Poop jokes are forever
Crock, 4/25/09
Some might call it inconsistent, but I like my terrible comic strips to keep track of and abide by their ossified, humorless conventions rather than trying to branch out into new comedic structures. Take, for instance, the frequent “Crock talks to his mother on the phone” trope in Crock. Usually we only hear our sinister commandant’s side of the conversation, with his mother’s replies relayed in indirect speech to whatever hapless forgettable character happens to have wandered into the panel. Today is the first time that I can remember actually seeing a word balloon (one so large that Crock has to hold the phone a good foot from his ear) emerging from Crock’s phone. Of course, the punchline is a hilarious reference to terrible institutional food causing an old woman to defecate uncontrollably, so I think we can provide the structural flexibility necessary to allow such a gem to be delivered.
Mary Worth, 4/25/09
“That’s right, Covice! Your nationwide string of broken hearts ends here, thanks the efforts of Bruno and Flaxhair, FraudCops! With the rust-colored jacket of justice and the minty blazer of retribution, they travel the nation, looking for scamsters with tell-tale pencil mustaches to put in the slammer. Sorry we took as long to catch up with him as we did, young lady; you didn’t do anything foolish like, say, give him an enormous sum of money, did you? Because you can pretty much kiss it goodbye if you did.”
Shoe, 4/25/09
The obvious punchline here is actually “Your body has a lot of hair.” I’d like to believe that the form actually used was chosen because it’s mildly funnier, but it may just be that someone finally remembered, apparently between the first and second panels, that the characters in Shoe are birds and thus have no hair at all.
Aitherion
April 26th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
The cops really should have said “Ma’am, he hasn’t called you ‘Queenie’, has he?”
No other crime this man has committed can be as terrible as calling someone “Queenie” as a pet name. Except maybe calling himself “Ted Confey” in the first place.
CoriOreo
April 26th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Sadly, it’s the bigamy charge against Tedward there that has me most interested. I can only hope that we find ourselves privileged enough to meet one of his “other” women in the near future. Adrian will either burst out crying or wallop the little hussy a good one with her handbag, as she appears ready to do to her fiancee in the second panel.
Non-Shannon
April 26th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
“And I would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for that meddling old shrew!”
Yes, of course Mary had something to do with this. How could she not?
Tim
April 26th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
RE: Shoe, if we’re going to start picking that nit, then we have to get into the whole birds with mammary glands issue and who really needs that?
Roto13
April 26th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
Did someone throw a fireball at Fidel Castro in Crankshaft today? Holy crap, this strip is more badass than I give it credit for. It could only be made better if the deathcat was involved somehow, but I guess the fact that Castro is alive today prevents that.
Harold
April 26th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Off-topic and shamelessly unrelated – but everyone reading this between 8:00 and 9:00 PM local time Sunday should go look to the West to see a conjunction of the Moon, Pleiades, and Mercury!!!
http://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2009/04/mercury-setting-conjunction-of-mercury.html
See y’all when I get back inside!
redlikerubies
April 26th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
Okay, Slylock Fox was especially awesome today. The “how to draw” section was for drawing an ice cream treat but instead prominently featured a fat kid with an outie belly button who had just eaten the treat and was throwing away the packaging. Being 28, I know I am not the target audience for SF, but the silliness was off the charts and I went to go get a pen and doodle pad.
Tim
April 26th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
@ Harold… sorry, just mostly cloudy!
Larry McAwful
April 26th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Well, I don’t know. That lady bird has a lot of hair, which seems to be very fashionable among she-birds in East Virginia. But I suppose that actually pointing out that she has hair would be as awkward as pointing out that she’s got earrings, which is crazy because they don’t even draw ears on these birds. I can allow that their glasses can stay up without ears (though that’s pushing it,) but earrings? Come on!
membargo
April 26th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Except for the strange interlude on Earth Day, Mary has been MIA for weeks. Are we supposed to believe that this problem solved itself without her meddlin’ ways? I won’t believe that. I can’t!
If Adrian has any lingering doubts about Ted’s double life, the Sansabelt pants and the tucked-in polo shirt should set her straight.
“Minty blazer of retribution” – hee!
Derdrom
April 26th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Officer flaxhair’s speech mannerisms… so familiar.. where’d'ya suppose we’ve seen that before… could it be… They Do It Every Time??! Ohh yeah!!
As for Ted getting caught without Mary W.’s divine influence, it seems Dr. Jeff has been imprinted too deeply. In other words, Mary’s gone viral!
150
April 26th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Man, how humiliating would it be to get put away by a cop in a lime-green suit?
NoahSnark
April 26th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
Ah Mary Worth – where true love is the delightful lead in to personal tragedy.
Harold
April 26th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
I realized thst Josh wouldn’t get to participate in the Moon/Pleiades/Mercury observing – Baltimore’s sky, the last time I checked, was a solid yellow-orange!
Well, it’s over now for those of us on the East Coast. I’ll have pictures up as soon as NOOO — I CAN’T SEE!! DAMN YOU, RUBY!!!
Digger
April 26th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
“Edward Covice, you’re under arrest!”
“Why are you calling him that?”
“We just like to make up random names for people. You got a problem with that, Girly McDumdum?”
Remote Sparky
April 26th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
A3G: Xeno’s paradox applied to violence?
