I was alerted to today’s ‘Get Fuzzy’ comic strip by ZRC Cultural Historian Andrew Leal, who keeps up with the newspaper comics industry for us. I’ve taken the liberty of posting the comic below, so you can read it before the ZRC take:

Two things about this strip interest me from a ZRC perspective. First, the idea of casual violence against the Differently Animated, gruesome mayhem even, is now thoroughly acceptable even in the rather restrictive, family-oriented newspaper comics industry. Naturally, such excessive violence against any other oppressed minority group, even mentioned in passing, would be unacceptable to editors across the country.

The second point of interest came in the question of whether Bucky, or ‘Get Fuzzy’ itself, is Anti-Zombie. I tend to think not, actually. Much like ‘MadWorld’, which was rated as Zombie Neutral because it applied grotesque atrocities to the Zombies and Living communities in equal measure, Bucky hates everyone and everything more or less equally, to the point where his sheer misanthropy extends even to harmless thank you notes, and he is more than willing to make his alleged ‘owner’ the target of his scorn.

In other words, he’s a cat, albeit one that can talk, and as such is an amoral monster, judged by human standards.

About the worst I think we can say here is that this particular comic shows us that horrible individuals, like Bucky, will easily pick up on the currents of Anti-Zombie prejudice in our society and use them as outlet and inspiration for their innate cruelty. This is yet another reason we need to remain vigilant about the Anti-Zombie media.

Naturally, the ZRC will keep up the vigil on behalf of all the Differently Animated.

(You can read more ‘Get Fuzzy’ here)

Tags: Comics

This entry was posted by John Sears on Sunday, February 20th, 2011 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.