dreadedcandiru2 | Entries tagged with cesco the great

Now, as a bit of a palate cleanser, I'd like to talk about how Cesco Marciuliano's syndicate has seen fit to award him the writing duties of the long-running soap strip Judge Parker. The reason this is of interest is that the premise is almost as jarring as that of Funky Winkerbean. Instead of whining homely people who, upon failing at a simple task, simply give up and moan about how cruel their lives are and how helpless they are to improve anything, the strip has a collection of rich, pretty people who go from minor crisis to minor crisis and end up better off than when they started. This, Cesco reasoned, made no sense in this or any other world so he's set about seeing what would happen if they endured something harsher than a favoured brand of conditioner being reformulated.

This was accomplished by having the daughter of either main character Sam Driver or title character Alan Parker's many enemies embark on an elaborate revenge scheme involving kidnapping Sam's daughter Sophie. This, and an improbably weird accident involving older daughter Neddy's business venture falling down a sinkhole and Alan's writing partner turning out to be a deep-cover Russian spy messing with him has caused them to fall apart because they're even worse at dealing with an actual crisis than Ted Forth is. They've never lost before and it's making them nuts...just as it would in real life. Anyone can smile when they win so much, they get tired of it. It's when people lose that you find out who they really are...which is what we're about to find out.

As we know, we're about to have the next phase of the stupid revenge fantasy against some man Lynn was angry with be implemented when Connie returns from her exile in the bleak, terrible place where Elly and the Pattersons never contemplated going ever in triumph with an instant family. Well, anyway, that's the way Elly sees it. As I've said before, the Patterson children take from Elly an irritating belief that having to go to someone else's place of residence instead of having them come to you is a humiliating defeat at the hands of someone who doesn't know her place. What they also take is an utter lack of curiosity about places they don't frequent.

This is why I assume that when Mike is asked to imagine what Lawrence could have been doing all that time in Thunder Bay, the Delicate Genius would shrug and draw a blank because he simply cannot imagine that Lawrence would do anything at all without him being involved. Much like Cesco Marciuliano's interpretation of a character someone else created, Mike shares with Hilary Forth the odd belief that people just stand there waiting for him to bless them with his presence. The only difference is how the creator sees this. Lynn doesn't notice anything especially wrong while the man preaching about the Evils Of Procrastination sees it as just another unsettling part of a crazy child's psychopathology.

The interesting thing about Sally Forth these days is that Cesco has injected a sort of audience surrogate named Cynthia into the strip. Her function is to talk to Sally and ask questions that she would rather not face because answering them honestly means that Sally is doing something intensely stupid for an absurd and counterproductive reason. She doesn't mind it at all when Cynthia talks about Ted's daddy issues or the need he has to win all the time or his need to hold onto his childhood like a starving octopus engendered by his complicated relationship with an unyielding father, neurotic, negative mess mother and loutish jock older siblings because she can't make a secret of being ashamed of him.

What she does mind is being told hurtful things like "quit giving your neurotic, domineering asshole of a mother power over you because the petty, selfish bitch would sooner die than let you win." Sally can't follow this advice because doing so would pretty much destroy who she is as a person because she wants to think that she can actually fix her mother. Realizing that she can't isn't going to proceed as it normally would. A normal person would shrug, say "Well, I'm never going to really get along with my parents or siblings so I don't need more abuse. If they don't like it, f*** them all through the heart." Admitting that she can't do anything to make Laura wonderful would send Sally into a death spiral of apathy and despair quicker than realizing that she's doing the same damned thing to Hilary for the same damned reason Ted channels Mussolini whenever he coaches Little League. Simply put, Sally cannot do the sensible thing because she's irretrievably broken and doesn't want to be fixed.

It was just yesterday or so when the debate turned around to wondering why the Hell Elly and Lynn felt guilt about not visiting distant relatives. The consensus seemed to be that they live in a world where they think that they have to despite that being counterproductive, silly and wrong. That being said, the Pattersons aren't the only family in the four-panel universe who needlessly complicate their lives in the pursuit of a phantasm involving their relatives. When Francesco Marciuliano took over writing the comic strip Sally Forth, he asked himself "What would make a woman like Sally the perfectionist she is?" The answer he came up with is "Someone who grew up to be overly responsible because her mother is a high-functioning alcoholic with an aversion to being blamed for the chaos her selfishness creates and a smug, selfish refusal to see anything anyone else does (especially if that someone is Sally) as being good enough." Having thus turned Sally into Sidalee to Laura's Vivi, he proceeded to warp the annual Thanksgiving dinner into a hellish nightmare in which Sally stupidly and uselessly goes into a frenzy in a doomed and futile attempt to elicit praise from someone who doesn't have it in her.

The reason that I mention this is that it makes a lot of God-damned sense to assume that Elly herself is also a high-functioning alcoholic who sees the world through a layer of negativity in which she's beset by fools trying to crush her. She also has an aversion towards admitting blame and, since nothing can ever be good enough, a blind refusal to praise her children. Since every day is like Thanksgiving at Casa Forth, it thus seems to me that Lynn doesn't really need to make a Thanksgiving strip because every day is Turkey Day at the Pattermanse.

