Heart of the City by Steenz for April 21, 2015

Except for Ira. He comes with a briefcase. OK, maybe it’s a sparkly briefcase.

Show him how they poop rainbows.

And they impale their enemies with their horns.

Sorry Dean.

The funny thing is, unicorns could be marketable to boys, if you pick the right source material. From the writings of Pliny the Elder:

“The fiercest animal is the unicorn, which in the rest of the body resembles a horse, but in the head a stag, in the feet an elephant, and in the tail a boar, and has a deep bellow, and a single black horn three feet long projecting from the middle of the forehead. They say that it is impossible to capture this animal alive.”

the unicorn is impossible to capture unless you have a virgin handy to gentle it. without that, you get the whole fierce unicorn tearing it up with the horn, all that muscular horsepower to back it up. rainbowy sparkly unicorn is a recent concept

That Newton was one of the most irritating characters in cartoon history.

Sorry — forgot to say that twice.

And they can only be tamed by a virgin. . . I used to have one, then I lost it.

I was pretty upset about this strip actually. Even though I love Heart of the City and Lio, this strip casually reinforced the stereotype that girls don’t ‘play’ imaginatively like boys and that their toys should reflect that. That’s not the case at all! And gendered toys are a real and persistent problem, and I was sad Mark Tatulli perpetuated such a difference.

I haven’t thought about it in so long, but yeah. That’s how I saw a lot of those kinds of girl toys. They don’t DO anything. Of course, you can pick any number of “boy” toys and say the same.