Before BOHICA: Comics Archaeology (Patreon)

There was an old, famous commercial from the 1980 for a donut shop. I forget which shop; it was a famous nationwide chain (I think it was Dunkin' Donuts, I know for sure it wasn't Winchell's, which was a much smaller competitor). But the commercial featured a friendly-looking but sort of dumpy guy who was supposed to be a baker getting up at some crazy hour like 3 AM to go make the first batch of donuts fresh and ready for customers on their way to work. The message, of course, was that the folks at the donut shop got up painfully early to see to other peoples' needs. 

I briefly worked as a baker myself, albeit for a bagel place rather than donuts, and I can confirm that, yes, you typically do have to get up at insane hours to make sure everything is fresh. The job lasted about 6 to 8 months for me and was my one and only foray into food service work. The job ended when they went under new management and I was one of the people that just had hours cut back to almost nothing so my paycheck was unsustainable. I wasn't sorry to see the job go because the hours were awful for me, and I am not a morning person by any stretch. 

Needless to say, the Army doesn't care if you're a morning person or not; you're all morning people by decree, and you have to get up at oh-asscrack-thirty in the morning pretty much every day. 

With Chernobyl back in the news, I unearthed this gem! Comics in general are typically very topical, reflecting events going on at the time for laughs. It mines humor that is easy to connect to with the audience at the time the comics are created and shared. The flip side is, of course, as time marches on and the events fade from memory, the relevance of the comic also fades and eventually it becomes more confusing than entertaining. 

One thing that really drives this home is going back and looking at old political cartoons. It is interesting to go back and see political cartoon harvesting then-immediate issues that were apparently "very important" headlines at the time, which are now utterly forgotten or meaningless. Defeated political opponents in elections are frequently forgotten within a couple years and it is hard to comprehend, perhaps, how it was that people like Roosevelt or Kennedy or other previous winners ever sweated their heels being nipped at by names that are now rendered meaningless by history. But at the time, the also-rans were considered a threat or at least problematic, even though our years of distance and hindsight have nullified their importance to all but students of history.   

Until the recent wildfires in the Ukraine, Chernobyl was largely shuffled away as a chapter in history, slowly fading except for the sometimes morbid fascination that the ghost town of Pripyat continued to hold on the minds of some. But now it is receiving attention again as forest fires kick up tons of potentially radioactive smoke and dust into the air. 

In this comic, I was still using the utterly ridiculous over-the-top accents for my Russian/Soviet characters, a hallmark of the time to make all Russians appear goofy since it was a time of high Cold War tensions. Little did we know that within just a two or three year time span, it would all come undone. 

That'll be it for now; come back again for more old "Before BOHICA" comics from the 1980's that will be released very soon.