Yesterday on this blog, in “Not in a bad mood, just smart”, I looked at this cartoon panel that had appeared on Facebook:
(#1) Image plus text; the image was pretty clearly from Calvin and Hobbes (isn’t that Susie?), but the text (expressing a sentiment that resonated with me in current times, packaged in a slogan, or tag line) was unfamiliar to me
Then the searches.
The image. In a comment on my posting, John Baker reported tracking the image down to a panel from the Calvin and Hobbes strip of 7/29/86:
(#2) A strip about Susie Derkins
From my 10/8/21 posting “Masculinity comics 5”, about gross-out humor and slapstick:
A gentler shade of gross-out: Calvin and Hobbes. Much gentler.
In Bill Watterson’s comic strip, Calvin is a 6-year-old boy, and Hobbes is his toy stuffed tiger, appearing as a human-sized companion to Calvin who functions as a playmate, an older brother, a detached adult observer, and an intelligent tiger, depending on the moment. Meanwhile, Calvin behaves like an 8- to 10-year-old boy, old enough to be beginning to flirt fitfully with girls, but still generally plugged into normative boy masculinity, keeping girls at a distance and doing his best to gross them out at school lunches.
… From the Calvin and Hobbes Wiki:
Susie [Derkins] unwillingly sits by Calvin during lunchtime at school, but Calvin always decides to sit next to her anyway. In many situations, Calvin would talk about his lunch, portraying it as something disgusting and unappetizing.
The posting offers a collection of strips showing Calvin doing his best to gross out Susie.
The tag line. In a comment on my posting, Stewart Kramer determined that the slogan — which I will now dub Susie Smart — was added by image manipulation on the This Isn’t Happiness site. I wrote:
But now the question remains: where does [Susie Smart] come from? Is it actually an invention of This Isn’t Happiness and spread from there? Or did This Isn’t Happiness pick it up from somewhere else and just combine it with the C&H image? Where did … bluesky posters and [Basque artist Judas] Arrieta get it from?
Arrieta comes into it through this artwork of his (details in yesterday’s posting):
(#3) A collage of tag lines, with Susie Smart at the top
The slogans in Arrieta’s work are what I called
fugitive tag lines, expressions that sound like familiar sayings or quotations, but are just a bit off
It ought to be possible to learn something about the spread of Susie Smart on-line, but it probably won’t be possible to track it back to to a specific coiner. The problem is that it’s so close to a generic idea, expressed compactly but not in an especially memorable wording. Anyone might have come up with it; and then it would just be taken as a nice way of expressing the idea, maybe a common collocation, maybe even an old stock expression. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, but nobody is much surprised by a survey questionnaire.
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