Poke those Hokes
Jan. 14th, 2023 05:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

1-14-2023
This is not a bad payoff but the setup was far too long.
I'm also impressed by the fact that there's actual backgrounds, actual physical things they're interacting with.
But I feel compelled to note that the last time they were in present-day they were on an isolated tropical beach, and now they're at some lake where it's warm. Just how much traveling do they do? Especially as this scene could be set anywhere. It could be set in Central Park. It could be set in their living room. It could be set at a party where people are talking about how they learned about sex (a frequently hilarious conversation). Instead they are isolated, occupied only with each other. No friends, no family members - including their own kids.
Which, I mean... we had an entire extended story line about how badly they want to conceive children and the final (?) scene is them as adults who have children but the children aren't there.
Island Version Wife Guy Has Arrived
Jan. 1st, 2023 04:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

01-01-2023
Happy New Year! Let's all settle in for a month of writing the wrong year every time we have to write the date.
The Van Hoesen family is celebrating their entrance to 2023 by romping on their own private tropical island. Again.
"How can two professional concert musicians afford family vacations on private tropical islands," you ask? I figure it's one of those fake islands like the one Wilbur Weston discovered when he fall off a cruise ship in a drunken stupor. Those trees are fake, the coconuts in them are fake, and there's a swim-up bar just off panel.
There are people who are reading this strip as a valid joke, that the punchline is Amos screaming about his wife's ass to nobody. And that's, you know. That's a punchline, I guess. Just Amos shouting to nobody and everybody about how sexy his wife is, ultimate Wife Guy move.
But what would be FUNNY would be actual people there with them. What would be FUNNY would be a group of other vacationers all quietly doing their own personal thing and not paying any attention at all to the absolutely normal family doing absolutely normal things and only looking over at them when Amos starts bellowing about his wife's behind, drawing attention to it.
Considering how much they like attention while fucking this would just be foreplay.
I mean, either way Amos is a punchline, but one of those jokes requires McEldowney to put in the work of drawing other people. He really only does that when he needs witnesses to his characters doing something erotic in public.
Their New England beach visits, their tropical island beach visits, their swimming pool visits, they are all completely devoid of others even when Amos or Edda refer to other people (usually in context of Edda being so sexy people are staring at her). Their lake/pond visits sometimes have supporting characters there too but usually they don't.
But whether there are people there or not, White Knight True Paladin Amos is hollering about his wife's sexy ass right there in front of his children, ice cream dripping down his arms. These are the childhood memories his children are forming.
Humpback, eh?
Nov. 15th, 2022 11:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

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!"
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.