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Ziggy
Mary Worth, 1/11/10
You’d think that after, what, five and a half years of analyzing this nonsense “professionally,” my capacity to be amused and delighted by the total inability of Mary Worth characters to speak the way that the humans do would have slowly been dulled. But you would be mistaken, as nothing in today’s comics got as big a laugh out of me as “I suffer from an uneasy restlessness” did. It might actually seem here that scruffy neo-hobo Kurt is going to offer a radical alternative to this strip’s suffocating bourgeois values, and will lure Wilbur away from his comfortable condo life towards a new less stable and more vital existence, traveling from town to town to see what experiences the world has in store. But Kurt came into Wilbur’s life via the Internet, and everything associated with the Internet in Mary Worth is bad, so clearly this storyline will end with that sort of disaster averted and Wilbur returned safely to his ordinary soul-numbing life.
More proof that Kurt and Wilbur may actually be related by blood: their shared impulse to wear jackets and hats of precisely the same hue.
Jumble, 1/11/10
Speaking of suffocating bourgeois values, there’s something quite poignant about today’s Jumble, in which a group of crazed shoppers respond to a half-off sale on sodium-laden processed semi-food with a level of frenzy usually reserved for the Beatles circa 1964. I’m particularly saddened by the dude in the background, who’s cheerfully running over to the freezer case to make sure that he can bring home as many trays of microwaveable goop as possible, unaware of his life’s essential emptiness.
Crock, 1/11/10
I have many gripes against the creative team behind Crock, but one particular unlikable aspect of the strip as I encounter it is beyond their control: the fact that the desert setting is routinely slathered with a neon yellow unlike any found in nature must be blamed on the post-production colorists, not the credited artists. Still, it’s distracting, as in today’s strip, where it appears that Kerwood is being worked to death in some kind of sand mine.
Marvin, 1/11/10
For decades scientists have wondered: Would it be possible to create a character less appealing than Marvin? Well, the creators of this long running crime against humanity strip have decided to take that challenge head-on, by creating a Tyler Durden-style alternate personality for the titular hell-infant that encapsulates all of his worst qualities. The horrible little pig-faced monster is wearing his hat backwards for no good reason, which I suppose is a start.
Ziggy, 1/11/10
Thanks to a challenge from Stephan Pastis, Ziggy briefly experimented late last year with putting pants on its title character. That experiment has now thankfully been abandoned, but today we can see why Ziggy usually eschews trousers, as even a few weeks of wearing them has horribly mangled his legs. Are his feet pointing backwards?
Well, kids, as happens every year, I’m about to depart for my annual multi-city Christmas travelganza. I will start posting again on January 2, or thereabouts! But, as has become my wont, I have some fun things to share with you before I sign off for the year.
First up is an awesomely ambitious offering from faithful reader commodorejohn! You may have heard some of this comics-themed music before; now he’s completed an entire concept album called The Funnies, the cover art to which I dearly hope he doesn’t mind that I reproduce here:
With song titles like “Mary Worth Told Me To,” “Bösendorfer Bop,” and “Rockin’ The Armory (Recorded live at the Bucket, August 4th, 2009.)”, how could you go wrong? And it’s downloadable for free! What are you waiting for?
Also! I got a note from faithful reader Kattack about a recent trip she took to Monterey, California, where she encountered a playground dedicated to Dennis the Menace. Here she is, high-fiving and frolicking with the cartoon scamp in an extremely non-menacing fashion:
As is generally the case, the missing menace was provided by raccoons, who have decided to blanket the park with their delicious-looking feces:
“I actually made my whole family go out of their way to find this park once I saw it on a map because I knew you would appreciate it,” Kattack says. “The raccoon shit sign was just a bonus.”
Also! We’ve all been watching in mingled horror and fascination as the Pearls Before Swine characters have, with apparent success, agitated for Ziggy to start wearing pants. But what if things had gone … the other way? The Jumble’s Jeff Knurek dares to visualize it!
And finally! Faithful reader Susan sent me some pics of one of her delightful finds: a Mark Trail coloring book!
Wait, who’s this little blonde girl? A friend for Rusty? Ha ha, just kidding, it’s well known that Rusty has no friends.
What says “good, wholesome fun for kids” more than the severed heads of their favorite comics characters surrounding a personal message from Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior?
The most unsettling thing to me about this image is Mark and Rusty’s white hair. Kids, do you have an extremely black crayon? One that’s blacker than black? One that’s so black it appears to shine with its own dark, mysterious inner light?
