An Editorial by a Plastic Mannequin

I am not a historian of the comic strip Cathy. As a child I read the strip regularly. As an adult, I’ve glanced over Cathy from time to time. Because of this unique experience with the work of Cathy Guisewite, one could say I am more like Heinrich Schliemann finding a frozen moment in the development of Troy. Like Schliemann, all I see is ruination.

As a child I loved Cathy. Each week I would eagerly open the funny pages to read about her looking for a date, being fat, wanting to exercise, eating too many chocolates, talking to her cat, talking to her mother on the phone; virtually any of the boring things a young professional woman might do.

I wanted to meet Cathy. Not the character, but the woman who created her. In fact, I will admit to having a small crush on Cathy Guisewite at the age of seven. She seemed to know something about all the normal things in life, stuff a seven year old didn’t know yet. And since the strip was drawn very much as a seven year old would draw, I thought her character was cute and figured she would be, too.

I thought she lived nearby. Then again, I thought all the comics writers lived nearby. Dick Browne wrote Hagar the Horrible from up the street. Bil Keane lived in town with the Family Circus. Lynn Johnston owned the awesome house near my elementary school, pouring out For Better or For Worse. This was reinforced by the fact that Peanuts creator Charles Schultz really did live in my town. So I thought Ms. Guisewite was probably somewhere in the neighbourhood and I desperately wanted to meet her.

Things haven’t changed much in the last twenty years. The visual style of Cathy is surprisingly still very much familiar to elementary school students. It’s amazing that after two decades, she hasn’t been able to control her urge for sweets. She finally got that man she was after, but their dialogue isn’t much different than it was before. Her concerns are still quite parochial. For instance, Cathy still thinks she’s fat and makes jokes about exercise.

This last is difficult to wrap one’s head around. Everyone in the Cathyverse is the same size, so one assumes either Cathy has never been fat or she only knows fat people. Both propositions are quite sad. The former suggests Cathy as the victim of a persistent body dismorphic disorder. The latter is a dystopian proposition that Cathy lives in a dark, gritty world of people unable to control their urges, doomed to an early death from heart disease, high blood pressure, or diabetes. Diabetes seems most likely as insulin is never mentioned.

I no longer wish to meet Cathy Guisewite. Her concerns are parochially vapid and her output offers no deep analysis on the human condition. Probably a woman in her late twenties or thirties when I was a child, she must now be in her late forties or fifties. If Cathy suggests anything about her, on top of being too old for me she’s incredibly dull. I would make her angry when she showed me the latest strip and I told her how bad it was.

I’m not her demographic and that’s okay. I am not, of course, seven years old any longer. I am not a stereotypical young professional woman sitting in my apartment with my cats reading the comics in my sweatpants. I am not a middle-aged biddy wont to chuckle at the latest stereotypically male thing Cathy’s companion does.

I’m sure me, aged seven, would be disappointed with this outcome, but I won’t listen to him. He didn’t know how to tie his shoes then. He couldn’t recognize that Cathy is filler; one of the worst comic strips ever to be granted a syndication contract, and one upon which can be saddled all the accusations of decadence and boorishness ever levied against our culture.

Cathy was and is the early warning sign of a culture about to fall, of a grand civilization tottering toward its grave. When historians look back at the United States, Cathy Guisewite will be held up as one of the first signals that something was wrong. They will shake their heads at our folly and ask, “Why was nothing done?”