My mother, who is a total sweetheart, knows that middle sis and I don't take daily papers, so earlier this year she started saving all the comics from her newspaper for us. For several months she was painstakingly cutting out each strip she thought we'd like. Finally, around Christmas-time, she began just saving that whole section of the paper.

The interesting thing in reading through the comics she had gone to the trouble of cutting out was seeing just which ones she thought we'd like. I never gave her a wish-list of 'my favorite funnies' because I would have felt bad asking her to do this (and was, in fact, surprised to find out that she had been). As a result, several strips I would have liked to have followed were not included, and several real puzzlers were.

I mean, Cathy???

One thing I noticed in reading through the entire funnies sections was how few comics are actually funny. A second was how often the same gag was repeated across several strips (really random gags too; not even topical humor). A third was how few strips are done by women, although several strips are fronted by strong, interesting women characters. The comic strips written by women seem to consist of For Better For Worse, Brenda Starr (which I actually read on Sundays in the Chicago paper), and Cathy.

I like For Better For Worse because of its realistic continuing plot (whether that plot is funny or not) and the fact that I have been reading it for so long that I feel like I grew up with the Pattersons, and I like Brenda Starr for its soap opera-y goodness. Cathy, not so much.

It seems to me that Cathy is not just unfunny and repetitive, but insidious. I didn't notice its evilness as much when I was only exposed to it once a week with the Sunday comics (we do buy that paper), but the sickening effect of reading several months of strips at once was impossible to ignore.

I finally had to start skipping over that section of the page. One can only read so many jokes about disorganization, and being fat, and how silly fashions are, and how mothers and daughters are quirky...and fat...and obsessed with being organized...and with shopping, and so on, before it becomes painful even to skim.

Much like the Health and Family section of the paper. I don't know why I read that section every week, because really I don't read it per se. I usually end up flipping through its pages, one eye squinched shut, speed-reading the headlines and wincing at each one. Why would I want to read about all these diseases and problems? Why would I want to let the paper turn me into a psychosomatic freak who thinks I need to follow every regimen the paper recommends for problems that the paper itself was the one to convince me that I posses? The absolute worst part of this section, in my ever so appalled opinion, would have to be the last page, where small items about child abuse and vitamin deficiencies and so on are accompanied by the most inappropriately cheery clip art possible: Sesame Street characters, grinning Winnie-the-Poohs, and the Simpson family.

And Cathy is the same way. If you read enough of it and take it to your heart, you will start thinking that battles with crazy fashions and electronic personal assistants and your weight and fighting how alike your non-organized mother and you are should take up an integral portion of your daily concerns. It horrifies me to think that women have been reading this strip, and I suppose finding it relevant to their lives in some way (?), for like three decades now.

Are these the same women that think that the "I should just apply this (delicious but so fattening food) straight to my hips! Ha ha!" line is genuinely funny and/or somehow clever?

I suppose one should applaud Cathy Guisewhite for never caving and marrying her protagonist off in some contrived 'happy ending', but at the same time, she has a lot to answer to for not helping Cathy develop as a person over the years. She is still the same selfish, body-obsessed, fashion-fetishist she ever was. Maybe she thinks she is somehow exposing the evils of the fashion industry by having Cathy constantly bemoaning how fat the 'in' bathing suit makes her look or how stupid it is for the thigh to be the in-style body part of 2001 or how ridiculous peasant chic can be, but her very absorbtion with the subject makes it take on an importance that it doesn't deserve. Especially because her treatment of it (and her other topics...both of them) is about as funny as a Target print ad.

Except for this one Target print ad that had a picture of Princess Barbie holding her mirror accessory, and in the glass of the mirror they had Photo-shopped a picture of Prince Charming Ken's face telling her how pretty she was, so that the entire ad really spelled out nicely how women today rely on men for self-validation, especially of the physical kind.

Because that was super funny and I clipped it out to pin it over my desk, and Cathy isn't. Cathy's funniness is on a par with all those other Target ads of Mossimo-clad teens pouting because they didn't make the cut for the Talbots ad.

My office was trying to think of ways we could make our dealings with clients more pleasant, and it was suggested, non-ironically, that we could include Cathy cartoons with our shipments to them. Yeah, because nothing says "we are top-notch professionals" like implying that your clients are imbecilic, calorie-obsessed yet too weak to stick to a proper diet, plucky in the face of piles of unsorted photographs fashion victims that you can laugh with at their silly foibles.

In summation: Cathy = not funny, repetitive, stereotypical, and banal

I would have thought the truth of this assessment painfully obvious to everyone even years ago, and yet there the strip is, still in the paper.

Alongside Love is... and Ziggy, so I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised at its persistence.