Category: default || By jt3y

When I worked at the News (and those Newsers who check out the Almanac will back me up on this story, I think), we used to regularly receive letters from a city man who was offended by the comic strip "Nancy."

In particular, this man found offensive two certain parts of the anatomy of Nancy's Aunt Fritzi. If you're not familiar with the strip, let's just say that if "Nancy" is ever cancelled, Fritzi Ritz will be able to find work as a comic-book superheroine.

Anyway, each time Aunt Fritzi would appear in the paper, this man would clip out the offending "Nancy" strip, circle Aunt Fritzi's bosom, and write "SMUT" on it. Then he'd send it to the newsroom, where the lovely and talented Gerry Jurann would share the missive with the reporters and editors, and we'd all roar with laughter. For all I know, the guy is still sending them.

I realized recently that I'm rapidly approaching that stage in my own life. I'm starting (starting?) to fit the pattern of a sad, lonely man who will one day be found dead under a pile of moldy newspapers. When the police are alerted that my mailbox is full of unopened pension checks, they'll send the volunteer fire department to bust open the front door, and find me in a rotting recliner in the living room with a half-finished letter to the editor in one hand. Clutched in my other desiccated hand will be a clipping of "Spider-Man," but instead of "SMUT," I'll have written, "IDIOTIC."

"Spider-Man," which I can't avoid because it's now in all three of the papers I regularly read, is the slowest-paced adventure comic strip of all time. The plots, such as they are, move at a pace that a turtle would find tiresome, and worse yet, the Sunday strips (seen in the Trib) tend to recap all of the action (or lack thereof) from the previous week.

The excruciating plot over the past few weeks has involved Peter Parker, the titular hero, being hired full-time by the Daily Bugle and being sent to the doctor for a physical. Naturally, he's worried that the doctor will discover that he's Spider-Man, he does whatever a spider can, he's got radioactive blood, et cetera.

But in Sunday's installment, he suddenly realized that he had worn his Spider-Man costume under his clothes, and the doctor wanted him to take off his shirt. Naturally, this is a major crisis, and no doubt it will take King Features Syndicate months to resolve it.

Now, I'm willing to buy the bit about him having the radioactive blood, because it's essential to the whole Spider-Man character. I can't quite figure out, however, why Peter Parker would spend days worrying that the whole turn-your-head-and-cough routine would inadvertently reveal his status as an arachnid-American, but some how he forgot that he was wearing his goddamned red and blue Spider-Man costume under his freaking clothes.

Apparently, he got the proportionate strength of a spider, but the proportionate common sense of an intestinal parasite.

This is profoundly stupid even by "Spider-Man" comic strip standards. It threatened to open a stupidity black hole in Sunday's paper that sucked into its vortex all of the other comic strips around it. No offense to the people in Louisiana, but I hear there were high wind warnings Sunday all the way from "Beetle Bailey" to "Marmaduke."

Suspension of disbelief is one thing --- it's a comic strip, for crying out loud --- but this was disbelief being suspended from the top of the U.S. Steel Building by 1,500 feet of dental floss. Or spider webbing, if you prefer.

I'm dreading the moment that I open tonight's paper. Because chances are "Spider-Man" has taken another plot twist so utterly moronic as to make people dumber merely for delivering the newspaper.

If you saw a teen-aged kid on your street lying on the ground, drooling, he or she wasn't on drugs. He or she was a carrier whose central nervous system shut down after inhaling all of those concentrated "Spider-Man" stupidity fumes. Personally, I'm going to cover my mouth with a protective mask as I check out the comics page, just to limit my own exposure.

You might be wondering, "Why even take the risk?" Because you never know when you might get a chance to ogle Fritzi Ritz.

UPDATE: Josh at The Comics Curmudgeon posted his own thoughts in the latest "Spider-Man" plot twist early Tuesday morning: "Peter Parker, meanwhile, proves that he has the proportionate IQ of a spider: not only did he forget to remove his 'spider threads' before the inevitable 'customary' medical exam semi-nudity, but he’s chosen to reveal said threads to provide a visual counterpart to his cretinous internal monologue. Sorry, Spidey, but for this desperately retarded move, you deserve a few days locked in a cage in some sort of clean room down at CIA headquarters. Good luck with that. Anyway, to sum up: Spider-Man is dumb."