Freedom of punch(lines)

[tahnan]

"Prickly City" is the funny, non-preachy version of "Mallard Fillmore", I've learned from skimming the archives briefly. Conservative, but at least it actually goes for jokes, not just frothing at the mouth. Except, I happened to see the 7/18 strip in the Diesel yesterday. (If you can't get past the registration, it is, in short: Character A is on the ground wincing and holding his nose, next to a burning flag. Character B, fist out, says, "You exercised your right, so I exercised mine...")

Still funnier than Mallard Fillmore, but...the right to physically assault someone is protected under free speech? Fascinating. I had no idea.

Comments

[marith.livejournal.com]

...I've been reading it for quite a while, since it lives under Doonesbury in the local paper. It gets quite as preachy and not-funny as Mallard Fillmore.

If I were the sort of person who writes letters to cartoonists, I would write one suggesting that the Watterson "kid + cute animal + bouncing around vague undefined scenery having conversations" formula, when used to say ugly things, does not actually make the things less ugly.

[prog.livejournal.com]

That's still kind of clever and punchy (if you will), though too bad about the giant fallacy you point out.

The strip is, from a purely stylistic standpoint, better than a sequence of drawings of a duck standing around with enormous thought bubbles explaining how the New York Times is in league with Bin Laden and Ted Kennedy drowns dozens of girls every week or whatever. But from a content standpoint, I too have seen it sink just as low.

[lunacow]

No, no, see how her sleeves are pushed up? She's exercising her right to bare arms.

[silkiemom.livejournal.com]

Our newspaper sometimes prints letters from readers in our entertainment section. A recent reader wrote in saying he was glad about the return of Mark Trail to our comic section. He then went on to write, "But not at the expense of "Prickly City"! Talk about adding fuel to the fire of apparent "liberal bias."..."Prickly City" is the needed counterpoint to the flaming-liberal portrayals of the "Doonesbury" characters (except for Duke - he's pretty red state)."

Buh.

[qaqaq.livejournal.com]

Wait a minute. Someone reads Mark Trail?

[silkiemom.livejournal.com]

That did make me wonder if in fact the entire letter was tongue-in-cheek.

[eyelessgame.livejournal.com]

"Except for Duke - he's pretty red state" -- that was the line that made us both howl. Duke is even more reality-disabled than Zonker, and spends much of his time in a drugged stupor. It had to be a put-on. Nobody actually considers Duke sympathetic... it's like thinking Archie Bunker was a dramatic character.

... do they?

[eyelessgame.livejournal.com]

Wow, if Prickly City is 'funny' and 'non-preachy' compared with it, I don't want ever to see Mallard Fillmore.

That said, c'mon, it's "I exercised my right", as in "right arm", not "constitutional right".

Prickly City mostly seems, as a comic strip, lazy - there's not any real effort to draw art, or create any sort of world, just a pair of characters who remind me of Hannity as a little girl and Colmes as a Hobbesoid coyote. While there's occasionally some physical humor (like this one), most of the time the strip is just dialogue as the two characters jump around a desert, so they could (and for all I know, do) recycle the panels from one day to the next.

At least B.C. has multiple characters, each with a personality, and a world where things occasionally happen. :)