Headscratchers / The Onion

• Does Kelly Comics have two Author Avatar? There's the obvious one that looks like Kelly (except he's more in-shape, because obviously) but who's the black-haired younger dad who stars in comics that are clearly styled as "Kelly making a melodramatic statement to complain about a minor annoyance in his own wife"? Kelly is meant to be divorced, but half of the dad's comics seem to revolve around his wife supposedly being a bitch for making reasonable requests. Is it just a parody of Boomer humor frequently joking about hating your own spouse, or is the dad Kelly in his younger years? Him holding resentment over several decades because he was forced to sit at the table until everybody finished...isn't really out of character.
  • Most likely, the black-haired younger man is meant to represent Kelly's ideal of an American. He's usually used to represent "the common man" in most situations. The fact that he's very frequently an Author Avatar for Kelly is because Kelly is a very shallow and uncreative person with no real conception of how other people think and behave, so whenever Kelly tries to imagine how the average person acts, he defaults to himself. Naturally, he thinks that the ideal everyman is married, but when he tries to think about how that man relates to his wife, he defaults to his own experiences with his wife, which were profoundly negative.