MW: Will Mary be cackling Monday?
scamps
April 26th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
Add “Visible Panty Lines” to Tedward’s list of crimes.
KarMann
April 26th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
Re MW: Oh, come on, you can’t rule out Mary’s meddling. She puts the “anonymous” in “anonymous tip,” I’m sure.
Alan's Addiction
April 26th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
I realize that, being born after the Truman administration, I’m a little younger than most “Crock” readers, but I still have no cultural ties to the phrase “Gas and go.” I get that it’s a horrible euphemism for bodily functions because it’s in Crock, but I know nothing about the phrase aside from that.
I’d have to say that Ted/Edward’s crimes are pretty minor compared to that horrible green suit. I’m pretty sure that everyone who read today’s Mary Worth had their vision dropped by 10 points, and even Hitler couldn’t do that. As a side note, I never thought that “tampering with public records” was an actual criminal charge. That’s akin to “peeing in the public pool,” or “using a razor to steal pages from the university’s books” – it’s probably a crime, but it’s rarely enforced and almost expected. Still, given the banality and stupidity of this case, I fully expect Judge Parker to preside over the case.
“Your hair has a lot of body” – when has that ever been a successful pickup line? Cosmo (and humans) would do better to emulate actual birds and engage in a complex, ritual dance/song. If Cosmo (or humans) are unable to do that, I’d recommend a combination of booze and karaoke.
Windier E. Megatons
April 26th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Isn’t Ted a really common nickname for Edward? For example, Edward/Ted Kennedy? Is Adrian really so dumb that she can’t parse that? …oh, yeah. Right.
I also like how much of a hurry Ted must have been in to skip town, given that he appears to have given himself some sort of reverse wedgie while hastily cramming his shirt into his pants.
Aviatrix
April 26th, 2009 at 11:40 pm
@19 – Alan’s Addiction
The complete phrase “gas and go” refers to the crime of fuelling a vehicle at a self-serve gas station and then driving away without paying. For the purpose of the comic you just have to recognize “gas” as intestinal gas and “go” as in “Mommy, I have to go!”
dale
April 27th, 2009 at 12:18 am
“gas and go” in an auto race is when you make a pit stop for nothing but gasoline.
Dragon of Life
April 27th, 2009 at 12:48 am
“Ted! Talk to me! I must know why you won’t look at this second thumb I’ve grafted onto my hand! I did it for you, Ted!”
Jeff
April 27th, 2009 at 2:09 am
So finally, a Crock…of shit. Excellent.
It's time to pay the price
April 27th, 2009 at 3:12 am
As the officer in the lime suit rounded a corner he pulled off his mask revealing a familiar wrinkled face beneath. No one would ever know who it really was that saved the day, no one had to. The meddle was its own reward.
Yanni
April 27th, 2009 at 6:19 am
I was actually reading today’s Shoe as “Your body has a lot of body” aka “You’re fat.” Of course, that issue just distracts you from noticing the framed credit card hanging on the wall.
Lolsworth
April 27th, 2009 at 7:25 am
Crock in panel three is all, “And here’s the punchline. Take it or leave it, you bastards.”
Trent
April 27th, 2009 at 8:45 am
Edward Covice?
Seriously? That’s his name?
Was this supposed to be some kind of Medival allegorical tale?
Little Guy
April 27th, 2009 at 10:00 am
MW: — But… but I wanted a Tasering! A3G gets a Tasering!
Chicago Bob
April 27th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
15 & 24: Digger & Jeff: Just have to say you guys bring the atmosphere of rude wit to new, splendid heights.
Turgid Gloppage
April 27th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Crock: That’s not a cordless phone. It’s a regular phone, but unplugged from any active unit. Crock has to hold the phone from his ear so that the reader can see that it’s not just Crock carrying on a coversation with his own imaginary mother or dead spirit of his mother (”What, Mommy? Kill them you say?”). Other strips handle voices through the phone with a different style of word balloon. The Crock artist is relegated to drawing a protagonist with a single arm emerging from his chin, so maybe that advanced speech balloon technique has yet to be mastered, as is his research in what actually constitutes a “joke”.
Turgid Gloppage
April 27th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Shoe: You can also read into this strip that the girl bird is trying to respond to Cosmo’s compliment with another compliment. Maybe she, as a wild animal in nature to find fat a measure of one’s success.* Having a larger body makes for a healtier offspring and all of that. So girl-bird is really coming on to the older and slovenly Cosmo, despite our misinterpretation of the opposite.
*Except for the Bol Weevil. From “Master & Commander”:
Capt Jack: Which of these two Bol Weevils would you choose?
Doctor: The larger one.
Capt Jack: You are wrong.
Doctor: What do you mean? The larger one is stronger and faster than the other. Surely it has the greater advantage.
Capt Jack: You should always choose the lesser of two Weevils!
Howlin' Wolf
April 27th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Is any one else outraged that A3G and Mary Worth are being allowed to reach their narrative climaxes at the same time? Countless octogenarians will have heart attacks because of this. It’s almost as irresponsible as Edward Covice.
Pinokeyo's Wife
April 27th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
Well, wasn’t that snappy? Just when you thought that yet another Mary Worth storyline was going to drag out until the next postage value change, it is over tout de suite.
Covice, Confey…please.