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Garfield
Garfield, 1/13/10
I’m near-sighted in one eye and far-sighted in the other, which means that when I was growing up my eyes never really learned to work together properly, which in turn means that my depth perception is quite poor. This has had effects on my life large — I long ago gave up driving for the safety of myself and those around me — and small — 3-D movies generally don’t have the same impact on me as they do on other people. Whether the technology is what they use in Creature From The Black Lagoon or what they use in Avatar, to me it just basically looks like an ordinary movie — except for brief moments when something comes flying terrifyingly right at me.
Anyway, I don’t know about anyone else, but Odie’s tongue in panel two is providing me with just a nightmarish 3-D moment, with the leading edge of it appearing to be freakishly out of proportion to its apparent distance from the slobbering beast’s mouth. There are few things I want less when reading the comics in the morning than to even briefly worry that I’m about to be licked by some cartoon dog, and I resent the flash of panic that this induced in me.
Funky Winkerbean, 1/13/10
As you probably learned in your introductory English class, narrative is total snoresville if it doesn’t include conflict of some kind; but the inhabitants of Westview are generally far too morose to actually have competing goals or desires, so the only conflict comes when the doomed characters must do battle with their own cruel universe. Thus, I’m vaguely intrigued by the rivalry being implied here between the town’s only two vaguely ethnic downscale restaurants. I hope the Toxic Taco is a mirror image of Montoni’s, with the original Tacoteer having long since retired to Arizona, leaving the restaurant and its cast of regulars (including the zany UPS delivery guy and a single mom who overparents her only son) in charge of the manager, a bitter, burned-out recovering cocaine addict.
I’m not entirely sure what Mopey Pete’s sentence in the first panel is supposed to mean, actually. Is he saying that, since he’s not working on anything, he’ll have time to really focus on his favorite hobby, taco eating? Is he short of cash because of the lull in his work, and thus the only food he can afford is the Toxic Taco’s meat-style food substance topped with cheese byproducts? Or are the Toxic Taco’s wares literally poisonous, and his career failure is driving him to commit suicide in the most grotesque fashion he can imagine?
Mary Worth, 1/13/10
I love the look of mounting panic on Wilbur’s face as all his idle daydreams of what life with Abby would have been like are shattered by Kurt’s terrifying talk. Like all characters in Mary Worth, Wilbur values stability above all else, and if that means a life where the only “moving from place to place” happens when you move from the computer to the counter where you make your sandwiches, then so be it. Thank God he and his erstwhile lover broke it off when they did, or he might have been forced to grow as a person or experience joy.
Mary Worth, 1/8/10
I’m pretty sure that panel two of today’s Mary Worth is what happens when you have MC Escher draw your family reunion. Note that Kurt and Wilbur are ostensibly sitting on the same piece of furniture, but Kurt’s waist is somehow level with Wilbur’s knees. That may have something do with the fact that Kurt is turned 90 degrees towards Wilbur, but his legs are still magically able to bend! Meanwhile, Dawn appears to be drawing away from Wilbur and her probably-not-actually-half-brother in disgust, tucking her right arm awkwardly behind her back so that Wilbur can’t touch it, and somehow moving closer to the viewer than the actual length of the couch would seem to allow. Just as Kurt has disrupted the Westons’ lives with his story about his illicit parentage, so too has his presence disrupted the actual fabric of time and space in their condo unit.
Also, I like their plan of finally setting some time aside to get to know each other better next week! It should make the next few days of sitting around the house awkwardly super-fun.
Apartment 3-G, 1/8/10
Wow, it looks like dating a foul-mouthed married pill addict isn’t a bed of roses — who could have guessed? I’d have more sympathy for the outrage being perpetrated against Ari’s professionalism if not for the fact that he actually appears to be not so much “with a client” as “wandering around the foyer of his office while his client presumably drones on and on about his emotional problems in the next room, seriously, that guy never shuts up, he probably won’t notice if I take a break for a few minutes.” Also weighing against Ari’s right to be self-righteous: the fact that he prescribed sleeping pills to one of his clients almost immediately upon meeting her, then started sleeping with her. What I’m trying to say is that Ari can, in fact, go to @#*%!!
Family Circus, 1/8/10
My favorite thing about today’s Family Circus is the look of disappointment on Big Daddy Keane’s face. It’s like he always had dreams of having kids so he could read stories to them, only discover that actual children ruin everything by thinking for themselves and being bored and irritated by the things you like. At least Dolly is staying engaged enough to know what’s happening in the story, even if she’s going to pick it to bits with her dumb questions; PJ looks as if he’s fantasizing that something more interesting is happening — that’s he watching television, or instance, or staring at the wall.
Garfield, 1/8/10
Ha ha! Garfield and Odie are voyeuristic perverts!
Garfield, 10/12/09
So it appears that when, in an epochal Garfield continuity shift, longtime love object Vet Liz submitted to Jon’s advances, it was part of a long-term plan on her part to kill him and his cat with an improvised explosive device.
Blondie, 10/12/09
Sorry that your dad created Blondie and not, say, the X-Men or the Transformers or some other insane revenue-generating piece of intellectual property, but cheer up! At least you’ve got that lucrative Dagwood Sandwich franchise thing going, right? Oh, wait.
Apartment 3-G, 10/12/09
The bad news for Professor Papagoras: when his current lust object Bobbie roots around in her pill-fogged mind for his name, all she can come up with is “Doctor Whositz.” The good news: she has a list of people or things to “do”, and he’s on it!
