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Monday, December 13, 2010

Those damned Girls

What's Mallard raving about today?

Girls.

With just 3 weeks to go, Mallard lobs out a doozy of a contender for the 2010 "Creepiest Unintentional Self-Revelation."

Thanks. I'm going to drink bleach now, and forget.

13 comments:

Tog said...

Batshit's thought process resembles a pair of oxen charging into each other, then falling into quicksand, thrashing helplessly as they sink from view.

I mean, look at this! Is Batshit trying to say that fat Americans are fat because of Santa? Is he trying to file "anorexia" away next to "climate change" under "things I believe aren't real?" What? His fantasies of American exceptionalism, his contempt for women, and his assorted Christmas "issues" have collided disastrously in this twisted wreck.

...Or is he just being the ugliest little bastard he can be, before the inevitable Christmas strip in which he pretends to be an honest Christian?

exanonymous said...

Huh?

This doesn't even make sense. It's creepy no matter how it goes: Santa makes media that sexualizes women and feels guilty, Santa feels guilty for lusting after younger girls based on what they wear because he didn't have anything to do with the media.

But mostly what it probably aims for is Santa, being fat, feels guilty for obese girls imitating him. Which displays a contempt for the complexity of the problem as well as a sick desire for young girls to maintain a strict diet now so they grow up to look pleasing to a narrow male sexual preference. Kids aren't smart, you tell a girl she's fat and therefore ugly and she is far more likely at that age to develop an eating disorder that will kill her more quickly than the extra layer of fat at 10 would have.

But a government program helping children eat a healthy and balanced diet so that they are not obese nor feel compelled to purge and starve themselves is the epitome of evil to the right.

Michael Foley said...

Creepier version

James M said...

Wow, that's genuinely grotesque. Just when you start to feel sorry for Tinsley, see him as some harmless rambling old coot who just can't stop getting angry over nothing until you put a blanket over him, tuck him in and let him drift off to sleep, muttering about daytime TV in between snores, he comes out with something like this. There's not a single interpretation that makes this better (my initial reading of it was that Santa, by which, of course, we mean Tinsley, was saying that eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia were no great shakes because they made the young girls thin enough to turn him on. Seeing some of the other explanations offered up in the comments I'm glad this might not be about his lechery but still... he's a dick, even if this comment isn't about his own.)

Unknown said...

I'm going to try to reconstruct the process that led to this cartoon.

Tinsley has the drawing of Snotty Cynical Santa ready to go. All he has to do is supply the mordant observation about the madness of our liberal times into Santa's thought balloon.

You'd think that would be no trouble, but Tinsley has been drinking more than usual today and now finds himself scrambling through the newspaper for something he can fit in.

Desperately, he seizes on something about some damned feminist group ranting about girls being led astray by Hollywood images. He's all ready to use it, with Cynical Santa making a mordant observation on how the liberals won't let girls be girls anymore, and you know how in the holidays... and you can't have Christmas... and Christmas in my time was... and he's stuck for how in the hell this has anything to do with Christmas or Santa or anything.

But like I say, he's desperate, and he's going with Those Damned Feminists, but then it hits him: the Damned Feminists are going after Hollywood, so if Tinsley goes after Those Damned Feminists, it will look like he's sticking up for Those Damned Hollywood Queers!

It's a dilemma which has puzzled greater minds than Bruce Tinsley.

So he punts. He throws in something about how somebody said something about girls, and he knows something about girls too. Christmas is saved!

Rootbeer said...

I have no idea how this one was intended to be read, but the only way I do read it is that Santa Claus, speaking here as the mouthpiece of the author, experiences feelings of guilt and shame over the erections he gets when he comes in contact with precociously sexualized prepubescent girls.

This does not belong in the funny pages.

dlauthor said...

This strip raises the question: has Anonyrast really been Tinshley all along?

Either that, or Bruce Tinshley, champion of the sainted common man who doesn't need a lecture, wants to tell that same common man that his daughter is too fat.

And he's made Santa appear to be a complete cock.

In other words, Drinky Duckwanker needs to be beaten with a stocking full of coal this Christmas.

CW in LA said...

Man, no one draws an uglier, creepier, less jolly Santa than the Tinsh.

rewinn said...

"He sees you when you're sleeping..."

EUW!

I mean, seriously. Maybe Tinshley was trying to have Santa say that it's his fault kids are fat, because Santa is fat. But that 2nd word balloon does nothing to advance the "joke"; all it does it make the whole thing creepy by emphasizing that Santa "sees" young girls.

This is more evidence (were any needed) that King Features have given up on Mallard Fillmore. Any competent editor would have said, "Hey, Brucie, that double entendre? doesn't help. Change it!" Obviously KF isn't given BT editorial support, and who can blame him? MF is not published for quality; it's published for ideology and like the Soviet-era Party cartoons it imitates, actual content doesn't matter.

Erich said...

At first, I thought that Santa was blaming himself for young girls' body-image problems because he delivered Barbie dolls to them, but that didn't seem to jibe with Tinsley's worldview. It took me a moment to figure out what he was really trying to say.

"How can anorexia possibly be real when childhood obesity exists?"

Frank Stone said...

Alfred Kinsey would have had a field day studying Bruce Tinsley. Or jumped out the window screaming. One or the other.

Kip W said...

Every day I'm not looking at the strip and seeing that duck thing stare back at me is like another Christmas present. C'mon, Tin Eye! Make this the Best Christmas Ever!

Ducky is RIght said...

What.
The.
Fuck.