Humpback, eh?

[brigid]

11/12/2022

I can just imagine Nelson Muntz or Sherri and Terri cornering the girls on the playground.
"Nice outfits, dorks! Did your mommy dress you today?"
"No, our daddy did!"

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It's usually Amos rocking the turtleneck and blazer, I want to say, with Edda sporting a turtleneck dress and cardigan - as she is now. You know, the kind of clothing that an active young former superfamous ballet dancer and supermodel would wear while walking along the beach front on a brisk fall day. It's just as appropriate as a button down collared shirt under a sweater topped off with a duster/rain coat. A camel colored trench coat?

Sartorial choice aside (see how I'm channeling the strip there by saying "sartorial" instead of "fashion"? I, too, am an over-educated dork who went to Catholic school!), this is a prime example of Amos and Edda interacting briefly with their kids then proceeding to get sexual with each other.

This would be cute if:
1) They don't have an established pattern of getting extremely sexual in public
2) They don't have an established pattern of getting sexual in front of their children
3) They weren't grinding themselves together passionately

"Oh look, a humpback whale!" and then a cute little smooch on a nice fall day. Instead it looks like they're about to tear each other's clothing off and come up for air flushed and sticky.

And the overly wordy "punchline"? "Just who do they think they're fooling" is much pithier and sounds more like what actual children would say. And if the expression were an exaggerated eye roll instead of weary disgust? Ok, that's more teen behavior I guess and these girls are somewhere between the ages of four and eight, that nebulous age range so popular in comic strips.

The small children staring out across the ocean with determined expressions, one saying "I don't see any whales!" is its own form of punchline, as well. One that doesn't rope the children in to their parents' sex lives as well as retaining their childlike naivete. They trust their parents, they look for the whales. They don't think about their parents kissing, or humping and grinding in public.

Kudos to McEldowney for drawing a background, though. His hand was forced, I guess, by mention of humpback whales specifically. It would be pretty odd to mention them against a white, or muddy tie dye, void... although he did represent a zoo that way, once.

We'll draw a curtain upon this little family now, leaving the parents to hump and then make the beast with two backs as their small children wander along a spit of sand next to the Atlantic Ocean.

Good job on sneaking that leg in, I guess.

A Twin by Any Other Name: Mary and... Lolita?

[brigid]

Thanks to rhyming slang "Polly" is a nickname derived from "Molly," a nickname for Mary or Margaret. "Molly" is extremely Irish- at one point "Molly" and "Brigid" were the names that non-Irish people called any random Irish woman regardless of her actual given name.

It's possible that Edda wanted to honor her grandfather (the man who married her grandmother and raised both of Edie's children even though one was not biologically his and was, in fact, the offspring of a Nazi officer) Bill O'Malley with an Irish name for her daughter. And just... look. "William O'Malley" is a man who dutifully attends Mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation, eats fish on Friday, has not discussed an emotion with anyone in his entire life except possibly anger, and has a mother who prays the rosary every night. Whoever Edda's dad is, he was Catholic or pretended to be or converted. Edie wasn't Catholic in her youth but boy she is now. William O'Malley's primary weapon in life is guilt and the fact that he's extremely disappointed in you.

Given what a massively terrible husband and father he apparently was, however, it's also possible that it's just a coincidence and Edda named her child "Polly" because she has terrible taste in names, doesn't realize that it's a nickname, and rejected "Pearl, "Mabel," "Ruby," "Edna," "Mildred," and "Gladys" because none of them have a rhyming name to accompany them.

So what about "Lolly" as a name? It's possible that it's a nickname for Laura or Lauren or another name starting with "L" but lets face it: most of us hear "Lolly" and immediately think "Lolita." It doesn't matter what age the person named "Lolly" is, adult or child, the association is "Lolita." And "Lolita" itself is a nickname for "Lola"! So we've possibly got here two kids whose names are nicknames based on nicknames. Recursive names!

It would also make sense for Lolly to be named after her biological grandfather, the Austrian Nazi officer and retired opera singer. Lorena, Lotte, Louise, something like that.

Amos is apparently Dutch and Lolly could have a Dutch name but Amos... is more a side kick than a protagonist in this strip. His past and parentage has never really been explored other than a week long gag of his mother making him PBBP (peanut butter and bell pepper) sandwiches for school lunch and Juliet having to threaten his parents (?? mother, at least) to come to one of his recitals. He'd never had family at his recitals.

Mary Margaret and Lotte, Polly and Lolly, would be cute names with an interesting story line.

Edda and Amos discussing their names and why they picked those names (Edda is the one who picked them) would be an interesting story. Instead she burst into the panel, announced their names, and they were never really discussed again.

And that's part of the frustration with this strip. There's all these hooks an interesting story could be hung on and instead we get humping on a table in a diner. Frequently. For weeks on end.