards the bottom of this piece, in that it is _slightly_ more realistic than the bridge scene in The Dark Knight Rises:
http://hackaday.com/2015/11/18/suspension-bridges-of-disbelief/
Hard to say, because there were two Mary Worths.
The Mary Worth we’re familiar with was a busybody at leisure, a retired teacher and widow of a Wall Street tycoon.
Apple Mary, her predecessor, also named Mary Worth, was a poor woman who sold apples on the street during the Depression.
The APPLE MARY strip became MARY WORTH’S FAMILY and that became MARY WORTH, but somewhere in the transition, the lead character became a different Mary Worth with a different history.
APPLE MARY, incidentally, was created by Martha Orr in 1932; I’m not sure another woman worked on it until Karen Moy started writing MARY WORTH in 2003.
This precious scroll set in the pixel sea…
While certainly an uber-competent and independent woman, other than in flashbacks Modesty Blaise was a lady of leisure, doing missions for Taggart as a combination of favor and to keep from getting bored, and getting involved in situations due to friends. Pre-start of the strip, she did run The Network, a global crime organization.
Another working woman strip was The Heart of Juliet Jones, although really it was a two woman strip, once Juliet’s sister Eve gave up on college. While admittedly emphasizing the romance angle, particularly for Juliet in the early days a fair part of her stories were about her various jobs and working life.
The more I think about it, I think Cathy gets credit for “working woman strip” because it consciously addressed the meta-aspects of being a female in the workplace while such was at best background elements in the other strips. That and hitting it big during a period when more women were starting and staying in the workplace post-education.
While being a working woman was background to romance in many of the strips, it was the core appeal of others — as noted, WINNIE WINKLE was subtitled “The Breadwinner,” since she had to support her parents and younger brother, starting in 1920. That was a different era of women entering the workplace, with somewhat different concerns, and different societal expectations about what made good fodder for a comic strip, but it wasn’t at best a background element, it was the core concept.
BRENDA STARR wasn’t about “women in the workplace” as a type, it was about one specific woman with an interesting job, but the focus was on the job, with romance as an element but the job as the main focus. Interestingly, BRENDA was not only created by a woman, but whenever they had to bring in someone new, they hired women — it was written by Dale Messick, Linda Sutter and Mary Schmich, and drawn by Messick, Ramona Fradon and June Brigman
It was certainly catching a wave, and representing a particular zeitgeist. It just wasn’t the first to do that with working women. There were earlier waves, earlier zeitgeists.
Kurt, not quite what I meant. While earlier strips definitely had focus on the work/job part of women at work, Cathy added more of a focus on the aspects of being a *woman* who worked and how that affected her life. As I mentioned earlier, I can’t even remember what Cathy’s job was, and really it didn’t matter. It wasn’t “what’s it like to be working at this job” but “what’s it like to be a young woman in the general workplace, emphasis on woman”. Or to put it another way, while previous strips could be called feminist with respect to the set up of women working, I think Cathy was very consciously trying to address what Guswaite saw as issues a woman, rather than a man, would face as worker/independent breadwinner, in that sense making it perhaps the first consciously feminist strip in wide circulation (note: feminist as of when the strip debuted; I doubt it dealt with many, if any, of what seem to me to be cutting edge issues of the current feminist wave).
And so did WINNIE WINKLE. This is the part you seem to keep missing.
Different era, different social context, but yes, the fact that Winnie was a woman who worked, and how that affected her life, were the core of the strip. Over time, it became more of a straight soap, but at the start it was about the implications and experiences of changing times.
I’m not saying CATHY wasn’t a good strip at the right time; I’m simply noting that the stuff you keep trying to credit it with being first at, it wasn’t actually first at. It did it well, and in its own way, but it wasn’t the first strip to be about being a *woman* who worked and how that affected her life.
@lurkertype
Kip W beat me to saying that back in actual Roman times, they didn’t do IV and IX — just IIII and VIIII.
My pedantic comment for the day – The Romans did use IV and IX, they just weren’t very consistent about it. Sometimes they wrote IV, sometimes IIII, depending on how they felt, and possibly how much space they had. There are plenty of instances. The Roman Inscriptions of Britain http://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/156 for example shows the use of IX twice on a first century tombstone.
Well there’s not would about it, is there? Cats that are bigger do actually kill you. 🙂
As for the eating you after you are dead, I feel Granny Weatherwax would approve: no sense wasting perfectly good meat, is there?
