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Cathy
There are days in the comics blogging business when I really know that I’ve made it. Today, for instance, I was one of surely only a few hundred people on the Universal Press Syndicate’s email distribution list chosen to receive a very important email with the following subject line:
AACK! After 34 Years, Cathy Comic Strip Bids Farewell
Read all about it here, assuming you enjoy reading interviews with Cathy Guisewite in PDF format, and who doesn’t, really.
Obviously, a long-running strip like Cathy can’t just go away without a big to-do. But with the strip’s formerly chronically single title character now married off, and the October 3 end date too close for her to finally poop out a baby, we have to ask ourselves what the bang of an ending will be. Since Cathy was a pioneer depiction of a working woman, we suggest that she get with the times: heartless layoff, followed by workplace spree killing, concluding with suicide by cop.
Archie, 7/13/10
Archie takes a break today from typical teenage whimsy to explore Riverdale’s grim economics. Lazy layabout Jughead can’t maintain the income necessary to fund his burger habit; Archie, who is marginally more employable and may be writing himself checks from the checkbook stolen from Mr. Lodge’s desk, has agreed to float his friend enough cash to keep him fed, but at significant interest rates — and now those debts are coming due. Terrified at Archie’s suddenly revealed violent side (he’s holding a gun in his left hand in panel three, just out of our field of vision), Jughead seeks out “Pop,” his substitute father figure, coming up with some feeble excuse to try to beg for shelter and protection without Archie noticing. But we can see from his rage in panel two that, if Jughead can’t afford his greasy diner food, Pop wants nothing to do with him, and in panel three he shows that he wants no part of this scene. Jughead will be lucky to escape Archie’s implacable wrath with only a missing thumb or two.
(Seriously, though, if someone could explain to me what’s actually supposed to be happening here, I’d sure appreciate it.)
Apartment 3-G, 7/13/10
Speaking of sudden turns to grimness, I Dressed In The Dark is beginning to look less like What Not To Wear and more like a reality-show version of 24, with the sadistic Mama Kat taking the role of the chief torturer. The girls will submit to her aesthetic demands, no matter how many beatings she has to dish out. But the once bickering roommates will come together now that they’re literally under attack from outsiders; naturally, Margo has taken a leadership role, and she’s demonstrating exactly why, for all her faults, you want her on your side in times of trouble. I look forward to this battle of implacable wills!
Mark Trail, 7/13/10
You might think that Mark Trail owning a cell phone is terribly anachronistic for this strip. The police officer certainly does, based on his puzzled expression in the final panel (“Hey, my uniform indicates that I just arrived here from 1965, and this freak is talking into some tiny sci-fi gadget!”). Still, you have to admit that a mobile phone really allows Mark to ignore the feelings of the people around him, as is his wont. “Excuse me while I take this call … Hi, honey, what’s up? No, I’m not busy, there’s just some old lady here weeping about how they’re going to take away the only things that make her life worth living, some crap like that, I dunno.” Cherry’s glad to be able to get a hold of Mark now, but she’ll regret it when she realizes that with his new phone he doesn’t even have to return home from a romantic horseback ride to get a call from his editor Bill Ellis that will take him out of range of her clumsy seduction attempts.
Dennis the Menace, 7/13/10
Dennis the Menace the character may no longer be menacing, but today’s Dennis the Menace the cartoon panel was apparently menacing to the colorists, who decided that trying to render the vibrating Mitchells in color using the Photoshop tools at their disposal wasn’t worth the effort. This in no way makes up for the fact that the whole “joke” here is that Dennis belched forth a punny malapropism. That’s the sort of thing that Jeffy Keane does, Dennis. Do you want to be like Jeffy Keane?
Cathy, 7/13/10
We interrupt our usual studied ignorance of Cathy to note that today’s “punchline” contains the phrase “poop bags.” We now return you to our usual refusal to acknowledge Cathy’s existence.
Marmaduke, 10/21/09
As you may have noticed, many comics are earnestly pushing a pro-volunteering agenda this week, with results that range from the “so irritating that even people who like volunteering will come to view it with scorn” (Luann) to “so cynical that they seem to be actually making fun of the very concept of helping one’s fellow citizens” (Archie, Wizard of Id). Probably the best of the lot is today’s Marmaduke, in which the titular hell-beast takes some time out from burying the bones of his victims to help his serial killer neighbor prep some backyard graves.
Mark Trail, 10/21/09
You know, Mark Trail has always been kind of David Lynchian, but things seems to be accelerating this week. I missed it Monday when a word balloon clearly containing dialogue for Bob emerged from the head of Mr. Sinister Sideburns; today, the same phenomenon recurs. Is Rusty just passing the time in the swamp by practicing his ventriloquism? Is “Rusty” just one Mark’s many personalities, and panel one a brief hint of the real world of Mark Trail, in which an isolated man spends days nattering on to nobody in particular? Or is the whole universe of the strip simply collapsing, with the very identities of the various characters becoming increasingly fluid as their reality dissolves into nothingness? The last possibility would explain the ominous, world-consuming mist pooling around Mark and Rusty’s feet in the final panel.