Let me just step in here and say that you don’t own any of America, Rusty. It’s exactly this sort of commie “holding land in common” talk that led directly to Mark’s brutal assault on a duly appointed law enforcement officer.
And on that note, I leave you to your own holiday fun. See ya in 2010, everybody!
Ziggy, 12/18/09
Wow! Like a lot of people, I assumed that Ziggy would make a token response to Pearls Before Swine’s put-pants-on-Ziggy crusade before getting back to the bizarrely optimistic despair that is its stock in trade. But today brings us back to pants, and puts a whole new spin on things! Ziggy is visiting his wizened dry cleaner, who offers to give back the gnomish alopeciac’s trousers — along with his Nehru jacket, a garment that went out of style many years ago. Thus, this panel turns our scorn back upon us. Pants are so out of date, it seems to be saying. Maybe you narrow-minded losers are walking around, your thighs unfairly constricted by fabric tubes; but Ziggy is the new model man, his legs exposed to the open air, as is the style here in the future. You squares with the pants can do what you want. Ziggy won’t be having any of it.
Wizard of Id, 12/18/09
Hurl all the epithets you want at the Wizard of Id — “unfunny,” “irrelevant,” “badly drawn,” “minimizes torture” — but one thing you have to give it credit for is its unflinching attitude towards alcohol. While Hi and Lois, for instance, has gone along to get along, with “Thirsty” Thurston’s gin blossom-scarred nose of old having long ago vanished, the Wizard of Id’s Bung remains on the funny pages as an unrepentant alcoholic, and not the fun, charming kind. Today, for instance, we learn that, in the brief period of time after he awakes from his booze-numbed slumber but before he can stumble down to the bar to start drinking again, his hands are shaking so badly due to the lack of alcohol that he injures himself while attempting to attend to basic grooming. This may shock and horrify you, but anything that leads to awkward conversations along the lines of “Daddy, what’s the DTs?” is OK in my book.
Six Chix, 12/18/09
Speaking of horror, there’s something quite touching about this scene, in which ephemeral snow-lovers trade a last few endearments even as their bodies droop and melt.
Mark Trail, 12/18/09
Sheriff Stogie Q. Doublechin is right! That is a good one! What kind of monster leaves a little boy trapped under a car on the beach? How the hell does a car even get onto a beach on the first place? And would anyone leave a child in the care of this obvious lunatic? No, the sheriff doesn’t think he’ll be following that lead, than you very much. He’ll just stay here with his thumbs hooked into his belt and glare at you there in your cage, mister! Haw haw!
Note just what a state Mark is in, with no less than five hairs somewhat out of place. This is really the most desperate we’ve ever seen him.
Crock, 12/18/09
So, uh, the Lost Patrol, after years of all-male company, has been saved by water and masturbatory fodder? Eh, why not, it’d hardly be the most distasteful Crock ever produced.
Dennis the Menace, 12/17/09
I hereby request demand that Dennis the Menace be renamed Henry Mitchell the Lascivious, Menacing Pervert, as today he appears to be insisting that Dennis ensure that sexily emaciated 15-year-old baby-sitter Chloe remain in the Mitchell family employ. I’d say that Henry was merely planning to teach Dennis about sexual objectification early, or perhaps that he had found a new star for his masturbatory reveries, but yesterday we saw him making time at the mall with some non-wife person, so clearly he plans some unseemly, legally actionable advance. This panel is by far the most distasteful thing on today’s comics page.
Mary Worth, 12/17/09
By comparison, today’s Mary Worth is positively innocent, though I do require that Wilbur keep both hands where we can see them. This is literally the twelfth consecutive day Wilbur has spent parked in front of his computer, and many of us were beginning to despair that we’d ever seem a flashback, so today’s sexy thought balloon about Wilbur’s lost love is something of a breath of fresh air, even if it is juxtaposed with a facial expression of Spock-like seriousness. C’mon Wilbur, who could have resisted that pearl necklace, that frilly collar, that fringy jacket? It was the sort of outfit that drove men wild, on whatever alternate-universe 1970s Earth where someone might have actually worn it!
Dick Tracy, 12/17/09
I would like to point out that that the alienating, inhumanely scaled architecture on display in the second panel of today’s Dick Tracy nicely parallels the alienation between long-haired father and long-haired son. I’d also like to point out that, if you want your rage-frenzied classical orchestra conductor dad to stop hitting you, you probably shouldn’t refer to violins as “fiddles.”
