Slump

[brigid]

9 Chickweed Lane for 11-24-2022

Have you ever sat up a beanie baby and then seen it slump forward?

That's how Amos used to stand. His spine just completely relaxed, shoulders slumped down, head drooping, pelvis jutting forward. I mean... stand up straight then just let your whole spine slump down. Feel how your body changes with that bit of posture alteration?

By 2000, though, McEldowney had graduated to Amos standing fully upright. He was still in high school, he still wore baggy old man pants (something that has never changed, it's a bedrock of the universe), but he had good posture. Straightening his spine, squaring his shoulders, also pulled his pelvis into place.

McEldowney had depicted Amos in these flashback sequences with... really weird posture. He's slumped, but his shoulders are sometimes back and not forward, like he has a major spinal issue that thrusts his pelvis forward. His head juts forward. When he walks, or stands, he leans with his groin. This position looks uncomfortable to maintain.

It not only differs from the way McEldowney actually drew a younger Amos, this is the stylized way a lot of people (including McEldowney) draw old men. Amos has always hitched his pants up to his nipples but where it once looked like "nerd kid who doesn't understand how belts work" it now looks like "70 year old retiree cosplaying as high school student."

The guy's been drawing comics for 30 years and even if he hasn't kept old strips himself to refer to he can easily comb through the archives hosted by various syndicate sites, including gocomics.com. It would not be hard to go back and LOOK at how he used to draw Amos. It also wouldn't be hard for him to use a search engine to look at the way that human bodies work, how humans stand, what different postures look like.

Anyway, in this strip a teenager has just informed his principal, who is the member of a religious order, that he and another student are going to grow up and have sex.

This is a normal thing that teenagers do all the time.

If there's one thing teenagers do it's go out of their way to find religious authority figures to announce their sex plans to.

McEldowney not only wants us to know that these two have always wanted to have sex and have children, he wants all the adults in their lives to know it too.