Baldo by Hector D. Cantú and Carlos Castellanos for February 09, 2010

Good move, Gracie.

No, Joe, she doesn’t.

Smart girl, our Gracie.

well, in ten years she’s going to need a car dude. Guess whom will have to answer her desperate pleas to change a tire, oil, plugs, or reset an idiot light?

Gracie, tu eres el hombre! Vayas, chica!

Baldo, just do the dishes and then go to the mall.

Potrzebie, I have little doubt that Gracie will be able to handle those on her own. She’ll probably be better at auto maintenance and repair than Baldo, since she will have read the manuals…

Baldo: If you give me $5, I’ll owe you a big favor.

Gracie: Sure! Can I collect my favor immediately?

Baldo: Sure! What is it?

Gracie: Give me $5.

After this exchange, who owes whom $5?

I agree, you agree, the cartoonists agree, yet there is ONE who disagrees…

Then there would have been no joke, would there?

The purpose of comic strips is to present jokes,not to accurately reflect peoples’ likely behavior in realistic circumstances. If in panel1 Baldo had asked “Will you take my turn doing dishes tonight so that I can go to the mall?” and Gracie had simply said “No, do them yourself”, that wouldn’t have been very funny, would it? There would have been no reason whatsoever to commit that exchange to the page (or website), would there?

What avails it a man to say “The comic strip character should have done this” when, had the character done it, it would not have been funny?

Everybody – and I mean EVERYBODY – who reads this strip, whether in the paper or online, understands that Gracie’s handling of the situation was contrived by the authors of the strip for the amusement of the audience. Well, not EVERYBODY. There seems to be one commentator on this site who seems to think that comic strip characters should behave in ways which are morally instructive.