Tag Archives: groaner

Quoth the unshaven “Anymore”

If today’s strip is to be believed, Crazy Harry is completely unaware of a genre of music that has been a major force in popular music for three-and-a-half decades now, and is arguably well into its second decade as the dominant genre of music in the United States. Where has Crazy been? Living under a rock (booooooooo!) since the Reagan administration?

Funky lives up to his name for once, brimming with mildly more modern musical knowledge than Crazy, the Act I gang’s resident music fan and audiophile dating back even to his early appearances. I guess he’s now not only channeling NASCAR legend Mark Martin’s haircut but also Martin’s unexpected rap music fandom.

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Licorice Pizza

OK, I’ll start positive today. Here’s something I like about today’s strip, Ayers uses bubble panel borders correctly, to denote a memory of dream sequence. Yeah, that doesn’t sound like much, but coming from TB’s pencil for decades it meant “present day in-strip setting change”, a maddening misinterpretation of longstanding comic art language.

And now, for everything else…

A pizza spinning on your turntable used to be a sort of shorthand for “cool”, in that it signified you were someone cool enough to have just a had a party wild and “crazy” enough that some nut tried to play a pizza and everyone was having too much “fun” to notice (see this well-known scene from Sixteen Candles, for example). However, a pizza spinning on your turntable when you are alone in your own room with your headphones on is not “cool”. Silly, whimsical, weird, crazy? Sure… but not cool. One could even describe Crazy’s memory as rather sad, given the contrast between him listening to his pizza alone in his room compared to the sight of a pizza on a turntable signifying a really good time shared by friends.

Furthermore, was the music produced by the pits of a pizza ever “cool”? Since every Youtube video of someone “playing” a pizza on a turntable is just a gag to dub in “That’s Amore”, I am forced to assume that it actually sounds like an EP for a British New Wave band. In that case, yes, it actually was cool.

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