Wizard of Id, 1/8/26

The syndicated newspaper comics are, among other things, your #1 source for gender stereotypes so out of date that everyone has pretty much forgotten them, like "women love to drag their husbands to the opera even though men find opera boring." Usually your source for these gags is The Lockhorns, where it's at least vaguely realistic because they live a mere hour from Lincoln Center via the Long Island Railroad; I suppose you might think the Wizard of Id's pseudo-medieval setting also makes it a good candidate for opera gags, if you were a philistine who didn't know that opera originated in the 1600s and didn't truly flower into the oft-parodied art form we see here until the baroque era. Anyway, this lady has a rare talent that she's chosen to share with the world, and maybe it makes me a gender traitor, but I feel that she does not deserve to experience the painful and horrifying ideal of transformation into a bird, right here and now, at the height of her career.

Gearhead Gertie, 1/8/26