Sluggo's new backstory (Nancy, last couple of weeks)

[Joseph Nebus]

So, over the past couple weeks Guy Gilchrist has been giving
Sluggo some backstory to explain why it is he lives alone, in an
abandoned house, without any visible means of support. Most of this
has been based on giving him less-visible means of support and cases
of localized stubbornness to keep him from, say, being adopted by
Fritzi or someone else likely.

http://www.gocomics.com/nancy/2013/04/24

My question: is it working for anyone?

I feel like this is all tolerably OK work, satisfying the
obvious silly little questions someone might make if they were trying
to treat the comic strip as something that could happen in the real
world, with answers that at least don't have obnoxiously obvious reasons
they can't work.

However, I also feel like ... well, my ability to enjoy _Nancy_
really doesn't depend on whether I think Sluggo's believable. It feels
like an attempt to retrofit a comic strip that goes back to, like, the
Petticoat Affair into something that'd be a contemporary family-plus-
best-friend comic strip. I guess it can be done, but is it really
needed?

If the explanations were more surprising, I think, I wouldn't
have an objection, but I still think there's some aspects of this that
are over-explaining stuff that we can just take as given in the strip.

I'd be interested to know of other opinions and why explaining
Sluggo works for people.

--
http://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/ Joseph Nebus
Current Entry: Real Experiments in Grading Mathematics http://wp.me/p1RYhY-rN
--------------------------------------------------------+---------------------

[Ted Nolan <tednolan>]

In article <kl9f48$rs9$1...@reader1.panix.com>,

Joseph Nebus <nebusj-@-rpi-.edu> wrote:
>
> So, over the past couple weeks Guy Gilchrist has been giving
>Sluggo some backstory to explain why it is he lives alone, in an
>abandoned house, without any visible means of support. Most of this
>has been based on giving him less-visible means of support and cases
>of localized stubbornness to keep him from, say, being adopted by
>Fritzi or someone else likely.
>

Well, they haven't actually made it explicit (yet?) but Fritzi can't
adopt him because he wants to marry Nancy someday.

>http://www.gocomics.com/nancy/2013/04/24
>
> My question: is it working for anyone?
>

It's working pretty good for me. I was mildly suprised when the "uncles"
turned out to be real people as I was pretty convinced by Sluggo's tapdance
that they were inventions to keep DSS away.

I agree it's not stuff we needed to know, but I don't mind knowing it, and
it's been pretty entertaining.

It's also fleshed out Phil a bit, which *was* needed. (And I'd have to
go back to his first modern appearnce a month or two ago, but my complaint
then was that he looked like a 12 year old and didn't fit as Fritzi's BF
at all. I'm thinking Gilcrest has aged and de-Bushmillerd him a bit, but
I could just be getting used to seeing him..)
--
------
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..

[John W Kennedy]

If you write in the perpetual now, you have to have a bit of retcon
from time to time. Compared to the Bobbsey Twins changing "Baby May"
from a human baby to an elephant, I think this one's kinda cool. Even
as a child in the 50s, after all, I found Sluggo to be a tad
anachonistic. (Fortunately, being a literary locust, I chose to
disregard it.)

--
John W Kennedy
Having switched to a Mac in disgust at Microsoft's combination of
incompetence and criminality.

[osurickbee]

I'm enjoying this for the most part, and feel like Gilchrist has done an outstanding job in making the strip relevant and a must read for me.

My question is was there ever a differing backstory for Sluggo? Being a gag a day for the most part all of my life my only vague knowledge of Mr.Smith is that he was a depression era orphan/tough guy known for being lazy and would probably would have eked out an existence by means less than savory.

Anyone know if he was in the strip back in the days when it had a storyline?

[yardlet5]

Some of the early strips had a storyline.

[John W Kennedy]

The child-who-lives-by-himself was still a viable figure in pop culture
then. As I have said, even as a child, myself, in the 50s, I recognized
it as a somewhat dated trope. But, back then, Nancy, et al., lived in
the vague world of "anytime after WW1". Now, the setting has been
changed to "eternal now", and it is difficult to reconcile a Sluggo
whose lifestyle marks him as older than I am with a Fritzi who whose
pop-culture references mark her as younger. Something had to be done to
resolve that tension, and this solution seems rather clever.

--
John W Kennedy
"Though a Rothschild you may be
In your own capacity,
As a Company you've come to utter sorrow--
But the Liquidators say,
'Never mind--you needn't pay,'
So you start another company to-morrow!"
-- Sir William S. Gilbert. "Utopia Limited"

[Paul Ciszek]

In article <517beeeb$0$25638$607e...@cv.net>,

John W Kennedy <jwk...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>
>The child-who-lives-by-himself was still a viable figure in pop culture
>then. As I have said, even as a child, myself, in the 50s, I recognized
>it as a somewhat dated trope. But, back then, Nancy, et al., lived in
>the vague world of "anytime after WW1". Now, the setting has been
>changed to "eternal now", and it is difficult to reconcile a Sluggo
>whose lifestyle marks him as older than I am with a Fritzi who whose
>pop-culture references mark her as younger. Something had to be done to
>resolve that tension, and this solution seems rather clever.

I have noticed that Fritzi sometimes reverts to a WWII era young dame on
Veterans day. And that's fine, too.


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