Grantbridge Street & other misadventures: Banjo Lessons by Bruce Jones and Rand Holmes.

Monday, 27 December 2010

Banjo Lessons by Bruce Jones and Rand Holmes.

from Twisted Tales # 5.

6 comments:

Ivan said...: YOW! This is one of the sickest comics I remember from my already sleaze-filled youth: Thanks!
(And Happy New Year!); 28 December 2010 16:43
Daniel [oeconomist.com] said...: There's generally a boil-over of controversy when this story is reproduced, with some readers regarding the story as itself racist in-so-far as Banjo behaves in such a subservient manner. I'd say that, at the least, the story needed to better motivate that subservience.

I've also read objection that the cannibalism is gratuitous; I think that this complaint is misplaced. The cannibalism is a deliberate reversal of the racist cliché that treats blacks as always on the edge of cannibalism. (The cliché seems no longer to be used outside of overtly racist work, but could be found as recently as 1977 in Lucifer's Hammer by Pournelle and Niven.) And surely some of the behaviors found in the more serious EC comics of the '50s were likewise implausible.

[Hmmm… The challenge word is “banneth”. I guess that the ant-spam software has taken a stand, albeït expressed in oddly archaic language.]; 28 December 2010 21:31
Daniel [oeconomist.com] said...: By the way, dogs do scream. It's not something that one ever wants to hear if one has the slightest concern for their well-being. But they scream.; 28 December 2010 21:46
joe bloke said...: I think you're right on both points there, Daniel. but I also think that, ham-fisted though the writing may well have been, Bruce Jones meant well, and meaning well goes a long way in my world.

& I've never heard a dog scream. and I don't think ever want to.; 28 December 2010 23:37
borky said...: RE: Daniel's reference to readers objecting to Banjo's apparent subservience.

I grew up in Liverpool 8 in the UK during the '60s and've had a lot of black mates from different parts of the world.

You'd never get, say, a West Indian behaving like that, but plenty of Africans might - not out of subservience but out of a trusting nature and a willingness to go along with the local way of doing things in order to fit in.

During the '90s I was on this engineering foundation course when one of the openly gay lecturers started subjecting this Nigerian lad I'd befriended to the most appallingly aggressive mistreatment.

No matter what he did or didn't do, he was always in the wrong, as far as this lecturer was concerned.

The lecturer never actually said anything blatantly racist, but'd constantly refer to him as "moron", "imbecile".

The Nigerian lad made all sorts of excuses for this guy, possibly because he didn't want to seem homophobic, but it near made my blood boil to watch a member of one persecuted group picking on a member of another such group.; 30 December 2010 20:35
Daniel [oeconomist.com] said...: @borky—

I'm not claiming that an explanation for Banjo's subservience couldn't have been provided; just that it wasn't and certainly needed to be, in-so-far as to treat something as needing no remark is to treat is as unremarkable, whereäs such behavior certainly didn"t typify real American blacks at any stage in the 20th Century, even those in which the social and political oppression of blacks was at its worst.; 2 January 2011 20:05

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