Marmaduke, 10/12/09
“No! Tell him you can use me as a substitute! Don’t let him think you don’t need meAARRRRGGGH” CRUNCH MUNCH SLURP
Beetle Bailey, 9/3/09
Fun fact! Today is my lovely wife’s birthday; thanks to the “born on this day” feature that runs right next to the Baltimore Sun’s comics section, we now know that it’s also Beetle Bailey creator Mort Walker’s birthday as well! (Who says the newspaper isn’t any good for anything anymore?) I wish that today’s Beetle Bailey were more auspicious to celebrate this fact; instead, it just demonstrates that the soldiers at Camp Swampy are so incompetent that their only value to the military is as experimental test subjects.
Gil Thorp, 9/3/09
In just three panels, Duncan Daley has established himself as the single coolest guy in Milford, with:
- His Sonic Youth t-shirt
- His single hoop earring
- His carefully calibrated ambivalence about everything (“It was cool, I guess”, “I guess I pumped a little iron,” “I guess I’ll continue gracing you with my low-key awesomeness”)
- His not being named “Robb” or “Brock”
Of course, Duncan isn’t that cool on any kind of absolute scale, but the bar is set exceptionally low. I mean, he’s competing against Brock (or Robb, I guess), who, in the third panel, seems insanely eager to track down some cold beers and punch them in the face.
Garfield, 9/3/09
Ha ha! Garfield has left the bloody, half-eaten corpse of a household pet in the refrigerator!
Spider-Man, 9/3/09
Ha ha! Doc Ock is going to “get” Spidey from behind with his “tentacle”!
Garfield, 7/18/09
Some years back, some friends of mine got married at a little camp they had rented in lovely Big Island, Virginia, in the rural foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. After the reception, they headed over to a nearby bed and breakfast, while most of the guests crashed overnight at the camp; the next day, the happy couple came back to the camp to have lunch with us, with a tale to tell. Apparently, there was one other couple also spending their wedding night at the bed and breakfast that night, and at breakfast the next morning, they looked like they were in more or less a state of shock — as my friend put it, they appeared to have experienced “a night full of terrible discoveries.” That’s what popped into my mind here when I saw John and Liz’s traumatized faces. Have they crossed some line, gone someplace from which they can never return? Will they ever be the same again? Was there a lot of tongue involved?
I’m amused, meanwhile, that Garfield feels a need to euphemize a disgust-prompted quantum of vomit as a “hairball.” Perhaps Paws, Inc., believes that the newspaper comics morals police would accept a reference to the sort of regurgitation natural to the cat lifestyle, whereas straight-up barfing would be forbidden. Clearly, they hadn’t seen this.
Mary Worth, 7/18/09
Speaking of people who have just experienced a night of terrible discoveries, check out Mary and Delilah’s devastated facial expressions here. You’ll have noticed that, while I breathlessly kept you up to date two weeks ago on every aspect of the interaction between Mary, Delilah, and Charley, I have been silent in the aftermath; that’s because the aftermath was boring, consisting of Mary and Delilah having the same pointless conversation, about how Delilah should get back together with her husband and Delilah saying she’d like to but she’s not sure, that they had for like three solid weeks leading up to the wonderful Charley episode. Mary is now washing her dishes with a look of defeated resignation on her face, her meddling having apparently failed to break through Delilah’s thick skull. Delilah, meanwhile, has chosen to wander unescorted around Charterstone in her revealing outfit, which will surely result in Charley leaping out of the bushes and wooing her with more transparent sleazy banter. Thus are the punishments the gods dish out to those who ignore Mary’s sound advice.
Gil Thorp, 7/18/09
Meanwhile, in Gil Thorp: The Stalkening, it appears we just might have a worthily bonkers summer storyline. WHO could hurling these baseballs at Gil and/or leaving them in his mailbox, since Shep Trumbo is “on vacation” (i.e., in prison for loosening the caps of all those saltshakers)? Who has Gil wronged in a baseball-themed manner, leading him to lurk in the shadows, wearing a Phantom of the Opera-style half-mask, cackling evilly and plotting revenge? Could it be Elmer Vargas, now condemned to work for the Kalamazoo Kings for all time? Clambake, whose dreams of baseball coaching glory were forever ruined by his ugly season with the Mudlarks? Everyone who’s played on the baseball team for the past six years and failed to go anywhere in the playdowns?
Mark Trail, 7/18/09
I’ve never had anyone assassinated by a sniper right in front of me, but I’m willing to bet the resulting noise would really be more like a BLAM or a KA-POW or a neeeeerrrMMP than a WHAM. However, the more important question is: what sound effects will the bullets make as they are punched out of the air one by one by Mark, as he slowly and deliberately makes his way back to confront our sinister villain?
Marvin, 6/15/09
You know, every time I think that Marvin has reached a new nadir of depravity, I am horrified and amazed anew as a fresh week of filth blights the innocent comics pages. The strip’s title character (aka “Satan’s toddler”) enjoys sitting around in his own putrefying waste, you see. How can he be convinced to join polite society and learn to urinate and defecate in a toilet? Only by animating his potty chair by some sinister magic and having it beg to be defiled. “You see Marvin, I’ve come out here because I want you to pee and poo in my mouth! Isn’t that vile enough to bring a glimmer of cruel enjoyment to your dark, dark soul?”
Lockhorns, 6/15/09
Ha ha, it’s funny because Loretta has killed Leroy by slipping horse tranquilizers into his evening highball! At least he appears to have died happy.
Garfield, 6/15/09
And just like that, the murder-suicide pact is forged.