Ziggy, 12/17/09
In case you’re wondering what this is about: this is what this is about! I’d like to add that I dearly hope that comics editors really do go work wearing a suit and tie, and that they sit behind a large, imposing desk, and that, when they ask hairless, half-naked weirdos to maybe put on some pants, they do so with an expression that shows that they speak more from sorrow than from anger.
Mary Worth, 12/12/09
As predicted, Mary Worth has made what should by all rights be a spectacular storyline boring in near-record time, mostly by showing us endless shots of Wilbur typing instead of treating us to mid-70s college flashbacks. Still, there are some moments of visual interest in today’s strip, mostly centering around Wilbur’s crimes against ergonomics. In panel one, he’s somehow managed to get his chest all the way up the keyboard, forcing his elbows behind his back as he types the phrase every young man wants to hear — “I’m probably not your dad, but your mom was an amazing lay back in college.” In panel two, the desk seems to have miraculously dropped by two or three inches, which explains why Wilbur’s fingers are just flailing about in the air two inches above the keyboard.
Ziggy, 12/12/09
Last year around this time, I pointed out how creepy it was for a man with no pants to wait in line to see Santa. Today we learn what’s even creepier: a man with no pants standing off to the side and silently watching kids sit on Santa’s lap. Just the thought of it is apparently making Santa weep in disgust.
Mark Trail, 12/12/09
While I suppose it’s swell that Mark is going to great lengths to save Rusty’s life and all, don’t you think he’s a little too excited about all this breaking and entering and smashing windows and what not? I mean, look at that face in the second panel: drenched with sweat, eyes wide and crazed — Mark hasn’t had this much fun in his life! In fact, it was wholly unnecessary for him to dramatically throw that old barrel though the store’s front window, as Mark is more than capable of kicking any door down. One begins to wonder if the whole “jacking the car up on sand as a playful dog scampers about” scenario was a set-up to allow Mark to go on this vandalistic rampage.
Pluggers, 12/12/09
Pluggers are so scandalized by extremely mild swear words that they bowdlerize classic movie quotes, even in their own minds.
Spider-Man, 11/20/09
It really shouldn’t come as surprise to anyone that the quality control over at the newspaper Spider-Man strip is less than stringent; but, as several faithful readers have written to me to point out, the feature appears to be reaching for stunning new levels of “Eh, why bother?” It seems that at some point this plotline’s pathetic villain has had his name switched from Bigshot to Bigtime. This is obviously troubling, not least because there was already a newspaper Spider-Man villain named Bigtime just last year. Worse, while Bigtime — who earned that moniker when his all-pervasive clock fetish matched up with his given name of Bigelow — seemed like a pretty lame nemesis for a superhero at the time, he’s like the love child of Catwoman and Lex Luthor when compared to Bigshot, who got his name because he’s short. It’s a sad day when your villainy suffers in comparison to someone whose crimes were entirely timepiece-themed.
Dick Tracy, 11/20/09
So this is something like the fourth separate and contradictory explanation that’s been offered for the events of this Dick Tracy plot — which explanations, I should add, have taken up more strip time than the events they are attempting to explain. This one makes even less sense than the others. In my experience, circuses tend to travel from place to place, and thus there’s no “property” to purchase, unless we’re talking about the actual tent itself, for which I’m guessing there isn’t a huge resale market. Cyber the tiger looks as enraged by this as anyone about all this, and I sincerely hope he (or she?) finally just eats everyone to shut them up.
Judge Parker, 11/20/09
I just had this bit of realization about this plot: Sam Driver is withholding information from the police about this note, and knowledge about this note could set his client free — his client who has terminal cancer and not long to live. Presumably he thinks it would be much more dramatic to reveal his ace card during the trial (“discovery”? what’s that?) in stunning and dramatic fashion than it would be to work the whole thing out now and let his client spend the last few weeks of his life with his family. In other words, Sam, never one to rest on his laurels, is working hard to secure the title of Dickiest Man Alive.
Ziggy, 11/20/09
I’ve always been disturbed by the fact that nightmarish gore-fests like Hostel or the Saw movies get R ratings while sexy flicks like Henry and June or The Dreamers get NC-17s, and now I have another reason to feel that way: this horoscope implies that Ziggy will not be violently murdered, but will rather participate in some no doubt queasy-making sex act.
Slylock Fox, 11/20/09
The final step when drawing a member of the proletariat: the honest grime of manual labor!
