It's the Day's Day of Days! Because This King Business.
You know, commenting on all that 1930s style dialogue really underlines this for me... we know that Muir's a classic comic nerd. He's had Sam dress up as Miss Lace, after all. A part of Muir doing plotlines like this is about running the sort of classic adventure stories that Terry and the Pirates, Wash Tubbs, and The Gumps used to run. And I will not fault the man for ambition.
The problems are manifold. Muir has not advanced as either a writer or an artist to make such efforts work, and is in a situation where, as I've noted, he will not advance, basking in the praise of an uncritical audience that applaud everything he does. Then Muir's politics color everything, by design, so we wind up with stories where the text is bad, and the subtext is worse. This strip is as delirious as Late Chester Gould Dick Tracy without ever having been, well, Golden Age Chester Gould Dick Tracy.
It's honestly kind of sad.
“This strip is as delirious as Late Chester Gould Dick Tracy without ever having been, well, Golden Age Chester Gould Dick Tracy.”
ReplyDeleteDamn. 😐
(Though in fairness even latter-day Gould was a bastion of staid, room-temperature mundanity compared to modern-day Muir at his LEAST flop-sweat insane.)
Well, Gould was actually... you know... selling his strip to papers. And to be fair, this is Moon-era nuttiness, which he pulled back on right at the end, because of the Moon landings.
DeleteLong as we’re on the topic, this is literally just me typing from a random page I opened in a small Little Orphan Annie book I have from 1926. 😆
ReplyDelete•••
"Aw, leapin' lizards --- "Daddy" and Mrs. Warbucks are jawin' away worse n' ever -- what's the use of people fightin' all the time like that?
This isn't a home, it's a nut house - that's what it is - no peace - no nothin' - 'tisn't real - That Count - why didn't he stay in Eu-rup?
And Selby - he isn't human, he isn't - some ways he's a thousand years old and other ways he's dumber'n a oyster - just a lot o' shiny hair and baggy pants and meanness - that's all he is...."
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One more random page. I can’t resist.
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"Yeah - in a frog's eye you will - but what I said about bein' sorry goes just the same - I AM sorry...that they stopped it 'fore I beat yer head clear off, see?"
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That “reg’lar folk” talk may have been all over the funny pages then, but there is only one Annie.
You might think so, but you'd be wrong.
DeleteLittle Annie Rooney exists.