• Join The Fed
• Advertise with The Fed

• About Us
• Contact

In This Issue

• Inside Look at Madrid Train Bombing
• On Keenspace, Funnies Go Super-Mega Sweet
• Stop Aborting Our Lord and Savior!
• The Passion 2: The Resurrection
• A Trip to the Britney Spears Museum
• Mail Order Brides Reviewed
• Letters to the Feditor
• Boccaccio's Decameron Gets Zombie-fied
• Campus Tradition of Blood Wrestling Continues
• Fed Fun Book of Zombie Lore!
• Wacky Fun Skeletons
• Crane Droppings on Sharon
• Marauding Interviewer: Back to the Seventh Grade
• Meta-Marauding Interviewer: Does Kate Eat Babies?
• They Watch

Every time I open up a newspaper to the comic section, I find myself deeply offended. The "funnies" generally share a common and most objectionable fault: they are not funny. Some of the strips, such as Peanuts or Garfield or Kudzu, are obstinate offenders. They repeat the same jokes again and again, many of which were probably never funny to begin with. Peanuts creator Charles Schulz has a reasonably good excuse for this repetition, what with his being dead and all. Garfield creator Jim Davis seems to have a serious problem in that he finds sleep and Italian food so funny that he can't stop to write about anything else, even after thirty years. Or maybe he's actually dead too, and that's why he appears with no shoes on the cover of the new Garfield book, tentatively titled The Walrus is Jon. But there's no excuse for Kudzu, a strip about a small town preacher. Not only is the strip dull and predictable, it even dares to be -surprise surprise- moralizing. That kind of crap should not be tolerated in a family newspaper.

Many other strips that don't fall into this first category I find difficult to relate to and not very entertaining. For Better Or For Worse, Cathy, and Pickles are all obviously intended for middle-aged women to read while vigorously completing their three-donut morning coffee break at work; Cathy lulls them into thinking that they can maintain their current weight simply by jumping on a treadmill for one panel every two weeks, For Better Or For Worse paints a vivid but completely counterfactual fantasy of a dysfunctional family that actually does, on some level, love each other, and Pickles convinces readers that the rapid approach of senile dementia and crippling physical decay will be a cozy and humorous relief from the hubbub of this crazy modern world. Dilbert is full of people who wear ties and have real jobs; obviously, I can't relate to that. Finally, Doonesbury and The Boondocks ask that the reader bring to the table a working knowledge of current events and be at least mildly literate. I can just hear your average reader cackle, "Haha, Trudeau, in league with Mrs. Frizzle, you can't trick me with your insidious plots to make learning fun so that I don't know I'm doing it!"

So, yeah, I think the comics in the newspaper suck. But recently, thanks to keenspace.com, I've discovered the underground world of online comics. This might not sound like a big deal at first, but think about it this way: once upon a time, people actually thought Playboy was hot. Now, because of the Internet, we know that real porn has to involve facials, double penetration, animals, pre-teens, or all of the above. How could we ever go back to the days of the coy grin and the beaver shot? Apply this analogy to comics, as literally as you can.

My favorite discovery is Ghastly's Ghastly Comic (http://ghastly.keenspace.com). The masthead reads "Tentacle monsters and the women who love them." For the uninitiated -people too tasteful to watch hentai movies, and other freaks- a tentacle monster is a thing that looks somewhat like an octopus, except that each of its arms is a fully functioning sexual organ. The "women who love them" are invariably adorable little schoolgirls who like it hot and nasty and in every orifice at once. The activity they together partake in is referred to as "tentacle rape", and generally occupies that grainy region between consent and non-consent that we have all come to know and love in Japanese erotica. In addition to frequent graphic sexual depictions, Ghastly's strip is also quite funny. For example, one strip shows a tentacle monster and his friend, a funkadelic black man who looks suspiciously like Jimi Hendrix, watching a girl eagerly play the new "Rape Rape Revolution" arcade game; she is being groped and penetrated by nearly a dozen mechanical tentacles, intently watching a screen instructing her which ones to put in her mouth and ... well, you get the idea. In the next strip, lawyers from Konami claim their patents are violated by the game; the girl sics the machine on the lawyers, and Jimi observes "Looks like their patents aren't the only thing being violated... Freaky, baby, freaky!" My thoughts exactly. I sigh in satisfaction; far distant from those stupid goddamned jokes about the football and the advice stand and the lasagna.

Most of the Keenspace comics I've read are less brilliant than Ghastly, but many of them still feature constant nudity and perversion. Imagine how much more awesome even Brenda Starr would be if she looked like an anime character and was constantly getting herself into humiliatingly hilarious "adult" situations! What if the bizarre sexual undertones between Linus and his blanket stopped being just undertones? Or if Nermal became an adorable furry with humanoid sexual features? This is the point where sweetness stops being just sweetness and becomes super-ultra-mega-sweetness.

It turns out that, in the online underground, creativity still survives in the comic arts (as long as creativity is understood as a euphemism for smuttiness). I blame the evil mass media establishment, with their sanitized comics showing idealized families, in which children never encounter drugs or guns or homelessness or tentacle monsters, and where rape only happens to lasagnas. Web comics look at the real issues in our modern lives. They celebrate the things that truly make it truly worthwhile to be alive; dig this toast proposed by one of Ghastly's heroic tentacle monsters: "To friendship ... and those noises girls make when you fuck 'em. Man! Those are the best!"