Buzzkill of the Month
Cidu Bill on May 5th 2010
The Meaning of Lila is a gag-a-day strip that never gets more serious than Lila spending too much money on shoes: a fairly shallow strip about very shallow people. The current storyline involved Lila’s best friend getting into an auto accident and losing her unborn baby — yet still retaining the gag-a-day format!
Seriously, what the hell…?
This is not to say that humorous strips can’t delve into serious topics. There have been many well-written examples, including a Calvin and Hobbes sequence about a dead bird. But this is just so out of left field and inappropriate for this particular strip. I mean, even Funky Winkerbean hasn’t made jokes about dead babies yet.
The story arc begins here.
Filed in 2001, Bill Bickel, Meaning of Lila, comic strips, comics | 41 responses so far
Kedamono May 5th 2010 at 12:45 am 1
The whole arc is about Lila losing her job, wanting to adopt Annie, and keeping mum about her friend’s adulterous husband. I see an epiphany coming and soon. Something is going to happen and… Aw, who am I kidding. The reset button will be pressed and we’ll be back to her buying shoes and being shallower than a mud puddle on top a dome.
Winter Wallaby May 5th 2010 at 12:55 am 2
WTF?! The May 2nd strip is particularly bizarre. Six panels is not enough time to transition from “I lost my baby, Lila. I lost my baby” to a cute punch line.
Richard May 5th 2010 at 01:49 am 3
That was awful! How long has the kid with leukemia been a part of the strip?
Charlene May 5th 2010 at 01:50 am 4
Pregnancy loss seems to be a common source of instant drama these days, especially in webcomics. Ctrl-Alt-Del threw in a miscarriage in between the trite geek jokes. For added creepiness, the female character who suffered the pregnancy loss was shown apologizing to a male character for annoying him with her grief. The implication was that by selfishly, irrationally grieving the loss of her child she committed an unpardonable offence: she mildly bothered a man. I guess she should have held a keg party instead.
George P May 5th 2010 at 01:52 am 5
I guess after following the thread in which Tad hit on Lila, and the ones involving Cancerous Orphan Annie, this one doesn’t seem that odd. I guess it’s been building up.
Dr. Shrinker May 5th 2010 at 01:53 am 6
Gee. Zuss. Christ. I personally love when humor is “edgy” or even “inappropriate,” but this is just awful stuff. I’ve never seen such awkwardly combined pathos and “humor” ever. EVER.
Igelino May 5th 2010 at 05:18 am 7
I thought it was bad enough when the leukemia kid got involved. I just plain couldn’t believe it when the woman lost her kid…
I don’t even want to know what happens next week.
Sarah May 5th 2010 at 05:52 am 8
I always read that strip, and I remember being offended by the “where will we put the gag in today” part of a serious storyline, but reading it back it doesn’t faze me as much as when I read it daily.
I suppose it’s just the way young people(well at least the young people I know and myself) come to accept serious things, it’s serious for about 2 seconds then you make little jokes about it and then get over it. It happens in tv shows all the time when serious stuff is just gag after gag and it’s true also to real life things that happen in the news.
yellojkt May 5th 2010 at 06:01 am 9
Lila has gotten very dark. The friend that had the miscarriage is married to a guy that is cheating on her.
Pirk May 5th 2010 at 06:30 am 10
this is so effed up that it’s kind of swung back around to enjoyable
Powers May 5th 2010 at 06:53 am 11
Ugh.
mitch4 May 5th 2010 at 07:35 am 12
Maybe the weight of “Meaning” in the title has started to get to the creators … Hey, let’s get all meaningful…
Nick Theodorakis May 5th 2010 at 07:55 am 13
I don’t think John Forgetta intends to keep the FunkyWinkerbeanize strip permanently. Annie has been in the strip a few months. Forgetta did not originally intend for her to play a big part of the strip (cite: horse’s mouth, or at least his email), but she kind of grew into it. I think he was getting tired Lila’s shallowness (he can’t make shoe jokes forever) so he injected a little depth into the character. Drew was also in danger of becoming the “perfect” girl. The loss of her pregnancy and her marriage (I presume if this keeps going the way it is) is a bit of a reset, albeit somewhat harsh for this strip.
