Look who I found outside, Chuck!
on August 2, 2015 at 12:01 amChapter: That Seventies Strip
Location: The Walkertons' Texas home
You know, my actual intent was to depict Sal being weirded out by having parents who 1) are alive and 2) adore her rather than constantly fight with her, but I realized just now this could be misread as a “oh, hey, who’s this black dude, wait is this my dad WAIT AM I BLACK???” moment.
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“aaaa I suddenly need to pee !”
sudden realization of “It’s Christmas… and I’m in TEXAS?!?”
Actually, one of the few Christmases I bother to remember was in Big Bend National Park …
I always interpreted it as “Sal being freaked out by having complete strangers claiming to be her parents when the parents who raised her are dead and expecting her to fit into the whole family holiday thing that they’ve been doing with her twin for twenty years and she knows nothing about”.
Exactly.
Pretty much what I thought.
Yep.
I dunno, if my abusive parents had the shit murdered out of them and suddenly these new weirdos were fawning over me like some kind of novelty drink hat, I might try to roll with it. Especially if my brother happened to be as big a goofball as Walky is. Can’t get any worse than literally being slapped in the face for gettin’ uppity!
What confuses me more is how Sal later goes on trying to avenge her adoptive parents’ deaths when they were demonstrably not worth the effort.
To some people, parents are parents. They might not be worth it if you had known them later on, but they raised you and are family. It’s a strange hold and bond.
Am I the only one that thinks “my abusive parents had the shit murdered out of them and suddenly these new weirdos were fawning over me like some kind of novelty drink hat” sounds like the beginning of an episode of The Outer Limits? As I recall, those rarely end well.
come to think of it, I can recall a number of instances of “Look, it’s J!” by people who professed to be related to me
and a handful of times when “Look, it’s J!” was similar justification for COMPLETE STRANGERS to stand around just like that
…I’ve had a strange life
This non-genitist comment comforts me.
Genitism: a word we coined at our house to talk about the ubiquitous-and-universally-accepted-and-depicted-as-normal discrimination in favor of genitors and against adpotees and their families. It’s like the biggest blind spot in all those communities that claim to be against all discrimination. Like this one time that LGBT activist told me “I’ll never adopt, I want to be a parent, not a social worker”. Yep.
Seriously, the child doesn’t fricking care about their genitors. They care about who’s taking care of them. And those genitors who make themselves believe they have this “relationship” with the child (which is actually all in their head) when they don’t know a thing about them, sorry but it’s CREEPY AS FUCK. You’re a stranger, I don’t know you, stop having emotional expectations, no I don’t want your presents, let me go back to my family, thank you, bye.
Oh, and being asked all your life “So, who are your REAL parents? You’re not REALLY half-Arab then?” (even when half your family is Arab including your mother and you spent your kindergarden in that other country and learned the language) is kinda shitty.
Genitism and whitewashing/racism go hand in hand. And they suck.
Can they really claim to be her parents? There’s more to being a parent than just being biologically related. You actually have to raise the kid.
As somebody who was adopted I have to agree with that. To me my parents are the people who raised me, not the strangers who had sex 9 months before I was born…
Ditto here word for frickin word.
I second!
That’s why I call the people who made the child “genitors” and the ones who raised them “parents”.
Well that interpretation would literally never have occurred to me.
However I do choose to consider that Charles might also be screaming internally.
Oh, hey, look – Sal’s here! Quick, somebody hide the windows!
And that, kids, is how curtains where invented.
s/where/were/
If you wanted to make a list of all the things that are neurotic triggers in Sal’s life, you would be writing for a long time!
Huh, I’m reading this more as ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, these people speak of me as if they were talking about stray pet they found.’
Was it even established at this point that Sal and Walky were of mixed-race? It’s kind of hard to tell from the art style at this point.
They’re ambiguously brown.
Great, now the theme song from the Ambiguously Gay Duo is stuck in my head…
How could this be an ‘WAIT I’M BLACK’ moment? Wouldn’t one of her adopted parents had to have been black as well, what with Beef having to fit in with the family?
Beef’s biological parents/Sal’s adoptive parents were both white.
But the difference in appearance racially is pretty easy to justify if you’ve been told you’re related. The much more prominent tip-off that Beef was adopted was just that no one else in the Walkerton family is anywhere near that TALL 😛
Tallness means nothing, me and my sisters are fare taller than anyone in the last three generations of my family.
Beef has always been drawn as being fairly dark as well.
Well… Beef is drawn about as dark as I am in the summer, and I’m super-white.
I mean, again – mixed race kids CAN appear that light skinned, so it doesn’t really matter too much — but the height thing? All the guys in my family are about a foot taller than everyone on my wife’s side.
If all the dude’s in Walky’s family are his height, the one tall guy is sort of a red flag.
Ha. If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think I even realized he was supposed to be black when I first read this. I don’t think it really comes up in the story, right?
Then again, when I first read this, I was marathoning IW all night instead of writing a paper, so my memory might be fuzzy.
Yeah, I think the art style kinda prevents it from being read that way. The shading is pretty low-contrast.
I just interpreted it as Sal freaking out because these two weirdos are just standing there, staring at her, like she’s some kind of object, without saying a word.
So, kinda like a reverse “The Jerk”?
Based on how she’s colored, it’d be a little weird to be surprised you have a black parent.
As a reader I’m much more weirded out by Sal’s parents than Sal is. I’ve been trying to figure out Sal’s complextion all this time. I figured she and walky were east Indian in decent from the southern U.S. Like Bobby Jindal or something.
I had always assumed the same, until I read the part in DoA where their race came up. I think it was mostly their straight hair (and the length of Sal’s) that made me think that, and with the art style and lack of color in these strips I couldn’t really tell what their parents’ races were, so yeah.
Until I read that same part in DOA, I always assumed they were simply caucasian, even 100th generation Norwegians get darker skin tones than they sometimes. I just thought Willis reflected that by giving his “white” characters varying skin-tones, I mean just look at Mike and Joyce up there, Joyce is considerably lighter than Mike but I don’t remember reading anywhere that he’s supposed to be a mix ?
Well you’re right, “white” people can have various subtly different skin tones, and that’s probably why Willis gives them different shades. But no one as dark as Walky and Sal would be called “white” in America. Of course, race is kind of an important thing here.
They could be Italian.
I think it has a lot to do with Willis’s style and his history with these characters. These are characters he’s been drawing since he was a child, and I gather from his previous comments that originally they were conceived of as white. Then at some point he decided to make them black (or biracial if you prefer), but because of his history with them didn’t really change anything about their appearance except their skin tone. Only much later does he acknowledge that their hair is somewhat unusual for black people.