11 November 2006

Sadie Hawkins Hell

See it here.

The Dinette Set has a fascination with Sadie Hawkins dances as a device, although it's usually in the background. I suppose that thought is that the battle of the sexes theme that often permeates the strip is given ironic expression in the role-reversal of a Sadie Hawkins dance. Either that or it provides a chance to give Verla and Jerry's dysfunctional relationship center stage.

For my part, I usually just find it quaint that there is still a corner of the world, apart from high school, where the tradition of the Sadie Hawkins dance appears to exist, assuming that The Dinette Set is a reflection of the world in which its artist lives.

After today's panel, however, I will never be able to rid my psyche of the hellish mixture of Sadie Hawkins and Salem witch trial imagery to which we are subjected today.

The Marginalia Maleficarum:
  • There are! Six exclamation points! In just! Three dialog! Boxes!!
  • The screen door pants get snuck into the background.
  • Satan, or a beatnick, appears to be wearing a "Mae, Go Home" shirt. I don't get the reference.
  • I think one of the bachelors in the background, whose pate is all that is visible behind Jerry's toupee, has hair plugs.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The "mae go home" thing is probably a Mae West reference, but I don't know enough about Mae West to comment further. Is it too much to hope, to pray even, that Jerry has styled his hair with copious amounts of alcohol based gel, and that as soon as the fire is stoked he will ignite like a bottle rocket, panicking and stumbling into the highly flammable curatins, thus setting off a blaze which puts an end to the hollow lives of these subhuman goons, leaving nothing but charred bones and the lingering odor of dollar store dresses? One can only speculate.