Recent Comments

1. about 12 years ago on Skin Horse

   I was only a baby when the USS Indianapolis went down. Still, it has hurt me to see that even the youngsters who draw this strip must know so little about it, probably about history in general, to allude to it in this way. The event late in WWII was far more horrible than the sinking of the RMS Titanic, although fewer lives were lost (yes, there really was a liner of that name, which really sank in April, 1912, with great loss of life; many people think “Titanic” was just a real cool romantic movie). At least, those lost on the Titanic who didn’t go down with her, took only minutes to die in the water, of exposure. Perhaps if I were to say that I’m not much upset by the deaths in the WTC on 9-11, because the victims were mostly New Yorkers, and I don’t like New Yorkers (untrue, but as an illustration very near the mark), the reader will feel somewhat the same emotion as this strip conveys to me.

   Wikipedia undoubtedly has an article on the light cruiser USS Indiana; look it up. There is, in fact, an appropriately dramatic allusion to the fate of the crew of the Indianapolis in the movie “Jaws,” where the captain of the shark fishing boat “Orca” identifies himself as one of the few survivors of the sinking and subsequent shark feeding frenzy when the remaining handfull of the Indianapolis.crew were found and rescued, many days later. Fortumately, very few of them or their spouses remain alive to have seen this strip. Their children would be about my age now, and probably are not eccentric enough to be serious about reading the funny papers, so it is to be hoped that I am the only only one whom the authors of the strip have managed to hurt by this one blunder. Please now what you are doing, and know that you know, before mentioning a tragedy in a public forum.