Did a benevolent God finally send poor Jim a beautiful woman?
196. A few years after this cartoon ran, Mark Davis, a Domer classmate, and I were sitting someplace when a beautiful woman sat next to us and he said to me, “There is a benevolent God.” This was before magician Mark became Father Mark.
197. The Red Brigade (Brigate Rosse) was an Italian Marxist-Leninist terror group that had kidnapped and killed Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro the year before. Remember the critique that the source of most of my humor is sex and death?
198. This is the second installment of a stretched out running gag in which Jim and Chuck meet sexy European women who all happen to know Dion. This was missed by nearly all readers who still thought that Dion was gay.
199. I was relating to my wife how in this series of cartoons I predicted that one day the most beautiful girl I had ever seen would walk into my life and be named Regina. And while it took decades for it to happen, and my wife Regina (Gina for short) is not of Italian heritage, it was still validation of there being a benevolent God. This intimate moment of emotional connection was interrupted by one our kids calling to tell us they needed the headphones to their iPhone.
200. Cartooning 101: Sometimes you do something because it feels right and then you look back and figure out why. In all the gags in which Mitch says something obnoxious about women and Cheryl reacts, you never see Cheryl’s action. The result is shown or described. This allows the reader the chance to fill in the image themselves which heightens the humor experience. Theater of the mind.
See the first five classic strips. Check back monthly for more classic Molarity strips. Molarity Redux, the updated, continuing adventures of Jim Mole and friends, also is posted monthly. For those new strips, check out the cartoon archives.