Chris Crosby and Owen Gieni
“Sore Thumbs”
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Owing equal amounts to Paul Conrad and Calvin and Hobbes, Chris Crosby and Owen Gieni’s Sore Thumbs is a blunt yet pointed satire of leftist thought in the United States. The strip uses the device of its protagonist’s fantasy world to poke fun at popular Democratic-party standards, while simultaneously endorsing the creators’ own ultraconservative ideals in the subtext.
It’s easy to mistake the strip as a raucous, nasal Democratic broadside, and no doubt some readers remain blissfully ignorant in that belief. This merely serves to illuminate the creators’ cleverness. Their protagonist, Cecania, is a sympathetic (if dense) character, and there’s an easy gradient toward nodding one’s head along with the views she expresses. Though rendered in third person, she is the reader’s point of view.
What rapidly becomes apparent, however, is that Cecania denies such sympathy — or empathy — to those who hold differing political beliefs. Her Republican brother Fairbanks is a round-headed caricature, a straw man in role and form, and her sinewy, Objectivist mother is a harsh vertical rectangle with an unrelentingly sour expression. Neither is allowed a debatable opinion or even a hint of considered thought.
This is the strip’s Wattersonian heritage: Cecania lives in an imaginary world, free of ambiguity, where tiny bears exist for the sole purpose of extra cuteness; where hunky soldiers fit into comfortable stereotypes (and where only the stereotypes held by others are wrong); where cars run on tap water and seaweed if only you really want them to. Cecania’s colorblindness (slyly reinforced by the strip’s grayscale palette) is Crosby and Gieni’s attack on liberals, and it’s a vicious attack indeed.
The strip is exceptionally well-done, rich with layers and allusions. For one instance, note that the strip’s art bears a heavy Nipponese influence, a clever way to recall the 1980s, which was the era of the first surge of manga and anime into Western popular awareness, and of the States’ Reaganistic conservative heyday. For another, note that Cecania’s top-heavy figure and bright pink hair seem designed to appeal directly to the video-gamer demographic–a segment of society that longs for beings like her to exist in their own collective fantasy world.
All that said, however, I can’t recommend it without reservation, simply because of its unoriginality. The double-edged politico-comic is a clever idea, but leftist Bruce Tinsley has been doing the same thing with his own Mallard Fillmore for over a decade.