Extremely well put.
Kurt wrote.
This is just calling out for Crisis On Infinite Worths.
#NotSorry.
One of our cats licks my arm if I’m late with breakfast. I take it as a warning.
I suspect that, if I die (my grandmother, pointing to her husband’s grave, said she would be buried bext to him if she died. As it turned out, she did, but I approve of her optimism), the cause of death will be “trauma subsequent to tripping while attempting to feed cats” and I will be found with a cat eating kibble out of the dropped bag.
I really liked Cathy, especially the earlier years. It was funny, it got political and funny as Cathy the conventional ‘girl’ bumped heads with the world and with her unabashedly feminist friend Andrea who was often right about things but often impractical with her advice…all written by a woman who worked in the milieu she was writing about.
Kurt wrote:
“Apple Mary, her predecessor, also named Mary Worth, was a poor woman who sold apples on the street during the Depression.”
I recall this because it was used in (?) Mad Magazine (?) when the FBI arrests Mary Worth. Seemed she was running guns or gin along with those apples.
@redheadedfemme
What the study failed to take into account was the intelligence of cats who have, after all, successfully domesticated human beings for thousands of years. Why should they wish to eat their owners when they’d have to go and find someone else to eat in a few days?
Fred Kiesche on January 8, 2016 at 6:40 am said: I recall this because it was used in (?) Mad Magazine (?) when the FBI arrests Mary Worth. Seemed she was running guns or gin along with those apples.
Actually she was nabbed for tax evasion, just like Al Capone. (Not a joke, or at least not my joke — that’s how the Mad piece ends.)
It’s been awhile since I read Cathy, but in my memory it feels more like a feminist forerunner of Dilbert than a successor to Brenda Starr.
@Jim Henley
By the time I started reading it, it was more like a feminist forerunner of Garfield.
@JJ
“The Call Me Maybe of Cthulhu” ?
@microtherion
Same here. My memory of Cathy is she had a terrible job, a jerky boyfriend, and a cheesecake obsession, and said “ack!” a lot. My view of Garfield has changed a lot since the late 80s, though, from some articles I’ve read about it. This discussion has been eye-opening regarding Cathy, as well.
Actually, “same here” is inaccurate. I never read it as feminist, kind of more the opposite. As a teenage boy in the Midwest, it’s very possible I was not getting it.
Ah yes, the linguine horror movies of the early 70s:
They Call Me Cthulhu
Cthulhu is STILL My Name!
Call me Cthulhu. Some eons ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no sanity, and nothing particular to interest me in my house at R’lyeh, I thought I would waken a little and rise from the watery part of the world.
I rather liked “Cathy” when it was new, but yes, it became formulaic and boring (a lot of daily strips do).
But speaking of feminist comics, anyone else know Nicole Hollander’s “Sylvia”? (I googled and see there’s a collection of 30 years of her stuff, so ZOT, ordered.) (I gave up on book budgets about the time I started hanging around File 770).
@robinareid – YES! Such a great comic. I love the passive/aggressive aggressive/agressive cats, among other elements.
Also, Roberta Gregory’s “Naughty Bits.”
I remember it as a strip I rarely read because the lettering was ornate and hard to read, and if I made the effort to read it, the strip was funny but not so funny that I stopped resenting the lettering.
In earlier years I had the opposite problem with NANCY. I read most of what was on the Boston Globe comics page, but wasn’t interested in a few strips — JUDGE PARKER, for one — and actively disliked NANCY because it was so stupid. But NANCY was so insanely simple you practically read it at a glance (years later I ran into someone who described it as “easier to read than to not-read,” and I agree completely). So i’d actually put my hand over the strip to avoid reading it, and half the time when shifting, I’d find out I’d read it anyway. Argh!
But SYLVIA I found easy to not-read, and while it was funny (I remember one strip about what the world would be without men: “No war and lots of fat, happy women”), any time it had a lot of text I’d just skip it because the joke wouldn’t be enough of a payoff for the effort it took to read it.
Then again, I wasn’t the target audience, so that was probably part of it.
BRENDA was a story strip, CATHY was gag-a-day — and yeah, BRENDA was, as noted, about a woman doing a job more than “woman in the workplace.” WINNIE WINKLE, which was “woman in the workplace,” started out as a mixtures of gags and story, and eventually settled down into being a story strip.
