It's our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! This year, the theme is A Comic Strip Christmas! Each day will spotlight a notable comic strip, and at least three Christmas-themed comics from that strip. Today's comic is Cathy.
Every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day's Advent Calendar post and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened, and you can see what the "treat" for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries.
The drawing for this year's Advent Calendar, of Santa Claus giving out presents to comic strip kids (although instead of a present for Charlie Brown, his dog, Snoopy, gets a present instead), is by Nick Perks.
Day 12 is now opened (once opened, the door will feature an image from the featured comic strip)...
WHO WAS CATHY?
Cathy was a comic strip that was launched by cartoonist Cathy Guisewite for Universal Press Syndicate beginning in November 1976. At the time, there naturally were not a whole lot of comic strips out there starring young, single working women, and so Cathy really stood out from the pack right away. It was the syndicate's idea to name the comic strip after Guisewite, she would have preferred to not be so closely identified with her fictional character.
Guisewite famously noted that there were four basic "guilt groups" for single women, namely Love (feeling guilty about single), Work (feeling guilty for not doing better at one's job), Food (feeling guilty about weight) and Mom (feeling guility due to your parents making you feel guilty about whatever they are making you feel guilty about on that given day).
Those four basic guilt groups were also the four basic plots that carried throughout Cathy's series, which ended in 2010 (Guisewite ended the strip of her own volition). Cathy dated a lot of guys, before eventually marrying her on-again/off-again boyfriend, Irving, in 2005. Charlene was the receptionist at Cathy's office, and the two were close friends. Elektra was Cathy's dog (we could see Elektra's thoughts). Cathy's parents, especially her mother, played major roles in the series, with Cathy's mom constantly trying to get her daughter to follow a more old-fashioned way of living life (her parents' names were apparently Anne and Bill. I don't recall that ever coming up, but I'm sure it did).
As noted, Guisewite brought the strip to a close in 2010, with Cathy discovering that she was pregnant with, what else, a daughter (oh, and yes, when Cathy got flustered, she would often say, "Ack!" That's not just something people made up about Cathy, the character really DID shout "Ack!" at times, like this 1984 strip...
HOW DID CATHY HANDLE CHRISTMAS?
When it came to Christmas, there were roughly three areas where Guisewite spent most of her time in the strip. There was the commercial aspect of Christmas, there was the "coming home to see your family" aspect of Christmas and then, finally, there was the interpersonal aspect of giving and receiving gifts aspect of Christmas.
One of the areas where Guisewite always did a good job was pointing out (and, yes, poking some fun at) the way that women are socialized to essentially apologize for everything that they do, and always feeling like they "have" to do stuff for other people, which leads to a recurring joke for Guisewite in the comic strip about how characters just can't avoid feeling like they need to give each other gifts just because they'll feel guilty if they don't, even if they KNOW that the act of giving relatively meaningless gifts will, in turn, guilt the OTHER person into ALSO giving gifts, which led to an excellent strip where Cathy and Charlene congratulate each other on not giving into the guilt of giving each other a present this year...
Click here to enlarge the comic.
Here's another one on a similar topic, but here is the classic "Gift closet for last second gifts." I don't know if your parents did something like this, as well, but I know my mom always had a few extra gifts like this if needed. Guisewite was good with some of those sort of universal tropes that parents and adult children go through.
Click here to enlarge the comic.
Regarding the commercialism of Christmas, a fascinating aspect of these comics is that, of course, the technology of shopping has changed DRAMATICALLY over the course of this feature. In the early days, Cathy would often be obsessed with mail order catalogs. Now, of course, mail order catalogs certainly still exist, but they're not NEARLY as important as they once were in the public consciousness. However, what's cool to me is that despite the strip ending in 2010, some of these technology-based jokes still work, like the importance of overnight delivery...
Click here to enlarge the comic.
A key recurring gag at Christmas time is just figuring out what to get everyone, and how much to spend, etc. Here, in a comic soon after Cathy and Irving got married, see Cathy's struggle to find a present for her husband...
Click here to enlarge the comic.
For a comic where the parents are such major figures, it is only natural for the Christmas visits to be a big deal in the context of the strip, and they definitely are. Here is a classic one from late in the series where you see how adults can sort of devolve to their younger selves when it comes to interacting with their parents when they return home for the holidays (and how the parents also like to push this sort of thing)...
Click here to enlarge the comic.
A similar concept is about how visiting home can help destress some of the troubles of your adult life...
Click here to enlarge the comic.