Nick
DW May 5th 2010 at 08:33 am 14
Calling this a “shallow” strip is a misread; there has always been a darker side to Lila (her drinking, debt, work attitude, relationships with men, etc.). Serious issues have been handled in the past as well: after Tad made a pass at Lila and she tried to warn Drew about him, for example. Rather than being an outlier, I think these latest strips are more the norm. After all–it has been weeks, if not months, since Lila’s shoe blog has even been mentioned.
mitch4 May 5th 2010 at 09:07 am 15
Good points, DW and Nick. Thanks for the perspective.
AMC May 5th 2010 at 10:01 am 16
A “gag a day” comic?
Yep, I’d say that’s accurate.
somebody May 5th 2010 at 10:24 am 17
I have to go with DW and Sarah on this: the strip has always been pretty dark underneath it all, and it does a good job of capturing how a lot of my generation (me included) deal with dark stuff. Even in the “I lost my baby” strip Lila does say the right things before Drew falls unconscious — only afterward does the gag show up. I personally like and follow the strip, and I haven’t found this last bit too jarring. YMMV
Karen May 5th 2010 at 10:25 am 18
This is not a light strip. It deals with prejudice against gays, a kid with cancer who is also an orphan, adoption by gay parents, Lila’s lost her job…the list goes on.
But, given all that, it’s actually way more readable than Funky Winkerbean. Instead of CANCERCANCERCANCERDEBTCANCER, Lisa seems to be like this: FUNNY LINE CANCER FUNNY LINE CLEVER COMEBACK UNEMPLOYMENT CAR CRASH WITTY REPARTE INFIDELITY. You know, more like real life.
Daniel J. Drazen May 5th 2010 at 10:48 am 19
WRT to the prevalence of miscarriages, I have to wonder if this hasn’t been inspired by the Octomom affair as well as by the celebs who treat the Third World as a Baby Supermarket. Makes me look forward to For Better Or For Worse when Ellie will be pregnant with April again.
Elyrest May 5th 2010 at 11:25 am 20
I read this strip all the time too and I have always found it rather dark Yes, there is usually joke in there, but not always. Lila is rather a sad creature caught up in drinking too much and trying to find her life. She has been incredibly shallow, but oddly pulls through with weird arcs of pathos and kindness.
Keera May 5th 2010 at 12:20 pm 21
LOL, AMC @16!
Howabominable (aka Lindsey ^_^) May 5th 2010 at 02:26 pm 22
I stopped reading this strip about a year ago, and really don’t regret it. I didn’t like any of the characters and it was never all that funny for me. This storyline was definitely more deep than I remember, but it still doesn’t seem to be particularly well-handled. I don’t know. Maybe if I was more emotionally invested in the characters it would be better, but day after day I couldn’t bring myself to care about any of them, so it eventually went off my daily reading list.
buzz May 5th 2010 at 05:28 pm 23
I think the creator (IIRC the writer has hired a team of pseudonomymous digital artists to create mix-n-match components that can be re-assembled into a variety of strips) is intending to kake major changes in Lila’s life, and this is just the set-up to same.
It’s happened before: FRITZI RITZ was a moderately popular strip about a young working gal util her neice NANCY showed up.
paperboy May 5th 2010 at 05:29 pm 24
I haven’t followed this strip since the once mighty S.F. Examiner stopped doing comics, but I found the strips in the link to be, well, darkly funny. Chuckling, if not laughing out loud, in the face of tragedy. I mean, in the words of Steve Martin “I think we all had a good time tonight; considering we’re all going to die some day!”
Seraphmonkey May 5th 2010 at 05:50 pm 25
Ok, nothing to do with the dark “humor” of this comic, but anyone notice in the May 1st strip the reference to the “didn’t hear the page.” Who the hell has a pager anymore? I mean, you can get a prepaid cell phone for cheap and just pay $20 every 3 months to keep it active, and in an emergency you have a phone, not a little box that beeps at you. If you want to talk about out of touch, that right there has my vote over anything else. Also, isn’t it strange that he keeps his “page” in his pocket? Wouldn’t a nomral person say he keeps his pager in his pocket?
