More Like Tragicomic

Revisiting Cathy, neurotic of the funny pages.

the first time I read the word Aack! was in the global syndication of the daily comic strip “Cathy,” nestled between “Garfield” and “The Far Side” in the English-language newspapers in Malaysia, where I grew up. I lived half a world away from the creator of “Cathy,” Cathy Guisewite, but the main character’s catchphrase imprinted itself onto my brain anyway—a testament to the strip’s power in the ’80s and ’90s. “Cathy” is now typically evoked with mixed feelings, denigrated for what it is half-remembered to represent: the angst of a distinctly boomerish upper-middle-class white woman exasperated by her attempts to “have it all” (a man, a white-collar job, a body that fits with conventional beauty standards) and wracked with guilt about the whole thing. The comic ran in newspapers for 34 industrious years, from 1976 to 2010, and its brand of fame adds to the complication: Surely anything beloved by so many suburban, middle-aged moms must be antithetical to good taste.

Jamie Loftus does not believe this. And in Aack Cast, the audio series that debuted last month, she mounts a full-throated argument for “Cathy” and its complexity. To see it, she posits, you just have to take the strip’s whole context on its own terms—the character, the time frame, Guisewite herself. You also have to, you know, actually read the comics. (And Loftus has read all of them.) Through a mix of interviews, literary analysis, and opinion, Aack Cast pays close attention to how the character navigated the fluid mores of an accelerating culture. When confronted with the changes of the comic strip’s many eras—by Loftus’s accounting, “Cathy” spanned seven presidents and two feminist movements—Guisewite’s creation often seems circumspect, uncertain of how she feels about the new