Week of 11/11/2024 Sunday-Edition

On today's Sunday edition of the newsletter, I review Naughty Bits #35 and recount my final day at San Diego Comic Con!

Naughty Bits #35 Review

Released in November 2001, this was the first Naughty Bits issue to come out since the September 11 attacks, and boy, is there a lot to unpack today, both in the ways you’ve already predicted and fairly mundane ones you’re aren’t thinking of. Roberta Gregory introduces the book with her usual preface talking about what she’s been up with her art and personal life since the previous issue. By this point, the series’s release schedule has reduced from thrice a year/quarterly to biannually due to Gregory being occupied with other jobs such as animating the cartoon adaptations of Bitchy Bitch (at this rate, I should eventually write an article about those). Speaking of which, the Bitchy story was originally intended to be longer, but 9/11 made her change the story to a shorter one that reflected the general social atmosphere and paranoia at the time in the opener “Bitchy Bitch Goes Through the Same Stuff as the Rest of Us.“

The greatest strength here: Midge is a cantankerous Bitchy Bitch about everything. The greatest weakness: Midge is a cantankerous Bitchy Bitch about everything! Throughout the series, we have seen Midge exhibit bigoted views towards almost every minority group from Hispanics to blacks, Jews, Arabs, you name it, a byproduct of her upbringing. However, Midge’s bigotry doesn't fall into stereotypes like the redneck or Karen. If anything, she’s an “ordinary” (throwing around the word very loosely) middle-class working white woman who displays disdain for those archetypes but it’s mostly from an intelligence (or lack thereof) perspective rather than one of social concern akin to the smug performative liberal although she frequently rants about societal grievances when it affects her, which makes her a complexly written character. We even see this when Midge is ranting about George W. Bush’s fearmongering and pro-corporate policies.

That said, there are times when I think Midge’s racism is played up so much without a FOIL to counteract her thoughts that she becomes more insufferable than entertaining or interesting to deal with. While it’s not as bad as in some other plotlines (looking at you “Bitchy Bitch Takes a Vacation”), it’s definitively still discomfiting to read Midge complain about how all Muslims are going to want to bomb America or how the Middle East deserves to be bombed because of 9/11. I get that Midge is a Bitchy Bitch for a reason, but if Roberta Gregory is going to lean into the bigotry element this much. I would have appreciated even a minor Arab character going about their day normally as a subtle reminder Midge is an unreliable narrator, especially considering how much anti-Arab and Islamaphobic sentiment was growing. Overall, I’m pretty ambivalent about the entire thing.

Next, we have a 7-page essay about the life of the Catalan-Mexican painter Remedios Varo. While it may seem like a random piece to include in this comic book, I like it when Gregory decides to just write about a subject she’s passionate about. Since she didn’t want to run into any copyright complications, she uses her interpretation of Varo’s paintings which are a delight to gaze at.

Finally, “2001: A Midwest Odd-yssey” chronicles Gregory’s then-recent book tour throughout the Midwest and Toronto with her friends Donna Barr (also a cartoonist) and Walter Crane. I dig travelogues, so when you combine that with comics, then you’ve got my full attention! The best parts were seeing how the signings went in each locale which ranged from excellent to atrocious such as one scheduled at a comic shop in the middle of a weekday where literally no one recognizes Gregory’s or Barr’s work and mistakes them for store employees. I laughed when a reader present a fanart of her kissing Bitchy Bitch; she definitely had a future in internet fandom (supposing she hadn’t already been in that space). But without droning on for too long, this was my favorite story in the issue.

And who can forget the letters page?

SDCC Day 4 Overview

It’s the last day of San Diego Comic-Con, and I’m still up and going entering the convention center once more at the same time in the morning. Still not standing in Hall H because I had other plans in mind. And by other plans, I just really mean the Jellystone Cartoon Network crossover premiere at 1 PM. In the meantime, I was back making my rounds around the showfloor although I went out of my way to avoid purchasing anything besides stickers after throwing away oodles of cash on comics, not that I regretted it (though I’ll still sell off the weaker ones in my haul).