Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

A lifelong, inveterate reader of the Sunday newspaper comics, wherever I've lived, I have since moving to North Florida become quite fond of Jok Church's "You Can U with Beakman & Jax." Beakman and Jax, of course, are the main -- in fact, only -- characters; however, they appear only in the strip's title panel. Beakman is a nerdy-looking kind of brainy guy who answers questions submitted by children about the way things work; he doesn't answer them directly, but instead leads kids through simple science experiments and demonstrations, with commentary, to discover the answers themselves.

As for Jax, a nerdy-looking kind of brainy girl, her contribution to the strip is more subtle. Across the bottom of each strip, upside-down and in very small type, appears a "P.S. from Jax," illuminating some facet of the question's answer which may not be readily apparent to readers.

Today's strip departed from the norm. There was no "Dear Beakman" letter; rather, the letter was to readers, from both Beakman and Jax. It said:

Dear Readers:

This week many of you will see videotape from 4 years ago showing New York's World Trade Center collapsing.

Beakman and Jax
Woodbury, Tennessee

An interesting "letter," I thought, and read on in the next (main) panel:

How these buildings collapsed straight down to the ground is something a lot of you wrote in about after the 9/11 attack. Most of you wanted to know why. Or, why they didn't tip over.

As we say a lot in this comic, talking about why things happen is usually impossible.

How or what is something we can look at and understand.

Why is a way more personal decision. But it's best to know what and how on your path to deciding why.

Beakman

In his usual straightforward way, Beakman then proceeds to lay out the what and how of the WTC's collapse. The kicker, though, is in the "P.S." to the strip:

P.S. from Jax: A hard thing to understand is another why thing: Why the man who planned and paid for this attack was never arrested for thousands of deaths.

Exactly.

(By the way, I would have happily linked to the Web site for the strip so you could see it yourself. Unfortunately, it is evidently no longer on the Web.)