We've been wanting to give Boxjam's Doodle the attention it deserves for a long time. Clearly, a preliminary, thoughtful examination is in order, if only to lay the down a blueprint for the work of more exhaustive scholarship that is to follow. There are the obvious issues to grapple with: the artist's obsession with garbage (a metonym for the myth of Sisyphus) and the Schulzian focus on human powerlessness; the attempts to incorporate blog-like journaling, family-oriented humor (sometimes in a more mordant vein) and trippy self-referential dream-sequences. And it is important to note the function of the Doodle as a meditation on the anxiety of influence.

And yet more than these, the Doodle is irreducibly a dialogue, a combat, a face-off between authority and the romantic conception of the soul's yearning for freedom, cleverly hidden under a Lockhorns-ish veil of marital struggle. A straightforward feminist reading of the Doodle might raise an arch eyebrow at the portrait of Ms. Boxjam's position as the Household Enforcer, but this would be a superficial analysis. As the disorderly proliferation of Boxjamian characters has progressed, it has become entirely clear that we are observing not the the beleagured life of a married man, but the many-layered selves of the postmodern subject, flattened into two-dimensional form in an attempt by the artist to render their doodled selves into legibility. The archetypal Boxjam struggles in vain against his superego partner just as he does against the Id-ish kids -- who represent not his attractive and well-behaved actual dependents, but the anarchic terrorists at play within his soul.

We still, however, don't know why it's that weird blue color. And we don't have nearly enough time here to get into the significance of muu-muus.

Eds. note: we apologize for an error in an earlier edition, in which we bungled the name of a newsprint icon of ossified conjugal bitterness. We can only surmise that our misattribution of "Lockharts" for the proper "Lockhorns" has to do with our obsession with the work of Johnny B.C. Hart, a man whose weird little universe creeps us out not so much because of his forays into fundamentalist dogma but just because its vibe is really, well, creepy.