The Comics Curmudgeon

Oh, for —

Herb & Jamaal, 9/29/04

It’s move bodies! A real friend helps you move bodies!

I mean, that’s the joke. “A friend is someone who will help you move; a real friend will help you move bodies.”

Seriously, dude. Get it right.

Security? Security!

The Phantom, 9/28/04

Aaaaannnd to prove my point about The Phantom having different storylines during the week than it has on Sunday, here’s a weekly strip for your perusal. The Phantom is hot on the trail of one of his tigers, stolen from his private island and cooped up in an American zoo. One of the funny (not ha-ha funny) things about the Phantom is that, unlike most superheroes with dual personas, he’s in disguise in both of them. Whether he’s clad head-to-toe in skin-tight purple lycra, or wearing a mysterious yet stylish trench coat-fedora-sunglasses combo, you can never get a good look at his face. Which leads, of course, to the question of: Why? I mean, if nobody can ever see your face, then who exactly are you hiding it from? Surely if everyone’s used to seeing you in a mask, then going around in plain sight is the best disguise of all. Come on, Ghost-Who-Walks, all the other costumed crime-fighters have figured this out.

Anyway, on this adventure, you’d think the Phantom would be sneaking into the zoo at night all Phantom-stylie in a bid to free his striped buddy. Instead, he’s wandered into the zoo after hours, offering cryptic answers to legitimate questions from the staff. (I bet most zoo-keepers get really peeved when they have their book-learnin’ questioned.) Fortunately, this zoo is run by indulgent types who apparently enjoy, or at least tolerate, the vague prattling of mysterious strangers.

Extra credit question: Can anyone really say “?!” Because people in The Phantom say it a lot. Eternal glory goes to whoever can explain to me how to pronounce it. My guess is a sort of “mmmmmmmmOOOMP!”

In prison, a scrunchie is worth at least two packs of cigarettes

Mary Worth, 9/27/04

There are so many things to talk about in the current drug-fueled Mary Worth storyline that I’ve neglected one of the funniest: Mr. “My very own meth lab”’s hairstyle. Subdivided We Stand has noted Tommy’s hair’s waxing and waning, but the little ponytail brings everything to a whole new level of hilarity.

Incidentally, it’s nice to know that Tommy actually speaks his internal monologue aloud while he’s alone. All that thought-ballooning must get tiring.

I bet he sunk it with some DYN-O-MITE!

The Phantom, 9/26/04

All right, The Phantom, you’re on pretty thin racial-sensitivity ice already, you hear? It’s bad enough to have lovable African sidekick Guran go around topless, wear that primitive necklace and that ludicrous hat, and, well, be named “Guran”; but I defy anyone who was watching TV in the first half of the 1980s to not read Guran’s dialogue in the lower middle panel as a Gary Coleman-style “Say WHAAAT?”

Or maybe it’s just me.

Odd fact about The Phantom: because it’s not carried on Sunday in all papers, there are entirely different storylines going on in the daily and Sunday strips. This can be a bit confusing at first, but it certainly makes for more action than the Mary Worth solution to this problem, which is to spend all day Monday and Tuesday recapping what happened on Sunday.

Can the artifacts at least be crappy and non-priceless for once?

Mark Trail, 9/25/04

So we’ve known for some time that Captain Simpson was up to no good. Now at last we’ve found out that the Macguffin for this month’s adventure is … priceless Indian artifacts! You know, just like it was two or three adventures ago, when Mark was left in the desert to die and managed to bring down an airplane with nothing but a chunk of petrified cactus. Does it mean that I’ve been reading Mark Trail for too long when I’m noticing that it repeats itself?

Personally, I was hoping that the fishing expedition was actually a front for drug running. But I guess I have to turn to Mary Worth if I want narcotics action.

I’ve also been wondering over the course of this storyline about Otto, the bizarrely accented cook. He has facial hair, so he must be bad, but he loves his cat, so he must be good! Now that the hirsute ship’s master has swatted the beloved Rosebud, it’s clear that Otto’s one of the good guys. Apparently, mountain man beard trumps Cary Grant mustache in the world of Mark Trail villains. Presumably he’ll help Mark defeat the artifact smugglers — and maybe even get a decent shave.

By the way, if you grow disconsolate between episodes of Mark Trail, the comic strip, you can now groove along to “Mark Trail,” the song, by Scott McKnight. That link takes you directly to the MP3 file, so don’t click on it at work unless you want everyone to know that you like Mark Trail. (The song was highlited (highlit?) by Editrix on the comments page of the Interbridge Weblog — how’s that for blogrolling?)

Metapost: Memory lane

For reasons too complex to go into here, faithful reader Sue Trowbridge recently posted on her blog a list of the comics in the Baltimore Sun in 1991. This is in fact my own hometown paper, and the one from which all the strips in IRTCSYDHT are drawn. It’s interesting to see that many of the old favorites are still here, but also interesting that the funny section is so much bigger now. Baltimore, like almost every other city in America, is a one-newspaper town that used to have two newspapers, and the current comics page represents the inheritance of both former papers. So see, whiners like Noam Chomsky are always going on about how media consolidation limits information to the citizenry and puts control in the hands of corporate conglomerates and blah blah BLAH, but they miss the really important thing, which is: better comics pages. So there.

This week’s unsettling search terms, both from Yahoo!: “Paleolithic Age jokes” and “cartoon strips and steroid use”.