Cathy, 10/21/09
To Westerners, one of the most striking aspects of Hindu deities is that they are portrayed with more than the usual complement of limbs. Now, most Hindus do not in fact believe that, say, Vishnu is a blue-skinned man with four arms; rather, since arms and hands are the methods that humans use to impose their will on the world, the depiction of Vishnu as four-armed represents his power, which is beyond that of mortals. The characters in Cathy are also occasionally portrayed with many arms, and by analogy I have always taken this to be metaphorical, generally representing their flailing, desperate, and ultimately fruitless attempts to control themselves or the world around them. Today, however, we learn that they are in fact literally becoming monstrous, tentacled hell-beasts — and frankly not a minute to soon when it comes to piquing my interest in future developments in this feature.
Gil Thorp, 10/21/09
So Duncan Daley has spent this fall storyline by turns refusing to drink, brooding manfully, and injuring his fellow football players in uncontrollable bursts of rage. And today, the big reveal: he’s doing it all because his brother’s in prison, which makes total sense. “Gah, I told Danny I’d be in jail in time to celebrate his birthday with him! How many people do I have to maim before they lock me up?”
Cathy, 8/24/09
For most of mid-August, Cathy revolved around Irving’s Facebook-inspired loathing of his current haircut, followed by his intense anxiety about switching hairdressers, so his studied nonchalance upon actually getting a new ’do is deeply irritating, matched in that regard only by everything else that’s happened in Cathy ever. Fortunately, in the final panel, it appears that our put-upon stylist is planning to behead her annoying customer with her clippers.
Dick Tracy, 8/24/09
I’m pretty curious about the conversation that led up to today’s first panel of Dick Tracy, in which the creepy Mr. Pops attempts to explain to Dick the rudiments of his job description. “So, Mr. Pops, I noticed that when you and your similarly dressed cohorts were performing, the audience members’ mouths were pulled up at the corners, and they were expelling air from their lungs in a series of short, staccato bursts that sounded like ‘ha, ha’. More troubling still, in those moments they appeared to not be consumed by thoughts of torture and death. What sort of diabolical scheme is this?”
Slylock Fox, 8/24/09
This may be the first Slylock Fox mystery strip I’ve seen in which two humans interact with each other, and I’ve got to say that I find it very disturbing that Slylock is there to protect the property rights of a man who sells animals for a living. Despite all of his nosey police work, Slylock appears to be nothing more than an vulpine Uncle Tom, happy to buttress the institutions that enslave his fellow beasts! For shame, sir!
Also, seeing as Slick Smitty must be freakishly strong to be able to hold up a bag of water more than three feet in diameter, I certainly hope that Slylock’s human overlords trust him enough to arm him, or else this could get ugly.
Mary Worth, 8/24/09
“…but then Ian said something pompous that irritated some drunken hooligans, so, long story short, he got stabbed to death. Hey, is Charley Smith still single?”
Sigh. Sorry, Scotland, I don’t mean to make cruel jokes about your reputation as Britain’s knifecrime capital. It’s just that, while a Charterstone pool party is usually a happy occasion to me, the one getting underway here can only be a source of sadness, as it marks the definitive and anticlimactic end of the Charley-Delilah-Lawrence storyline, which was once so promising. Sure, we’ll always have that deliriously wonderful week in Charley’s love pad, but I can’t help but think that the strip could have reached even greater heights of entertaining insanity. Would Ian’s cruel, violent death at the hands of junk-sick thugs alleviate my ennui? Well, maybe a little.
Hi and Lois, 8/24/09
Speaking of Scotland, today’s Hi and Lois offers a particularly pathetic look into Hi’s inner life. Sure, it’s only natural that a guy would want to ditch out on his wife and family to go play golf among the stab-happy Scots — I mean, how can wives and families ever match up with golf, right? However, it appears that Hi’s reverie consists not of him actually taking a golf vacation, but rather of him telling his layabout neighbor that he wishes he could take a golf vacation. It’s a sad day when your fantasy life consists of turning down opportunities that really aren’t even that exciting in the first place.
Crankshaft, 8/10/09
You might think that after his near death experience, Crankshaft would be ready to show a little humility — you might think that, that is, unless you read the strip on a regular basis, in which case you would know that being a smug dick is one of the key defining aspects of the old man’s personality. Admittedly, he isn’t actually causing anyone physical or emotional pain for once, but still, his expression of epically smug self-satisfaction in panel three is wildly at variance with the quality of the — well, I don’t even know what to call it. It’s not a pun, you can’t in good conscience call it a joke, and if you referred to it as a play on words, then the thought of how joyless and grim your playtime must have been as a child chills me to the core. Anyway, the point is that Crankshaft is an unfunny jerk who I’d hope would be stung to death by bees enraged at being roped into this sordid scene, except they already tried that and it didn’t work.
