The Comics Curmudgeon

Metapost: Last post of the aughts naughts ohs decade!

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!

Monday cheap shots

Pearls Before Swine, 9/21/09

Pearls Before Swine parodies Apartment 3-G. Poor Margo.

Edge City, 9/21/09

Last holiday: avoid bread products. Next holiday: promote bread products. Religion is so complicated.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/21/09

For some real money, try ‘Pie-the-Author’: you can pick up cowpies free at any dairy farm.

Dick Tracy, 9/21/09

What? The clown? The one we saw with a blunderbuss back in July? Say it ain’t so!

Judge Parker, 9/21/09

OK blah blah blah Gloria Sanchez sure is hot blah blah blah blah. Got it.

Mark Trail, 9/21/09

Hey, if it’s a good idea to just leave him bob, put him in the water!

– Uncle Lumpy

The Comics Curmudgeon is famous!

Pearls Before Swine, 8/12/09

Hello, anonymous rude denizens of the Internet! You have driven Stephan Pastis into his Internet Happy Box, so I hope you’re satisfied with yourselves. Actually, when people started emailing me about this strip this morning, I had a weird moment of déjà vu, as I thought this had run months ago. In fact, Stephan e-mailed it to me when he drew it, but that was back in April thanks to the high-tech distribution system that underlies the newspaper comics industry. Anyway, at the time I promised to rip him a new one when this came out, except he hasn’t been doing any of the terrible pun strips lately. SO UNTIL NEXT TIME PASTIS. You stay in that box just to be safe, though.

Baldo, 8/12/09

I went to college at Cornell, which is in the absolutely lovely (some might even say “gorges” HA IT’S A PUN GET IT) city of Ithaca, New York, which, despite being lovely, does not have much going for it in the way of malls. When you grow up going to Cheektowaga’s fabulous Walden Galleria, it’s a bit of a letdown doing all your enclosed chain-store shopping and food-court dining at the Pyramid Mall. This establishment appears to have since changed its name to “The Shops At Ithaca Mall,” which I find extremely amusing — oh, there are shops at the mall, you say? Anyway, I always used to mock the Pyramid Mall’s smallness by referring to it as the “Petite Mall”; I thought this was hilarious and everyone else was either more or less indifferent about it or thought it was actively offensive to people who have seizures. This is a roundabout way of saying that, why yes, I do feel validated by having essentially the same joke used in a Baldo strip 15 years later, thanks for asking!

I originally felt like there might be only about fifty-fifty chance that my terrible seizure joke was in fact the intended reading of this strip, but then I realized that there was no other obvious humor content here, so I figure that has to be what’s happening.

Hi and Lois, 8/12/09

It has not escaped my notice that quite a few of the recent Trixie-centered Hi and Lois strips have featured the pre-verbal infant girl wandering around outside apparently unattended. Maybe her parents are hoping that she’ll be adopted by a local wolfpack or some other band of animals and they’ll be relieved of responsibility for her; unfortunately, they hadn’t counted on the effectiveness with which the builders of their suburban subdivision cleared it of most wildlife. Trixie’s only option is to take up with a colony of frogs, which will go fine until she hits puberty and heads to the culvert under the arterial road with amplexus on her mind, only to be bitterly disappointed.

Hagar the Horrible, 8/12/09

Ha ha! He finds his wife’s mother so irritating that he’s going to hand her over to savages who will use her as a slave or a sacrifice to their pagan gods! MOTHERS IN LAW, am I right, people?

Tebeos o muerte, venceremos!

Hi and Lois and Pearls Before Swine, 9/8/08

I got about a jillion e-mails about this today basically asking me OH MY GOD DO YOU THINK THIS IS A COINCIDENCE?, which I have to say that I pretty much do, as the jokes don’t work together quite well enough for it to be a coordinated effort. I think Pastis just picked the wrong day to make fun of Hi and Lois (though when the Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC hired goons burn down his house, he’ll find that any day is the wrong day to make fun of Hi and Lois.) It might at first be hard to imagine that Hi and Lois would be taking on any kind of international politics, but keep in mind that this strip was one of the first to tackle the subprime meltdown, so it’s smarter than it looks.

I’m intrigued by Ditto’s shirt. It looks like when the time comes for him to take absolute power from his sister’s ailing hands, he’ll have a spiffy logo for his paramilitary organization all ready to go.

Family Circus, 9/8/08

There’s something off about this cartoon. Big Daddy Keane’s indulgent smile clashes with his complaint that the days when his house wasn’t cluttered up by four pants-pooping submorons and their many overpriced toys are now as distant as the Fillmore Administration or the Thirty Years War. And the children’s rather generic hijinks don’t at all imply a brash solipsism in which everything that preceded their birth is consigned to a single inchoate prehistoric moment. Presumably this panel is designed to be repeatedly trotted out and assigned a new “parents say the darnedest things about their kids” caption as needed — which captions, I predict, will only become more bitter as time goes on.

