A Brief Moment of Culture, Part XIII
October 30, 2011 ~ 7 Comments
I like the way the last illustration came out on this one. Man, did this story require me to draw a lot of gerbils.
This installment is dedicated “to the purple Smurf.” Andrew had probably just finished telling me how, as a child, he was traumatized by watching the terrifying purple Smurf episode of “The Smurfs” while home with a high fever, so it came across as some kind of horrible hallucination. This would not be the last time the purple Smurf episode would come up in my comics.
Oh, and hey!
It’s the new two-volume Narbonic omnibus edition! I’ve been working hard on this sucker, and it’s a thrill to have boxes upon boxes of it here. Although not as thrilled as I’ll be to have boxes upon boxes of it gone.
If you’re in the San Francisco area, there will be a Narbonic book release party at Borderlands Books from 5:00-7:00 PM on Saturday, November 19. I promise cupcakes and wine.
I’d never seen The Smurfs, so I clicked the link. I can understand why this episode would scare a child, but I found the entire cartoon horrifying: unfunny, obvious and badly animated. Why was this popular? Plus, how would it have benefitted the purple fly—or even the purple Smurfs—to turn everyone purple? (Maybe it’s a generational thing. I can’t fathom the appeal of The Brady Bunch or Scooby Do, but as a child I watched both Gilligan’s Island and Lost in Space without realizing they were crap, so go figure.)
Pink wine?
I know what I’m asking Santa for Thanksgiving! (And by “Santa” I mean “My wife who controls the checkbook with a titanium fist”.)
It wasn’t just the fever. It really is some kind of horrible hallucination.
@Kay; I once found myself constrained to stay in a room where the Smurfs were playing on TV, so I saw two whole episodes. They appalled me! The “messages” of both struck me as immoral and/or undesirable; terrible lessons to preach to children. (One of them presented the idea that science was bad (presumptuous, bordering on wicked) but that magic was good. The other made it clear that there was no moral imperative to keeping a promise made to someone who was “bad”.
That was many years ago; obviously the experience has scarred me for life!
I wish I could buy that. So much.
There is a good reason for “The Purple Smurf” to horrify a kid. The original story in the Smurf comics is a “Zombie Apocalypse” type story that predates “Night of the Living Dead”