(++++) TIMELY, YET TIMELESS

Multitasking: “Baby Blues” Collection 39. By Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott. Andrews McMeel. $19.99.

     At some point in the future, sociologists – or maybe anthropologists or even, by that time, paleontologists – will try to figure out why so many comics in the latest Baby Blues collection show the characters wearing weird face coverings. Along with Stink Eye, the previous book, Multitasking might be called the Baby Blues pandemic collection. But what is surprising/delightful/amazing is that, although Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott never discuss COVID-19 head-on, they manage to provide a slice-of-MacPherson-family-life for a horrible time period that shows everyday people pushing through all the difficulties, living as normal a continuing life as possible, and going only moderately crazier than they did before entering Pandemic World.

     Here and there, an entry in the book has a strong pandemic influence. One series of strips is about Zoe’s class creating a time capsule, and within that series, when Wanda asks Zoe how things are going, Zoe points out that “the items we put in it are supposed to reflect the times we live in… So far, it has thirty masks.” More often, COVID-19 is a kind of background noise for attempts to live a semi-normal life, as in a Sunday strip in which Wanda discovers accidentally receiving some of the MacPhersons’ neighbors’ mail, promises to “be back in two seconds,” and is shown donning a mask as she runs off to the left and then being maskless as she returns quickly home, running to the right. That sort of protective impulse for even the briefest of encounters with other people is a simple slice-of-life-in-a-certain-time-period – and Kirkman and Scott, far from belaboring it, use it to emphasize the decidedly non-pandemic-related behavior of the MacPherson kids: Wanda returns after just a few seconds to find that Zoe has tied Hammie to a chair and trapped Wren under a laundry basket, on top of which Zoe sits while telling her mom, “I’ve been training for this moment my whole life.” That comment and that scenario fit Baby Blues perfectly, and are among the elements that did not change for COVID-19 and, one can only hope, will not change when the next monstrous mess gets dumped in our collective lap.

     Readers really need Baby Blues when the-times-they-are-a-stinking. No matter how awful the pressures of the world at large, the pressures within the MacPherson household remain pretty much the same – and what a delight to have some miseries that have not changed! The personalities of the characters are so well-established at this point that Kirkman and Scott can, apparently effortlessly, ring infinite variations on their interactions. There is, for instance, the “dad vs. mom” dynamic, which comes to the fore when Darryl injures his foot and has to wear a walking boot for a while. Hammie asks why, and Darryl impresses him by explaining that “the doctor said that I run too fast for human tendons to handle, so he implanted cheetah tendons to compensate” – adding, “Don’t tell your mom that I shared the truth with you.” Oh yes, the truth hurts. Sometimes not enough, as in another “injury” strip, in which Hammie is the one who is hurt – and is wondering if he is going to have “a horrible scar that will sicken others when they see it.” Reassured by Wanda that everything will heal and no remnant of the scrape will remain, a disappointed Hammie says, “You sure know how to take all the fun out of having a bloody knee!” Hammie’s idea of fun is a recurring theme in Baby Blues, as when Wanda picks him and Zoe up at school for a doctor’s appointment but has not yet told them where she is taking them. Zoe tells Hammie, “I bet they finally found a family to adopt you,” and Hammie has an ear-to-ear smile as he says, “I hope they’re wolves.”

     With all the pandemic background and family interrelationships percolating along in Multitasking, a few topics get short shrift. There is only a passing reference to Wanda having a YouTube channel – a setup for a sponsorship offer that would make the family tons of money but that she turns down because “I found out that their toys are made of asbestos and lead by slave labor in a prison camp for toddlers.” Also, pandemic or no pandemic, Darryl continues working in an office – one sequence has him applying for and getting a promotion to “senior Western regional assistant director of limited budgetary integration and planning.” Those two series fall a bit flat, largely because they do not zero in on the intra-family triumphs and squabbles (mostly squabbles) that have powered Baby Blues all the way to this 39^th collection.

     Most of Multitasking, though, hits the strip’s usual bull’s eye (in this case, blues eye). That often happens through a unique Baby Blues combination of nearly meaningless Scott verbiage with perfectly apt Kirkman art. One panel worth framing contains the words “YAHH! SMASH! KICK! CHOP! PUNCH!” in different type styles and sizes, screamed by an open-mouthed Hammie as he leaps across the sofa in a blur of seven arms and four legs, trying to annoy Zoe. Another panel has Zoe desperately trying to hit a baseball pitched by Hammie, getting all the way up to “strike six,” accompanied by the word “WHIFF!” three times and shown with nine bats, three eyes and who-knows-how-many hands. Still another panel has the three words “FLIP! FLIP! THUMP!” as Wren nonchalantly does a double somersault out of her crib while wide-eyed Darryl and Wanda discuss moving her to a regular bed for “a lower degree of difficulty on her dismounts.” It is writing like this and illustrations like these that got Baby Blues – and its readers – through the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, reminding everyone that even if the world appears to be coming apart at the seams, it remains inevitable that when Darryl shows Hammie how to change a lightbulb, Zoe will complain, “I want to do something boring, too!”