Marvin, 9/8/08

Say, remember the Hulk, the sort-of popular comic book character that became the basis of a hit TV show in the late ’70s, and then later of two not-quite-blockbuster films in the ’00s? Well, Marvin hopes you still have “Hulk fever” as a residual effect of the marketing behind these media properties, because we’re apparently going to get some lame Hulk-themed jokes for the next few days. No matter how bad they get, we can at least console our selves that they appear not to actually feature the hated Marvin himself.

Here come the foobs

For Better Or For Worse, 7/11/08

You know what it’s been way, way too long since we last did? A little bit of What They Say And What They Mean!

Apartment 3-G, 7/11/08

Jack may sound concerned about the possibility that riff-raff might be pillaging the Mills Gallery, but his facial expression in panel three conveys to me a certain growing sadistic glee. I predict that a certain trio of crackheads are about to be on the receiving end of a savage and righteous keying. Perhaps Jack’s inner vigilante has been frustrated for years by modern New York’s low crime rates, or, more likely, he may realize that an act of shocking violence is the quickest way into Margo’s affections.

Mark Trail, 7/11/08

One look at that second panel will show you why Kelly Welly is considered the sex symbol in this strip. Oh yeah, baby, roll that right eye a little further towards the side of your head while staring straight ahead with the left. Mmm-hmm, that’s the stuff.

Pearls Before Swine, 7/11/08

Oh, Mr. Pastis, I ignored you when you taunted Lynn Johnston. I ignored you when you tried to kill Jeffy. But Masky McDeath? Oh, well played, sir.

Gil Thorp, 7/11/08

More proof that illegal immigrants do the sort of dirty cleanup work that Americans won’t! Steve Rosen probably refused to drive in the winning run unless he got dental insurance and overtime pay. You wouldn’t have gotten that kind of lip from Elmer.

Ziggy, 7/11/08

Ha ha, Ziggy’s killed his only friend with off-brand dog food!

A case of the comics Mondays

Mary Worth, 5/19/08

Well, it’s Monday, and with the sad story of the Dead Donna and the Battlin’ Amalfi Boys having reached its natural conclusion, it looks like we’re gearing up for another … wait, what’s this? We’re still at the funeral? Oh, Mary, you wily silver fox, you! I should have known that there were more twists and turns awaiting us in this storyline, since we’re barely a month into it. Will there be fisticuffs at the reading of the will? Will Ron and Richard follow papal precedent and dig up their mother’s corpse, demanding to know who she really loved best? I’m all a-tingle! I should point out that one of the greatest Mary Worth plots in living memory, the tale of Drunken, Co-Dependent Rita Begler, started at a funeral just like this one.

In panel two, it seems that Ron is less thrilled with Mary’s continued presence in his life than I am, as he appears to be preparing a stiff right uppercut for her if she gets any closer.

For Better Or For Worse, 5/19/08

Last week’s tale of how Everybody Wants Liz Because She Is Perfect probably brought the levels of foobishness in your bloodstream to an uncomfortably high level; since this week promises to focus on Mike’s Totally Awesome Writing Career, we may have to brace ourselves for a public health emergency. Braver souls than I who have perused the official For Better Or For Worse Web site tell me that his latest opus was originally supposed to be some crap about a boy in the 1870s who’s mad at his father and joins the crew of a sailboat or something; but since the title appears to be Blood Cargo, I’m assuming that during the writing process it turned into a grisly tale of a boatload of demons, sailing from port to port, dragging the living on board and keeping their mutilated corpses below decks to use as food. Presumably he’s hoping for a quick cash-in by selling to a second-rate J-Horror director looking to make it big in Canada. Reading between the lines, Carleen’s dialog should probably read “I mean, you look like a normal guy — but you come up with all these ideas that make me think that you’re some kind of budding serial killer!”

What exactly is Weed doing in panel two? It looks like he’s somehow suspending an enormous empty picture frame in the middle of his hip loft apartment, possibly as an act of protest against the tyranny of “art.” Whatever it is, it’s as good as excuse as any to avoid talking to Michael and coming up with something nice to say about his terrible, terrible book.

Judge Parker, 5/19/08

“I’m the richest person in the county … I don’t get parking tickets! In fact, I could probably have this highway patrolman fired, or killed!”

Pearls Before Swine, 5/19/08

I have to say that I really love Pig’s facial expression in the third panel. I like the idea that he gets all excited just writing “Surprise!” I suppose the cable company won’t really get the full effect, since they can’t see it.