Sunday 24 January 2010

373: Willy Murphy - Once More, With or Without Feeling



"Once More, With or Without Feeling" by Willy Murphy
in "Arcade" #1 spring 75

Murphy regularly employed broad stereotypes for his humour. In his Arnold Peck the Human Wreck strips, Arnold was usually just an observer to some scene of fashionable hysteria. And so we get these extreme over-dramatic queens. If it had been drawn around 1969-1971 I’d give this a pass ,that no one would be expected to know much better. But since it dates from 1974-1975 and was drawn by someone living in San Francisco at the time, Murphy is fairly wilful about what he wants a funny homosexual to be. Which surprisingly, don’t approach the usual comic fag clichés either, but may actually be worse. There’s much comic mileage to be got out of the high drama of the emergent gay scene in San Francisco. This isn’t it.

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