Archive for October, 2004

Wizard of Id, 10/29/04

Welcome to a new feature here at IRTCSYDHT — IRTCSYDHT on the road! I’m comin’ at you live from New York City, the Big Apple, Gotham, the city that never sleeps! Let me tell you, New York’s good for trendy boutiques and twelve dollar martinis, but pretty crappy when it comes to comics. But by plunking down 25 cents for the New York Post (which, by the way, is the crappiest paper I’ve ever read — today they used a dollar sign as an S in a headline, as if it were the title of a bad rap song), I got reacquainted with an old friend named The Wizard of Id — or, as the Post apparently calls it, just The Wizard.

Like Kudzu, this strip has long since dispensed with its title character as its main source of yucks. It looks like its passed through the decade or so since I last read it without missing a beat: still making jokes about the short little king! Oh, he’s a hoot. I like how he always seems to be running for office — as if he weren’t a brutal monarch who was anointed by God and could crush his subjects with an iron fist! O King, why do you waste your time grovelling before your subjects for their approval when you should be taxing them blind and spending their hard-earned gold on wenches and ornaments for your palace! Your majesty, you are not worthy of your crown!

OK, so, to sum up: Wizard of Id is still stupid. Still, I have to credit it with teaching me the meaning of the word “fink.”

Peanuts, 10/28/04

The Boondocks, 10/28/04

When I was a kid, I learned a lot from the comics. For instance, I had a bunch of Peanuts anthologies that I read obsessively, and they taught me about how to be melancholy. Take sighing: from strips like the one above, I learned the precise emotional and conversational situations in which a sigh would be appropriate. Unfortunately, I had no idea what a sigh actually was, which meant that, when the mood struck, I would actually say the word “sigh.” This went on for years with no one older and wiser correcting me, presumably because it’s pretty hilarious to see a little kid going around saying “sigh.” Come to think of it, that probably accounts for a lot of Peanuts’ appeal. I add the Boondocks strip here as evidence that this trend is still going strong.

When I moved from my Blogger site to this one, I was rather pleased about the new commenting system. There have been some grumbling from commenters, however, who say that the pop-up comment window is too small, and that they’d like to be able to preview comments before they go live. These are well-reasoned requests, to which I say: bite me. Ha, ha! No, seriously, part of what annoyed me about Blogger was that leaving a comment required you to leave whatever index page you were reading and go to a page that contained just the post you were commenting on — the pop-up window seemed like a good solution to me to make it easier to navigate the site. I’m sure there’s a way to make the pop-up window a bit bigger, and when I have time in the next couple of weeks, I’ll track that down. In the meantime, though, if you are really feeling constricted by the tiny pop-up window, all you have to do is click on the headline of the post instead of the “Comments” link. Doing so will take you to a full-sized page that contains the post and a comment form at the end. Or, if you use a browser like Safari, Firefox, or Mozilla that allows tabbed browsing, you can, as helpful reader Mark Jackson points out, right-click on the comment link at the end of the post and open the comment window in a new tab.

As for previewing posts, that’s not really possible with the software I use to run the blog. However, I could set things up so that you could register and log in as an IRTCSYDHT member. If you log in and leave a comment, you could later go back and edit that comment — logging in would essentially be a mechanism that the blog would use to make sure that you were actually the person who entered the comment originally. Do any of you have any actual interest in this? I’ll set things up if enough people clamor to become registered members of the site; then I’ll probably have to think of some damn fool membership benefits or something like that. Anyway, e-mail me or post a comment if you think this might be fun.

Meanwhile, faithful reader Sue Trowbridge had no problem posting the following comment: “A few weeks ago, didn’t you post that someone had found their way to your site by searching on ‘blondie bumstead nude’? I notice that Sunday’s strip, which actually DID feature a nude Blondie (well, almost…), went unremarked upon by you. So I thought I should say something about it. Because you could definitely see part of her breast. I don’t think I would have noticed that kind of thing in the past, but I think reading people’s comics-related Google queries has sullied me.”

There are in fact many someones who found their way to my site looking for nudie pictures of Blondie Bumstead, and I did of course notice her semi-nude status on Sunday. I passed over it in order to express my outrage at incontinence humor, but Sue is right in that I need to serve my readership. So, for all you perverts out there, here’s what you’re looking for: Blondie, as nude as she’s going to get.

I hope you’re happy. By the way, congratulations, Sue: you’re the first person to publicly admit to being “sullied” by my site.

Speaking of sullied, here’s some strange and alarming search terms for you: “dilbert wedding planning strip,” “baby moses taking bath cartoon,” “oh mary why don’t you have some sense,” “trainwreck drug lingo,” and (no kidding) “how to make crystal meth.” Well, see, first you get a brown paper bag…

Kudzu, 10/27/04

All right, Kudzu, I went out on a limb for you. I said that I sometimes find you funny, something no other right-thinking comics commentator would do. I even said that I particularly like the Church League strips. And this, this is how you repay me?

Here’s the thing: the Church League is funny because no one else in America, to my knowledge, is doing jokes about differing religions, and because it’s funny to imagine the fairly bland Baptists led by Will B. Dunn playing softball against Buddhist monks or whatever. See, when you create a running gag around some structure, you can’t just jettison that structure if you want to make a joke about, say, reality show rejects (who, for the record, DO NOT THEMSELVES CONSTITUTE A RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATION).

At least when I see the parakeet, I know in advance that it’s not going to be funny. Try to keep things orderly here.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 10/26/04

OK, so why does recycling human corpses outrage me, but marrying the taxidermied head of a member of your species who’s been killed for sport make me laugh? I guess I’m just fickle when it comes to dark humor. It’s just wrong at so many levels that I can’t resist it. I particularly like the fact that it’s at the Elk’s Club. Ha! Get it? It’s like the Elk’s Club that exists in the real world, only it’s for, like, actual elks!

Ooog. To quote The Simpsons: “Are you being sarcastic?” “Aw, I don’t even know anymore!”

The other thing that I like here is that Ed is grinning kind of maniacally, while his wife (quite understandably) looks miserable, and the other guys at the club look … uncomfortable. Not the way you’d look if, say, one of your acquaintances presented you with a stuffed and mounted severed head and demanded that you treat it as his wife, but rather as if Ed has committed some social faux pas that they don’t really want to call him on but that they aren’t really happy about either. It must be tough being an elk.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/25/04

OK, I can’t hold back any longer. Mrs. Hendershot is the villain in the current Rex Morgan story line, and I just love her hair. Is it really her hair? Is it a wig? Who cares? It’s so … interesting! I like how it seems to be one solid mass at the crown of her head, and then has precisely parallel lines mapped onto the curve of her skull further down, then ends in a perfect line that almost cups in a bit. Rex Morgan’s artists love interestingly stylized hair (just look at Heather’s two little droopy devil horns) but Mrs. H’s freaky ‘do just takes the cake. It makes her head look all the weirder perched at the end of her unnaturally thin neck.

I mean, do you think kids call her “Kremlin Head” behind her back? Because … well, I mean … her hair looks kind of like … those tower things on Russian churches. You know what I’m talking about. Those things.

Heh. “Kremlin Head.” That’s funny.

All right, that’s all I have to say about that.

Some grim fare in the soap opera strips these days. Margo’s tied up in the trunk of a car in Apartment 3-G, some poor college kid’s in the hospital from bad meth in Mary Worth, and now we’ve got a mean old lady whose crusty exterior is just a cover for a hateful, unhinged, child-abusing interior. She may be evil, but seeing this skinny elderly woman hauled off in shackles — as we almost certainly will — is going to be a somewhat unpleasant image for the funny papers.