“Sylvia”! YES! With the snark, and the cocktails with Rita, and the sign-holding cats who kept trying to get rid of the dog. I enjoyed that one a lot. I certainly cut out a number of strips. My mom and I would sometimes exchange clipped-out strips.
Am putting the 30-yr. collection on my Wish List now.
I used to save strips of “Sylvia”, back when I could still find it in the local university daily paper, and glue them into a composition notebook. This was as recently as … well, OK, maybe 10 years ago. Damn.
I really should order that compilation.
Kurt: Ah. Apologies for misunderstanding what you wrote. I’m not familiar with the early days of Winnie Winkle and inferred something else from what you originally wrote about it.
I have, I think, every “Sylvia” compilation except the 2010 one. Nicole Hollander is very funny.
“Cathy” reminded me of a particular stand-up comedienne’s routine from the ‘eighties. “And our next comedian, ladies and gentlemen… is a WOMAN!” She was such a flat and cardboard depiction of a “working girl” about fifty years behind the curve.
I especially disliked “For Better or for Worse,” a woman-created strip with a vast reservoir of meanspiritedness behind it.
But “Sylvia” always has been a delight.
@Jim Henley: Now that you mention it, Cathy’s dickish boss Mr. Pinkley did bear at least a passing resemblance to Dilbert’s pointy-haired nemesis. A lot of Cathy was workplace comedy.
But a lot wasn’t. I remember one of the first strips back in the 70’s had Cathy’s horrified mom asking her why a nice girl like her had acquired a double bed. (Answer: “To fit the big sheets that I bought?”)
Yeah, it eventually got tiresomely formulaic. But after 34 years, what strips didn’t?
I especially disliked “For Better or for Worse,” a woman-created strip with a vast reservoir of meanspiritedness behind it.
That’s interesting. I must have missed the mean-spiritedness. Could you elaborate on this point?
@PIMMN–
Like Aaron, I’d be interested to know where you see the “mean-spiritiedness.”
@Aaron and @Lis Carey:
It might be difficult to articulate, particularly since I sold off my complete (at the time) run of collected strips a long time ago.
Read in aggregate one starts to see patterns of bitterness and resentment and neglect behind the mild Canadian suburban family activities.
There always had been a streak of snark in the strip, but it seemed to get meaner and less sympathtic over time. Also as I read it I had a growing sense of the characters’ isolation and dishonesty. People hid things from each other. The wife and the husband didn’t really talk and they each resented the other’s interests. The husband, last I read, was becoming engrossed in his massive toy train layout and neglecting his family. The wife had her magic new Mary Sue child after her miracle menopausal pregnancy, and that child, although a nastier, ruder, and more self-absorbed little drama queen than the two older children (who, unlike little Mary Sue were based on real people) ever had been, was glowingly approved of as the cutest thing ever.
It really is hard to put my finger on a specific strip or element that can explain the — I think I would call it *atmospheric* sense of a great weight of unhappiness among those characters.
Well, I can certainly see some issues in these series of strips:
For Better or For Worse: The Big Storm
For Better or For Worse: Mexico Trip
It reminds me of the mean digs my dad was always taking at my mom — nasty, but with just enough leeway to claim they were “humor”.
Hmm. Yup, I can see some issues with those strips. 🙁
I’m having a hard time seeing why meanness that we recognize as true-to-life makes a strip worse art.
I don’t see where Peace said it was worse art, only that Peace disliked it, which is not the same thing.
@Meredith: Fair enough! One of the things I like about Drake’s songs is that he not only conveys the pain he feels from her leaving, you can get a real good sense of why she left in the first place. Those winter storm strips are spiky. But man they looks like life.
What I’ve heard is that Lynn Johnston’s real-life relationship with her husband collapsed, or at least got soured, and the mean-spiritedness crept in with it. Sort of like how Dave Sim was on the sane side of the line until his girlfriend left him- though Sim, of course, started with a bit of a sexist streak and then went much further off the rails.
My mom is still a fan of the strip, but much more of the classic than the more recent.
As a teenage girl in a big city, I’d have agreed with you. She was a doormat. I grew up to smart off to Steve Jobs.
I don’t recall the exact date, but in the last few years of the strip as all-new, Lynn Johnston’s husband did have a marriage killing affair with a woman he’d helped hire to run the business aspects of their company. In the new book that ties in with an exhibit of her work and serves as something of a behind the scenes retrospective of what was going on in her life at the time, she does state that he and his paramour were gaslighting her and smearing her in the workplace for some time before she discovered the affair.