Saturday, March 24, 2007

Small Victories, sometimes all you have, you know...


If you're a Guardian reader (who has no sense of the contemporary state of cartoons) , you'll probably have seen these weird three panel cartoons and thought "what hell this...no be Doonesbury...is actually funn eee", if you've got any sense you know that Nicholas Gurewitch's Perry Bible Fellowship is one of the best three-panel cartoons to feature in the British mainstream press in (my) living memory, see below I am old. Jimmny H homie Bobby Clamnuts did a great interview with him. (ps this is Bob's archive site so no pics are there, his new site his here.)

Anyway I was in my room most of the day writing, then, when I left my room I saw the bizarre sight of my housemate's boyfriend and two of his friends, huddled round the back page of today's G2 in confusion, let me explain: two of these guys have PhDs in English lit and one is a published novelist finishing a PhD in Creative Writing. I walk past and they go 'can you explain this?' and I go, 'he's a guy trying to get off with her and she thinks he understands her and is about put out until his york notes pop out of his pocket and turns out he's shallow, and he trying to say it was only supplementing his knowledge' etc. I was like, read some comics you fecking lit mooks, you live in a visual culture...

3 comments:

Ernesto said...

Jesus, to be honest I had to read the strip twice to understand what it was all about. :P

What a turn off, someone reading cliffnotes!

John said...

Allow me:

The joke is, he has read the Cliff Notes to her. You may have noticed that, in the cartoon, her head is a book, and she is expressing her pleasure at the fact that he understands her. However, the truth becomes apparent when the Cliff Notes drop out and she realizes he's cheated and taken a short cut, presumably to get into her knickers.

Am I close, or have I actually embrrassed myself by explaining it?

Lorcy said...

yep, I think that about wraps it up! all the years of obsverving the 'cartoons' in the bulletin of the atomic scientists have had their effect :)