This was not the scheduled comic for today, but extenuating circumstances have left me no other choice.

This Wednesday I received a letter in the mail from my grandmother, who was concerned with my frequent use of the “F-Word” in my comics.  I was angry about the letter, and in my anger I originally posted it on Action Athena.  But now it is on Action Athena no more.

Instead, you get my two cents:

I feel pretty fuckin strongly about swear words, and one’s right to use them.  And why not?  I grew up with them.  I think my parents tried to hold their tongues a bit when Phoebe and I were little kids, but by the time we hit high school, the jig was up.  Mom swore as she hauled 2x4s around the garage; dad as he filled us in on his long days of small town politics.  Phoebe took to swearing with talent and delight (it was a natural progression from her love of bathroom humor); I wasn’t bad myself.  I’ve always been grateful I grew up with parents who treated me with respect–and I think that swearing was part of that.   When I visited houses of some other friends, where there were rules and punishments for everything, I noticed how distant the parents were from their children.  But there were never any lofty pretenses in our house.

When I chose my college, I looked for something similar.  To paraphrase alum John Krakauer, Hampshire is a place “where no ivy grows.”  The students here did not choose this college because it sounds good when said with a flash of pearly teeth at a cocktail party.
“Now where did you go to school?”
“Hampshire–but it’s in Massachusetts, not New Hampshire.  No, not Boston–out in Western Mass.  In Amherst.  No, not Amherst College.  Hampshire.  Yeah, I don’t know what my GPA is, we didn’t have grades.  I took a class at Smith once; got a B.”
Hampshire is not about prestige; it’s supposed to be about being innovative and radical (Ralph Hexter is currently hammering nails into THAT coffin, but that’s for another post).  Anyway, I came to Hampshire because I was looking for something different, and, to some degree, I’ve found what I was looking for.

Last fall I took a class called “Freedom of Expression,” where we explored media censorship and the First Amendment in great depth.  This was just three months after George Carlin’s death, at age 71 (Note: That’s pretty old!  Note also: that dude swore a LOT!).  During one class period, the professor played us the entirety of Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television” bit.  He neglected to close the classroom door, and halfway through the monologue, an angry secretary came by and shut it for him, giving all of us a dirty look.  I loved the professor for playing us that clip–and for exploring the topic of censorship with such an open, intelligent mind.  This year, he is the member on my Div III committee.

For my final in that class, I researched Frederic Wertham and his “Seduction of the Innocent,” the novel that brought about the “Comics Code,” i.e. heavy censorship in comics.  I find it continually fascinating how much power adults think various media has over young people; if it was comics in the 50′s; it’s TV and videogames today.

Two things freed comics from the censorship spell: 1) they lost popularity and became a niche thing (no longer the pastime of all American children–just the hobby of a few nerdy adults), and 2) along came R. Crumb and the Underground Comix movement.  People like Crumb, Aline Kaminsky, Bill Griffith, Art Spiegelman, Melinda Gebbie, and many others, reinvented comics by proving that they were not “just kid’s stuff”.  How did they do this?

With SWEAR WORDS!  And, okay, plenty of sex and drugs and rock n’ roll too.  The point is, they had to push their comics to the limit–to the inappropriate–in order to make them mean something.  I’m not saying that’s what EVERY artist has to do, EVERY time.  But it has obviously been crucial to what art “is” since the beginning of time.

All of my interests (comics, B-movies, burlesque, porn…) are things that are/were under-appreciated.  Things that are/were considered, as my grandmother put it, “crude, rude, in very bad taste.”  That is why I love these things.  My parents didn’t raise me to be a tight-ass.  I didn’t go to college so that I could become one with the uptight, the uppercrust, the academia.  (Jesus, I sound so fuckin’ Hampshire!)  I want to make comics that are true to my own life, and that life includes swearing.

And hey guess what!  Because it’s me, there’s also a feminist angle to this.  I also use swear words (or poop jokes, or sex jokes) because I don’t ever want to be one of those women who squeals whenever anything inappropriate happens.  A Proper Society Woman of Good Breeding would never say “fuck.”  But a slut or a bitch might.  Those are two other “bad” words I use with relish.  Words only have power if you let ‘em. Perhaps the good ol’ F-Bomb has already been drained of its power.

What makes the whole “Fuck” debate so funny is that the word is used in about a MILLION different ways.  Is it noun, adjective or verb?  Is it even about sex anymore?  It’s so all-purpose!  It’s like the magic bullet!

Fuck.  I think I’ve run out of things to say.