Websnark

« I want a Mell coffee mug. | Main | I had just assumed Andina would rez her, anyway.... »

Wednesday: [w] Lois, incidentally? Is so on my List.

Here's how it works: the virus comes out in North America, and then, a few days later, because of licensing restrictions, it comes out in the UK. (This is apparently a huge improvement from the situation a couple of years ago, where you had to wait at least six months from the virus release date before they'd consider special preview colds in and around central London.) If things are out of whack, you should blame the fact that British cold preparations have been known to contain mild opoids.

Anyhow.

(From DTWOF #457: Sun Goddess.)

Dykes to Watch Out For occupies a nebulous, transitional place in my head these days. I followed the strip off and on in various alternative print weeklies over the years, and you'd think that'd be the place for it. Much of the humour and characterization, up to and including the state of Mo's sex life at any given time, hangs off of current events. But DTWOF always worked best for me in collected format, especially when the newspaper strips could play off of the print-only longform stories. Biweekly installments, grateful as I always was to have them, always felt a little too spurty and isolated. All in one place, however, the collections felt like solid overviews of a 12-18 month period, like a sheaf of snapshots meant to be gone through all at once.

In recent years, the strip's been carried by PlanetOut. I don't know what circulation looks like for DTWOF in print these days (I see it's just been dropped by a larger weekly in Ithaca, of all places); I know it's always been more than a bit spotty outside North America, and the sorts of publications it'd appear in have been somewhat on the decline (do I even need to get into why?). And don't get me wrong; much as PO might screw around with the layout and frame it with the most irritating layouts imaginable, I am grateful to have it online, in the same way I'm grateful to have online any number of American comic strips which don't appear in British newspapers. And people are obviously reading it there.

That said, I'm not convinced that I'm the kind of person who gets much out of an online DTWOF, either. This got brought into sharp relief for me late last month, when PO were behind in posting something fairly topical. The creator, Alison Bechdel, apologized for/vented about this in her weblog, saying, "It's hard enough keeping the strip timely when it only comes out every two weeks, and Jon Stewart has already made every possible joke there is to make before I even sit down to write. But to have it run a week or more late is maddening."

I think that's only part of the problem. First of all, the topicality thing: the impact might not be quite so sharp if we were still back in the land of Just Print, true (it'd still be aggravating to have Jon Stewart make all the good jokes first, true), but I find my expectations have been utterly subverted by reading so many comics intended chiefly for online consumption. There's a fuzzy buffer in my head for weekly newspapers, magazines, and the like; I'm expecting snapshots, not feeds. And I realize, even with the above caveat that I've always preferred DTWOF in those Garfield-sized collections, always liked it better in larger chunks, that it's patently absurd for me to let my expectations shift like that.

(And I don't want a more frequently updated DTWOF, either. Alison Bechdel's not doing the kind of art you can knock out in a few hours, for which I'm glad. Ecstatic.)

The other thing, unfortunately, is that my attachment is less to the politics of DTWOF (which seem a little forced in the past couple of years; this might well be more to do with my infrequent direct exposure to America and its news/entertainment media, though) and more to the characters. I know I'm going to pick up Invasion of the Dykes to Watch Out For in October and I'm going to really get into, say, Cynthia (so far, my favourite of Bechdel's takes on teenaged/university-aged lesbians; the Madwimmin interns were frustratingly shrill and glossy) or Samia (who I think I like, but keep thinking "Toni and Clarice merged completely?" about for some reason -- she's hard for me to pick out). I'm going to totally enjoy the Ginger/Samia thing, I'm going to root for Bechdel to pick up the pace on Clarice and Toni's little agreement-that-died, and I'm going to get completely wrapped up in Sydney's chemo.

But, at the moment, all I'm catching are riffs on current events (especially when Clarice gets upset... she's worse than Mo) which The Current had hashed out completely by the time I remember to check in. I know the things I love are still there; they just don't make as much of an impact as they might, and even less still against the lack of the fuzzy buffer bumper.

Which is not a little frustrating when you're talking about something you've loved and loved and loved for about ... god, twelve years now? I feel like I should be better at managing my context here.

On the other hand, that's not going to stop me keeping up.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at May 11, 2005 8:40 PM

Comments

Post a comment