Cathy, 8/10/09
While I’m not Catholic, I do believe that confession is good for the soul, which is why I always feel compelled to admit it here when Cathy elicits a genuine chuckle. In the case of this strip, I wasn’t amused by the bizarre denouement, in which it’s revealed that Irving has no idea what he looks like (presumably that’s because any mirror brought into their home is shattered in short order by an ACKing swimsuit-clad Cathy); but I did kind of find the panels in which he’s shouting abuse into a laptop screen kind of funny, as it’s simultaneously ludicrous and something I feel a certain amount of familiarity with (see angry diatribe about Crankshaft, above).
Gil Thorp, 8/10/09
“I mean, Marty’s arm is already shot, so I don’t see how hauling a bunch of wood around could hurt him any more. Hey, Marty, let me know if your shoulders get sore! I have some cortisone here that will make you feel better!”
Meanwhile, at Ted Pearse’s Li’l Hobo Sport Camp And Sammich Dispensary™, another promising youngster is showing that he too is ready for some cortisone injections, as he participates in the traditional pastime of underprivileged youth: throwing around a stale sourdough batard that they fished out of a dumpster. Winner gets to eat it!
Dick Tracy, 8/10/09
“Hey, everyone, it’s me! The lifeless, bleeding, twisted corpse over here? Anyone want to throw a blanket over me? You know, help me maintain some shred of dignity? Anyone? Little help?”
Apartment 3-G, 8/3/09
Margo has already wept a single noble tear over Eric’s heroic death (or at least ostentatiously dabbed her eyes to imply said weeping); now, after having cycled through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief in record time, she has reached the little-known step that comes after acceptance: scratching one’s chin while scheming transparently. “Oh, I can think of some ways we can make my sacrifice worth it — er, I mean, ways you can be worthy of my sacrifice. Look, all the ‘Free Tibet’ hippies and ‘fear the ChiComs’ right-wingers back in the States are going to want to hear your story. I’m thinking instant book — don’t worry, I know a great ghostwriter — followed by a nationwide speaking tour. You’ll need a manager, of course. You know in the U.S. it’s traditional for a manager to take a 75 percent cut up front, right?”
Beetle Bailey, 8/3/09
I was so busy laughing uproariously at this send-up of an old man’s vanity that I almost missed the odd setting, which seems to involve Beetle holding U.S. soldiers at gunpoint. Could the military men at Camp Swampy, long ignored by the Pentagon hierarchy, have launched a coup? The most ill-conceived and incompetently run coup in history?
Cathy, 8/3/09
Why yes, now that Cathy has discovered the Facebook and publicly identified it as the theme of the eighteen million insufferable and near-identical jokes that it will be hammering home over the next six to fifteen weeks — jokes that will, as is typical of this strip, serve as a very thin veneer over a bubbling cauldron of terrifying anxiety about the most minute aspects of everyday social relations — life as I knew it is over forever, thanks for noticing. I and several hundred thousand other comics readers will be committing mass suicide in short order.
Crankshaft, 8/3/09
Even the most dedicated Crankshaft readers have traditionally regarded Crankshaft’s insufferable yuppie neighbor’s yappy little dog with vague irritation, if they were aware of him at all. But now that he has heroically saved Crankshaft from an agonizing death by snake venom, they’ll be even more irritated with him. If he was supposed to have been a hero, he should have gleefully urinated on the fallen, snakebitten ’Shaft while the hateful old man weakly cried for help.
(Seriously, though, little dogs dying in pain in the comics = NOT COOL, MAN. FBOFW at the height of its powers got away with it, barely. You, Crankshaft, are no FBOFW.)
(UPDATE: Faithful reader Chibigodzilla points out that the little dog belongs not to the ’Shaft’s annoying neighbor, but to his daughter’s annoying mother-in-law. I guess we should try to figure what the hell its deal is, now that it’s sacrificed itself.)
Momma, 8/3/09
Ignoring for the moment the wildly incorrect gibberish coming out of the mouths of Francis and not-Francis in this strip, I am sort of charmed by the setting: Francis and his bud hanging out in the woods, or maybe just in that copse of trees behind the gas station, drinking cheap beer out of cans and demonstrating their total ignorance of the North American Numbering Plan and the Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T)’s E.164 recommendation, which defines numbering plans for international telephony worldwide. Good times!
One Big Happy, 8/3/09
But wait, what would a guy do with a horse and a monkOH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
