Little Red Riding Hood

By Bob Gonzalez https://oddboxcomics.com/2011/03/15/blooper/

It’s a social cartoon, I guess, because it’s definitely not political. And I don’t want to call it satire, because it’s not really criticizing anything—while the punchline has to do with Hollywood and/or TV companies, it doesn’t seem to be making any scathing commentary on either industry. It’s just a joke. I think it’s pretty funny, although not really deep in any aspect.

It does, of course, reference the fact that there’s more than one wolf villain in different fairy tales, similarly to Roald Dahl’s Little Red Riding Hood and Three Little Pigs poems that we read. Those poems were of course much more violent than this four-panel comic strip, and certainly the Three Little Pigs had a lesson to go along with it; a lesson that is strikingly similar to most “regular” versions of Little Red Riding Hood. The narrator in that poem warns people not to trust “young ladies from the upper crust”, just like Perrault’s moral at the end of Little Red Riding Hood is for children, “especially young girls”, not to trust strangers they meet, especially the really nice ones, because they may turn out dangerous.

This comic, however, has no lesson at all. The only thing it has in common with Little Red Riding Hood is the characters and situation; partly because it is not complete tale, it has no narrative arc, and partly because it just exists to be funny. A true fairy tale should help children better understand the world, or teach a lesson, but this simply entertains. And I think that’s okay.