Cidu Bill May 5th 2010 at 06:00 pm 26
Buzz, that concept goes back a lot further than Fritzie Ritz: Remember Thimble Theatre?
mitch4 May 5th 2010 at 06:01 pm 27
Seraphmonkey, I’m with you for one out of two. Yes, it looks like a slip-up that he is made to say “page” in place of “pager” — I’d just attribute that to a typo (or the hand-lettering equivalent of typo).
But on the issue of the pager itself, that likely wasn’t his decision, it’s probably mandated and provided by the medical center, who want a standardized way of reaching their personnel, bought into these systems twenty years ago, and are still using roughly the same system (maybe upgrading and replacing some of the hardware). It beeps, he goes to a house phone, he checks in with the paging operator or maybe the extension that was sent to his unit. The signals come from access points mounted and maintained in their buildings, so there’s no issue of which carrier are you using and does their signal get into the hospital basement, etc.
George P May 5th 2010 at 07:35 pm 28
With Thimble Theatre (as with Barney Google) it was more extreme: the strip abandoned the original characters to follow an occasional visitor who lived somewhere else.
The Bad Seed May 5th 2010 at 09:39 pm 29
I dunno… I don’t follow this strip anymore because I just found Lila herself (and everyone else, actually) so coarse and unlikeable, so this arc doesn’t irritate me like I thought it would because they’re so much more human than usual. Plus the whole arc about Drew’s then-fiancee (now-husband) hitting on Lila just dragged on for freaking EVER, so a couple weeks of this particular arc pale by comparison.
Cidu Bill May 5th 2010 at 11:47 pm 30
Karen, I have to disagree with you about this strip’s serious nature: There’s really been nothing here about prejudice against gays (and in fact for a long time Boyd wasn’t even explicitly labeled as gay - though it was kind of obvious). The gay references in this strip seem to consist of Matthew McConnaughey jokes and at least two jokes along the lines of Boyd wearing women’s clothing (though we’ve never seen him actually do so, and there’s no reason to assume he would; I have it on good authority that most gay men dress like men). As for Annie, she is the most sanitized version of a leukemia patient anybody has ever seen: she’s a plot device who functions as a Greek Chorus.
In another sense, she’s Cousin Oliver.
In what’s always been a lightweight strip, you can have a philandering fiance/husband and play him for laughs. You can have gay jokes. You can make jokes about job loss. You can even have the World’s Healthiest Leukemia Patient. Let’s face it, Tad was never going to stick around for very long, Boyd isn’t going to get beaten by skinheads, Lila’s going to get another job, and Annie’s not going to succumb to her illness. None of it has to be taken completely seriously.
So let’s jump right to dead babies??
If this strip is going to go there, the they should do it right: remember, Drew didn’t miscarry, she lost her baby in an accident she caused by texting while she was driving (which Lila and Annie joked about). How freakin’ stupid is that? I’d like to see Drew charged with manslaughter, but I doubt it’s going to happen.
Realistically, she should be overcome with guilt. Not just the guilt many mothers feel after losing a baby, even though there was nothing they could have done, but guilt nobody can even try to talk her out of, because… she was an irresponsible moron and she was responsible. She should go into a prolonged depression that’ll make Wally Winkerbean look like Bozo the Clown.
But she won’t. This will turn into nothing more than an excuse for her to dump Tad (who will be the bad guy here because he was sleeping around as opposed to, you know, being responsible for the death of a baby), and by next month we’ll be back to shoe jokes.
Winter Wallaby May 6th 2010 at 02:31 am 31
What mitch4 said about pagers. Plus, it’s not just the result of having a twenty year old system that you haven’t upgraded; as mitch4 pointed out, they’re more reliable. I work for a software company, and run-of-the-mill workers who are on call for somewhat important issues have cell phones. But the people who you call for the “Holy *!&!, system X is down and it’s costing us thousands of dollars every second, call the genius who knows the system inside and out” emergencies have pagers.
Matthew May 7th 2010 at 02:28 am 32
Bill, I appreciate your opinion, but these strips moved into seriousness while maintaining the irony of awful things happening to shallow people. I found it fairly witty, and, most of the time, straddling nicely the quotidian & the tragic.
