One of my guilty pleasures is comic strips. I like quite a few, from the daily ones, to the political ones, to the ones that are multi-page in scope. But, oddly, I don’t like comic books (or graphic novels as they prefer to be called). Anyway, I have some comics that I follow pretty regularly. The political ones bring me down and the others lift me back up, so I maintain equilibrium.
One of the comics that I follow, though, has somewhat become like a stone in my shoe. It just bugs me. The strip is Adam @ Home and is about a work-at-home dad and his family. When I came into the strip, the topic was primarily about Adam’s issues with technology. But lately, the strips are really focused on his kids. It’s probably obvious those two topics are the two polar extremes of my entertainment. And while that irked me, I know that themes can come and go in a long-running strip. When I go back to earlier strips, there are runs of other topics that take over as well. I can deal.
But one day, I found out that the entirety of the series was online. Highly interested, I went and started reading from the beginning. And you know, considering themes and topics and changes and all, it was a totally different comic strip in the beginning. It was a strip about a husband and wife and their (then smaller) family. While Adam was still working at home, it had a lot of Mr. Mom kind of things in it as well as a lot of honest friction where Adam’s wife would come home from work exhausted and Adam didn’t do any housework. It was turning the whole "stay-at-home mom’s don’t do anything" on the guys. To be honest, Adam was really being a selfish asshole. And there was more than a few mentions of his wife being too tired for sex. Despite that, there was a strip where his wife left work early to get back home and have sex while the kids were at school. What the fuck? Is this the same comic strip?
I actually stopped reading the historical strips shortly after the mid-day sex strip because I couldn’t reconcile was then and what was now. In the present, there is zero, and I mean zero affection between Adam and his wife. They are never shown embracing or even interacting beyond discussing random, neutral topics, or their kids. It’s almost always Adam talking to his kids or sometimes the wife talking to the kids. If I had to read all the strips between then and now, knowing what they would become, it would be more depressing than the political strips I read on occasion. What the hell happened to this couple?
What actually spurred me to write this post was something so outrageous it just infuriated me. So, Adam works at home, right. In the present, he’s a freelance writer taking small jobs here and there. When not on a job, he’s trying to write something. A novel, a play, a screenplay, anything. He’s consistently unsuccessful. His wife works at a bookstore, but I don’t exactly know what’s been going on during the pandemic, whether the store has been open or not. I have to assume they have some steady income somehow.
So, the other day, the wife and Adam have a rare conversation together. The wife wants to confess something to Adam and is unsure how he’ll take it. What’s the bombshell? She says she’s written a novel. So, you know, Adam, being a writer by trade, and yet very unsuccessful at writing, reacts as you would expect.
My reaction is completely different. This is your fucking wife, your life partner, and you had no idea she was writing a novel? Do you even communicate? Do you even pay attention to her? From participating in NaNoWriMo myself, I was able to crank out a 50k word story in a month, but that was multiple hours night after night doing nothing but writing. And that’s after many years of blogging and writing in general, so I wasn’t exactly starting from scratch. One of my friends is a real writer, like published and shit. Writing is her full-time job. For Adam’s wife to write a novel from nothing is not exactly trivial. I’m not saying that can’t be done, I’m saying it should not have gone unnoticed by her husband and her kids. And if it did go unnoticed, what a fucking sad sack of a family that is.
But it’s just another devastating blow to a fictional family. You know, as a writer, of words or comics, your goal is to get people invested in the characters. And it’s painful when your emotional investment in them is discarded for cheap. Oh, Dilbert of old, where have you gone? (Off to the land of Narcissism, you cuck!!) But anyway, to wrap it up, I’m just a little hurt that a comic that started out trying to discuss real relationship issues between a working mom and stay at home dad, and the dad’s continuing difficulties in adapting, has turned into an emotionless cast of characters just moving from one day to the next with no continuity or persistence.
Where It’s Going
On: https://akcaggiano.com/2020/11/10/cruel-to-be-kind/
Usually, I use the Commentary category for news stories, but when I was writing a comment on this blog post, I decided I had more to say about the situation and making my own post might be more appropriate.
To summarize: After having been verbally, emotionally, and physically abused by the former president and his followers, we’re now asked to simply forgive and forget. The answer to both of those requests is "no." Anyone that didn’t see a problem with what has been done over the last years has a serious problem. Anyone that says the alternative would have be worse, or says that the president-elect is going to make it worse has a serious problem.
If we are not actually living in the "end times", which I’m not going to completely dismiss, a lot of people act as if there is nothing left to lose. For example, a see a lot of posts about gender or sexuality rights. And because "liberals" are coming into power, we’re all going to be homosexual now. Hyperbolic and hysterical, yes, but here’s the point. For some people, this is so important, that they would vote the incumbent back in solely because of that. There are other similar reasons people have for the same action. I’ll admit, there may be a case I would do something like that, but for a different cause.
The difference with me, and I would assume other rational people, is there is a level of risk/reward assessment. To get what you want, how much do you have to give up? And for these irrational people, it seems they would give up everyone’s everything for their one thing. And they would suffer for it as well, despite the win – a Pyrrhic victory. There’s no consideration to postpone that fight for 4 years and try again in better circumstances. It’s tunnel vision. Anyone who voted JoJo or Kayne, this is the one time to not be supporting 3rd party. This one is too important. But thank you anyway for pulling those votes.
Now, the point I really wanted to make in response to the post is: we’re nowhere near out of the woods on this.
There is a book from which I read an excerpt, and now there’s so many similar books there’s no way for me to find out which it was so I can link it, that discussed how Germany became Nazi Germany. I distilled the information from that into a single statement to commit to memory, "Hitler comes later."
The point of that warning is that in Germany, there was a pre-Nazi leader who sparked the nationalistic views of the people. He didn’t get very far, but the future Nazi party took note of how dedicated and passionate those supporters were. The party then turned it up to 11 and viola, Hitler.
So while there may currently seem to be a glimmer of hope that civility can return, this is the time to be even more vigilant (and god, I hate that word). I am certain the fanaticism has not gone unnoticed and can and will be exploited.
If I had to hazard a guess, it will be Jr. He’s young, charismatic, and carries the family name. He’s got a partner from the media that has been successfully grooming him for presentation. So far I haven’t heard of him speaking his own ideas, only parroting his father’s, but watch out if the tone changes and he starts instigating things himself.
We have 4 years to prepare for this. Do not forgive and do not forget.