As we know, there was a big, long arc back in, oh, nineteen eighty-eight that had Elly and the family pack up and spend Christmas at Exile Farm. As I’d mentioned in my last essay about said story line, there were three purposes that Lynn and Elly had in mind. The stated purpose for that little excursion into appealing to worse problems was that they all decided to have Christmas at The Farm with The Family just like on TV. The second purpose was, of course, to adjust Michael and Lizzie’s awful attitudes and teach them to be grateful to their wonderful parents and not take things for granted and, well, you get the point. The third purpose, of course, was to isolate Michael from that scary young girl and her scary body language and the scary fact that her scary existence meant that Elly might have to face the scary fact that her dance card was empty because she was a scowling, short-tempered idiot who pissed away her chances taking herself too damned seriously. Since Lynn approves of silencing complaints that mean that she might have to adapt to other people by ranting about refugees in war zones, the Pattersons were depicted as good-hearted people whose good intentions got wrecked by an ungrateful brat kid who doesn’t know what life is all about.

Contrast this with the upcoming Christmas on Long Island arc in Sally Forth. What is happening here is that Ces clearly indicates that Sally is embarking on a ruinous folly because she’s transfixed by a crippling delusion that makes her life and the lives of everyone in her family worse. While we see that were she and Ted to simply cut their horrible relatives out of their lives and focus their remaining years on being happy with themselves and making their daughter’s life better, they would finally get the peace of mind that they deserve, Sally simply cannot see it that way. She won’t admit that she should simply give up on her selfish mother and lazy sister any more than she and Ted can admit that he should stop beating himself up about not being a traditionally ‘manly’ man. Thus, they intend to not only waste a Thanksgiving being made to feel bad about themselves by a drunk and a parasite, they also intend to wreck a Christmas being made to feel like crap by Ted’s jerk father, clingy mother and brutish siblings. Worse, they intend screwing up Hilary’s budding romance with Jon in order to sacrifice her happiness on the altar of futility.

We thus have two crappy Christmases that could have been salvaged had the ‘adults’ not been deluded nitwits. The difference is that Ces knows his characters to be lunatics immolating themselves on a pyre of idiocy; Lynn does not. Why, he even handles the whole "You could be a war-zone living in a refugee" bullcrap from friends better; I mean, we know that Ted doesn't really want to go to Long Island so he can feel like shit all over again and is only doing it to indulge his wife's need to hope for an impossibility but Faye does not. This is much better than Eva having all the facts at hand and still blathering about how since April isn't a starving quadruple amputee orphan who has to travel fifty miles every morning to the hatpin factory to feed her nine starving quadruple amputee siblings, she can't complain about anything. Also, instead of having a rich kid complain to a poorer kid about problems she's too exalted to have, we have a poor kid who sort of wishes that she'd know what it felt like to have Hilary's problems. Leave it to Ces to discover the best way to appeal to worse problems: by giving the person talking sense into the other person worse problems.

Now that I’ve explained why I’m sort of glad to see the back-end of Ray Billingsley’s tribute to self-defeating behaviour and snippiness, I’d like to tell you why I’m fairly glad to no longer have to deal with Ces Marciuliano’s look at the horrifying after-effects of familial dysfunction. What started out as a bland, sitcom family living in a bland, sitcom world has, under his supervision, mutated into a hellish look at a family of creepy outcasts who barely qualify as sane, let alone human. What this means is that the only two people I’m going to miss are Faye and Nona owing to their tendency to call Hilary out on being a bossy lunatic with a fear of failure. Granted, Hilary tunes them out because she’s as nuts as her folks but at least they tried.

I won’t, on the other hand, miss Ralph Preston much at all. What Cesco did with him is to take a generic character type like the Pointy-Haired Boss and show us what a dysfunctional and pathetic slob he’d have to be in real life. What we see is a delusional, self-aggrandizing hindrance who spent most of his life taking credit for Sally’s hard work while at the same time not noticing that she’d been carrying him all that time. I also won’t miss the fact that what made him horrible was not that he was a useless load of sludge but that he didn’t listen to her when she started lecturing him.

I don’t feel especially sad that I won’t have to look at Sally’s work wife Alice any longer. There’s just something off about her that I can’t describe but don’t like.

I won’t miss Sally’s younger sister Jackie. Having to look at the lazy drone be baffled and angered by the suggestion that she actually do things for herself, her default presumption that people will live her life for her and her utter lack of any gratitude are as irritating as the realization that Sally isn’t strong enough to cut this jerk out of her life.

Likewise, I don’t see myself as being all that choked up at having to no longer see their mother Laura. Her vanity, her default assumption that she’s a victim because her children’s need to have an involved parent got in the way of her contracting cirrhosis of the cerebellum, her inability to be pleased by anything Sally does, her belief that people exist to cater to her fragile ego and Sally’s inability to tell the old biddy to freaking die already make her absence from my watch list gladdening to my heart.