FeelinOld May 7th 2010 at 04:04 pm 33
Elyrest: Agree, Lila is always a bit dark, and this isn’t really out of character, but I wish Drew would get a clue about Tad already.
Pagers: Hate ‘em one company I worked for used a couple of them that got rotated to whatever poor sucker was stuck on call. My company doesn’t use them, but the Docs we work with do as Cell phones seem to be blocked in the Hospitals. I quite often see a Doctor get paged then head for the glassed in walkway between wings and stand there using her cell phone because there is service.
todd May 8th 2010 at 02:53 pm 34
According to a woman who wrote into Ann Landers or Dear Abby, the last thing a woman who just lost her unborn baby wants to hear is any kind of “you can still have another one” comments.
John Forgetta Jun 2nd 2010 at 09:38 pm 35
Sorry I missed this discussion stream. In case anyone comes back to this, I thought I’d respond… I’m extremely impressed with what was said and appreciate the analysis, debate, and commentary. I definitely don’t want “Lila” to be a serious strip or a funny strip that sometimes tackles serious issues in a serious way. To me, there’s nothing worse than sitting down to watch a sitcom only to find that this time, it’s serious and sad. I want “Lila” to talk about real life issues and be about today’s world, but I always want it to be lighthearted and when possible, make people laugh. After all, even in the toughest times, humor is the best medicine. I’m frustrated by how dated so many cartoons are, how irrelevant they seem to real life, or just how silly they are, which is why I wrote Lila to hopefully be real and funny and now. I’m aware that the strip is not for everyone. My inspiration for the strip was “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “That Girl,” and “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd.” As you can see, these are all TV shows. Very few comic strips inspire me, which is why I started “Lila.” Thank you all for reading “Lila” at one time or another and for your great insights. I truly appreciate it and will do my best to keep current readers engaged and smiling. — John
Elyrest Jun 2nd 2010 at 09:54 pm 36
John - I, for one, thank you for your insights. I have occasionally read your blog and from what you have written I don’t feel you takes issues too lightly or burden readers with too much dreariness. You’re not a Winkerbean. I’m still interested in seeing where your strip is going and if you can approach some of the genius of “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd” I’ll be happy.
John Forgetta Jun 2nd 2010 at 10:17 pm 37
I can’t believe you know that show! Very cool
Elyrest Jun 2nd 2010 at 10:32 pm 38
Molly Dodd/ Blair Brown - very cool ladies and the show was wonderfully written. Loved that funky music in the opening. I’m not sure if I had a crush on Molly Dodd or wanted to be Molly Dodd, but the show was a joy to watch.
George P Jun 2nd 2010 at 10:59 pm 39
Of course we remember the show. When I first watched Fringe it took me a while to recognize Blair Brown, given the, um, passage of time, but I eventually did.
Drew still needs to deal with her responsibility for the accident.
Danny Boy (London Derriere) Jun 3rd 2010 at 10:03 am 40
John, thanks for doing “Lila”, and for adding your positive-toned remarks to this discussion. There was actually a second branch to this recent commentary, at http://comicsidontunderstand.com/wordpress/2010/05/14/the-meanness-of-lila/#comments , though that got onto some odd tangents.
Lila the character reminds me of some particular real-life characters at offices I’ve worked in. I have to confess I have more sympathy for the fictional character than some of the real-life ones; but that’s mostly the narrative effect — you give us slices of her inner life and her time away from the bosses and rules and squares, that we may miss seeing in real life without the effort of projective imagination.
I agree with George P just above, and others earlier in the thread, that “Drew still needs to deal with her responsibility for the accident”. For me, that doesn’t mean she has to be upbraided, and in the current strips it’s good to see Lila being purely supportive. (While struggling with reporting on Tad.) But maybe Drew could on her own say something?
John Forgetta Jun 3rd 2010 at 08:01 pm 41
First of all, I can’t believe how many people watched “Molly Dodd,” I thought I was one of a few. Secondly, you’re all definitely making a good point about Drew. I really like the idea of her feeling guilty because she was texting. I will pursue that story arc. Thanks, everyone, for the help!