Love Ain't

Love Is... was created in the 1960s by cartoonist Kim Casali. The one panel cartoons usually featured two nude children expressing love in a quaint, innocent manner. It's basically a romantic riff on Charles Schulz's earlier Happiness Is a Warm Puppy. The series even started as books before getting a syndication deal in the 1970s. Casali stopped working on the strip in 1975 due to her husband's illness, and it was continued by Bill Asprey under her name. Asprey continues the strip to this day.

But this is what ran in the LA Times on Tuesday...

While it's unusual for the couple to be clothed, it's not unheard of. The overt political statement, however, is highly unusual and led a number of people to question whether or not the strip was real or it had been altered by an unscrupulous third party.

The official Love Is... website doesn't host the daily cartoons, but the syndicate does. And they're showing...

... the exact same comic.

The strip has always had something of a right-leaning direction, with it's saccharine sentimentality and heavy doses of nostalgia for an era that never existed. But the use of "fake news" -- a favorite phrase of the political right used accusingly at everything they dislike -- seems to swing to an extreme. While arguably, the phrase itself doesn't necessarily point to a political opinion and can be applied to news of any political bent, it's not really a phrase that is used by the political left, even when talking about false reports from right-leaning "news" outlets (i.e Fox).

So my initial thought is that, for whatever reason, Asprey has decided to show his political viewpoint in the comic. Which is totally his right, don't misunderstand! But it seems unusual to make such a bold statement in an otherwise innocuous comics that he's been drawing for 45 years now. But when I looked up his own site to see if he said anything about this particular strip or his politics more broadly, I didn't find anything speaking to either of those, but I did note that A) he replicates the same strip there, meaning that it wasn't tampered with by the syndicate and B) his autobiography proudly notes that he's also drawn for Playboy. Which seems a bit at odds with the general theme of Love Is...

So honestly, I'm at something of a loss as to where this came from. But it is does indeed to appear authentic, despite not really fitting with the tone the strip has had for the past half century.

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