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.
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