nah pop, no style

Here’s a comic we haven’t discussed lately: Sally Forth.

One of the reasons I don’t talk about Sally Forth as often as some other comics is that it’s one of those that I can’t just snag online and repost here — the images of recent strips are protected so you can’t save them to your computer (or link to them from elsewhere). I guess I could take a screenshot, then save that and post it, but that would be a lot of work and would set a dangerous precedent, eh?

My point in bringing it up is twofold. First, I realized only yesterday that all week we had been privy to Ted Forth’s workday life in the strip, a first for it. Being centered on Sally as the working mother, of course, Ted’s work has always been essentially ignored; in fact, lately, it became something of a joke within the comic: someone (I’m pretty sure it was that impudent strumpet Faye) cracked wise about not knowing what Ted even did during the day. I began to postulate that perhaps he worked for an intelligence service of some sort.

Here’s what we know: he apparently works in some sort of office, and it’s populated exclusively by white men, and it would appear actually that one of them is G. Gordon Liddy. And this morning, just as I was thinking of writing on this subject, I saw today’s strip, in which one of the co-workers makes a joke about not knowing what they do at their workplace.

Liddy’s presence suggests to me that perhaps this workplace is in fact Radio America, which would explain a good bit. If I worked there, I probably wouldn’t want to tell others about it either, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, in order to keep employees from realizing what stupid media content they’re responsible for, the higher-ups there kept workers relatively in the dark about what the tasks they did all day accomplished (kind of like working for the Manhattan Project).

Anyway, the second reason I write about Sally Forth is this: in snooping around to try to find an image of a recent strip that I could cop, I learned that the current writer of the strip, Francesco Marciuliano, writes a pretty great web comic called Medium Large and also runs a standup series in Manhattan. The web comic in a lot of cases appropriates characters and situations from famous comics and cartoons, sort of in the style of the myriad “Family Circus” spinoffs, but without one particular comic being used every time. Worth checking out.