Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling for May 09, 2024

Quentin did it so he could get more face time.

I think he represents settler colonialism

Y’know, it’s funny. As I was reading the strip and before I got to the end, I recalled that at some point, Cowboy Cal gets killed in one of these Billy Dare adventures. I just didn’t know it would happen in the same strip he appears in. :^)

Cowboy Cal represents the romanticization and whitewashing of “The Wild West”. You must be eating Mexican food, since a quarter of actual “cowboys” were Mexican-American (remember that the US conquered half of Mexico in the 1840s).

[Orrr, he choked on a chicken bone…]

“Ah-Ha, the evil Poultry Industry!”

( –‸ლ)

America’s never been all that innocent.

Or that the writer choked when trying to think of a segue way into the next story!

Didn’t they have the Heimlich Maneuver in 2001?

What does Cowboy Carter represent?

As Cowboy Cal held the knife in his left hand and the fork in his right, he must have been left-handed. Was Cal the “sinister” side of Billy that he “Dare Not” acknowledge (“Billy Dare does all that may become a man; who dares do more is none”)? Or was he the right-brained, emotional, Dionysian principle in opposition to Billy’s left-brained, rational, Apollonian bent? Was there a resulting conflict, or did they make a complementary whole (now broken)?

Of course, he was drinking beer with his meal while Billy stuck to milk. Was his death symbolic of nothing more than the Evils of Alcohol?

Things like this are why I didn’t become an English major in college. It occurred to me that it was possible to make elaborate logically consistent arguments for the meaning of stories that had no relation to what the author intended.

Fourth wall? No fourth wall here, cowpokes.

“NEXT: ALLEGORY MYSTERY!”

I’d be happier with half-a-gory or even less.

Cowboy Cal obviously represented homoerotic teen fantasies, which are quickly closeted (“killed off”) in the final frames.