Anyhow, point well taken.

A lot of the other criticisms here are well-taken as well.

I also like the magic jacket that the boss is wearing, that unfailingly aligns the stripes with the horizontal and vertical.

Adrian, however, is still a git. perhaps moreso for getting defensive and condescending toward witty replies that were not directed at them as it was their first post in the thread.

—Myca

You were fine. but Adrian’s “I’m really sorry if I offend you by “overthinking,” or by thinking about a political cartoon at all,” was exceptionally condescending.

What I have never seen, however, is a performance being rated as really good if it’s a man, but barely adequate if it’s a woman. A woman’s spectacular performance gets rated as good; a woman’s adequate performance gets rated as adequate. There is simply no motivation for a manager to underrate average performances, other than the scenario where an organization is trying to downsize and is aggressively looking for people it can shed without operational consequences; bad performance reviews create work for managers, because they have to do improvement plans and monitor the employee and a dozen other bureaucratic hoops. If anything, the pressure on managers works the other way; to let Marginal Melanie or Barely Competent Bill slide for another year in the hopes that they’ll get better on their own, without the manager having to do anything.

The cartoon would be far more powerful if it recognized this dynamic and had the woman’s performance rating go from “you’re doing OK, keep up the good work” to “Wow, you’re like JESUS!” when she flashes the penis card.

‘Flash the Penis Card’ would be a good name for a punk band.

but the condescension, that’s pretty offensive.

what’s a raise?

it’s always about the penis with you people!

They have them on “TV Land”. Mr Spacely gave George Jetson a raise once.

Otherwise, I have no idea.

But I grinned (and grimaced with the underlying point) in response to both. Good stuff!

Wow. I was going to talk about suspension of disbelief as a necessary part of interacting with a comic, the usual need in a comic to focus on a narrow subject because of the medium, and on the other hand the way this simplicity encourages us to go beyond it afterwards and find both parallels and flaws on the image and how this makes it great for social criticism, yadda yadda…

But for early Saturday morning blackberry reading, that reply hit the spot. ^.^

I like the new one better primarily for the third panel - the boss kind of reminds me of a human version of Scrooge McDuck in that panel. But I do like the 4th panel better in the old version, even if the heads are off - it’s just that the boss just seems so much friendlier in the old version, which is imho funnier and sort of conveys the employees change in stature to “one of the guys”.

Way to overthink a plate of beans, man.