I’m equally glad to see the back end of what started out as “Generic Wise-beyond-her-years Sitcom Daughter” only to mutate into “Horrifying Combo Platter Of Her Parents’ Psychoses” Hilary. She combines Sally’s bossy nature and lack of tolerance for dissension in the ranks with Ted’s being a delusional maniac who doesn’t know what planet he’s living on half of the time.

Speaking of Ted, I liked him better back when he was a flat character who was only concerned about work, sports and meatloaf. Watching him degenerate into a pop-culture zombie who sees his life as being a sitcom and seems to be suffering so severely from Stockholm Syndrome that he believes that his killer robot wife is the only thing keeping him from working at Montoni’s is the second-biggest reason I don't mind not having to see him blather about his love of robot monkeys.

As for the biggest reason I'm sort of relieved to no longer pay attention to the Forthiverse, I’ll miss Sally least of all. Sure, it’s kind of satisfying to see what would make a person act like an ultra-competent sitcom wife in real life terms but when you consider that the price is a hellish childhood, a fear of disorder and a pathetic need to try to fix something that cannot be repaired, it’s kind of not worth it. Nor is it worth watch. This means that I’ll stick to following the man’s blog; Victorian Era Superhero and Todd the Robot Dad don’t sicken and scare me.

The interesting thing about the comic strip "Sally Forth" is that its writer, a Ces Marciuliano, has made a late-summer wedding the engine currently driving the plot forward. What is more, the bride to be wants to contribute nothing to the planning of the thing but whining and passive-aggressive bitchery. If you'll allow me, I'll contrast and compare the two to see which author is better at describing a Settlepocalypse.

The Bride to Be:
Johnston: Liz is seen as someone who deserves a happy ending after being forced out into a big, scary world while being shown to be a passive lump who wants other people to live her life for her.
Marciuliano: Jackie is seen as a selfish, lazy adult child about to walk into a disaster in order to spite her sister. It turns out that this is the case.
Advantage: Marciuliano.

The Groom:
Johnston: Anthony is described as being a great guy who needs to learn to love and trust again after being mauled by an evil, ambitious career woman; the fact of the matter is that he's a sunken-chested dimwit who has to settle for a pallid little twit like Liz because he's an invertebrate who couldn't deal with a real woman.
Marciuliano: Ralph is described as being evil incarnate when it's broadly hinted that his being evil consists of being Ted McCauley with less hair.
Advantage: a tie.

The Wedding Planning:
Johnston: Liz's refusal to do anything but carp and panic is seen as pretty much a harmless eccentricity by everyone who isn't a Martian.
Marciuliano: Jackie's tendency to leave it all up to Sally only to bitch whenever her older sister comes up with an idea is seen as an aggravating act of pettiness and immaturity.
Advantage: Marciuliano.

The Wedding Planner:
Johnston: Elly is seen as a great old gal for making sure that Liz does as little as possible.
Marciuliano: Sally is seen as becoming progressively frustrated by the irritating and unreasonable demands made on her time.
Advantage: Marciuliano.

The Mother of the Bride:
Johnston: Again, Elly is wonderful because she managed to make sure that Liz stays home where she belongs. This is nuts because home is what messed Liz up in the first place.
Marciuliano: Sally and Jackie's mother is seen as a pompous, blustering pain in the arse who wants to make sure that Sally doesn't pick on Jackie like she did growing up. Since Ces has established that most of what's wrong with Sally is that she was Jackie's primary caregiver owing to parental default, this is seen as adding to our hero's woes.
Advantage: Marciuliano.

The Wedding Itself:
Johnston: What most outsiders would see as the culmination of hateful manipulation leading to a loveless sham marriage is seen as the magical happy ending Lynn needed the strip to have.
Marciuliano: Sally and Ted will be holding their tongue about the disaster that everyone who isn't Jackie, Ralph and Sally's mother sees coming lest they be rebuffed when the inevitable happens.
Advantage: Marciuliano.

The Human Cost:
Johnston: A wondrous time was had by everyone who was invited to the adult table at the reception. The Martian watching the kiddies...not so much.
Marciuliano: Sally will be depicted as feeling as if she's aged ten years...just like what would happen if it happened to you or me.
Advantage: Marciuliano.

This means that in every way that matters, Cesco Marciuliano has done the world the enormous favor of showing us how horrible a real Settlepocalypse would be.

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Page Summary

Judge Parker experiences the Cesco Effect
Lawrence's two years of having done "nothing".
Sally Forth versus common sense.
On being Thanksgiving every day.
Two Big Crappy Families: Sally versus Elly.
Farewell to King Features, Part Two: Sally Forth.
Dueling Settlepocalypses: Marciuliano versus Johnston.

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Page generated Jul. 11th, 2025 12:35 pm

Foobonia and Points West.

Four Panel Babylon

Entries tagged with cesco the great

Judge Parker experiences the Cesco Effect

Lawrence's two years of having done "nothing".

Sally Forth versus common sense.

On being Thanksgiving every day.

Two Big Crappy Families: Sally versus Elly.

Farewell to King Features, Part Two: Sally Forth.

Dueling Settlepocalypses: Marciuliano versus Johnston.