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When I started this blog I promised myself that I would keep metaposts like this one (that is, posts about the blog itself rather than about the comics) to a minimum, but I do want make a couple of comments. (All metaposts will be marked as such in the title, so you can easily skip them and move on to the ones where I make fun the shape of little kids’ heads in the Family Circus and whatnot.) Because it’s much more fun than doing work, I’ve been using my nifty (and free!) referrer logs to relentlessly track everyone out there who’s linked to my humble offering here. I’ve noticed that I have attracted the attention of some readers on rec.arts.comics.strips, which I am very grateful for. This is obviously exactly the place where I should have posted links to the blog myself, and I would have had I not sworn years ago, in a desperate attempt to save my academic and social lives, to stop hanging around on Usenet.

A couple of people in that forum compared this blog to a similar but now-defunct feature called Funny Paper (of which I was wholly unaware) only with “none of the nastiness.” The last bit sort of surprises me, since I have in my first week impugned the racial authenticity of Stephen Bentley and compared Mary Worth to a train wreck. I guess the Funny Paper people were pretty unpleasant. Hopefully I won’t turn anyone off with my own personal vendettas, but for what it’s worth, I promise not to call for the death of any currently working professional cartoonist (at least not in this forum). It’s also been noted that Funny Paper‘s motto was “We read the comics so you don’t have to.” I swear that I did not rip my site’s title off of this. In fact, I ripped it off from “Dog Bites,” a column by Laurel Wellman that ran in the San Francisco Weekly in the late 1990s. Wellman used to tease/mock San Francisco Chronice columnist Jon Carroll by offering one-sentence summaries of his work under the heading “We read Jon Carroll so you don’t have to.”

Finally, a link back to a North of the Border linker, ronniecat. ronniecat shudders at the thought of mad “props,” so I offer big “ups” and a “shout” out instead.

OK, metapost over. Tune in tomorrow as I call for the death of whoever it is who draws Marmaduke, and possibly for the death of Marmaduke himself.

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Dilbert, 7/19/04

I used to like Dilbert. A lot. Maybe it’s because I’m kind of technically inclined and geeky. Maybe it’s because I used to have an office job that supplied at least of whiff of the bureaucratic nonsense that gets parodied in the strip.

Or maybe it’s because it used to be funny. I realized today while reading it that I haven’t laughed at it for ages now. So I dug out an old Dilbert book I have, and, sure enough, it used to have nice pacing and actual punchlines. Too much of the strip today follows the template used in today’s strip, which goes something like this:

1. Bureaucratic figure says something revealing incompetence, ignorance, and/or hostility, using latest MBA-spouted buzzword of the moment.
2. Dilbert or another sympathetic character responds with a cynical yet keen and cutting observation revealing the evil and/or stupidity of his/her superior.
3. Bureaucratic figure reacts with further hostility.

I mean, look at today’s installment. Hairballs! Ha! Cats get hairballs, and this cat is mean, and also in charge of HR! It’s funny!

I know Scott Adams is really busy running his media empire, but I wish he’d put some more energy into writing these days. As part of my goal of saying something positive almost every day, though, I do want to point out a nice artistic touch in the first panel: here, the reader’s point of view looks over shoulder of the Pointy-Haired Boss and Asok the intern, revealing just one of the PHB’s hair-points and including a rare close-up on Asok’s intriguing back-of-the-head stubble. This, to me, is funnier than anything else in the strip.

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Mark Trail, 7/18/04

Click here open the full-sized comic in a new window.

Why do cows burp so much? As usual, Mark Trail isn’t afraid to tackle the tough questions. One of the interesting things about this comic is the wild dichotomy in tone and artistic skill between the daily and Sunday strips. Generally, I find the human members of the cast of characters almost indistinguishable, since they all seem to have the same jet-black hair, weird pupil-less (or are they all-pupil?) eyes, and monstrously thick eyebrows — and of course they all speak in the same stilted, contraction-less dialog. I’ve been reading the strip every day for nearly two years, and I still have no idea who the hell anyone is. (Fortunately, the current plotline’s villain has a mullet and big sideburns, so he’s easy to pick out. Men with mullets are bad, people, bad!)

The Sunday strips, though, are a different story, and give me the impression that Jack Elrod was a wildlife artist before he took the Mark Trail mantle upon his shoulders. I love the cow drawings in this installment — check out the rippling muscles in the upper left-hand panel, and the face caught head-on in mid-moo at the bottom center. The bovine beasts project a definite majesty even as Mark discusses their gastrointestinal distress and its contribution to the coming eco-apocolypse. Another lovely detail is the presence of random birds flitting about and landing on the cattle — one of this strip’s signature touches.

(By the way, I always thought it was cow farts, not burps, that were the problem. No less an authority than erstwhile Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader once suggested building “boxes around their assholes” on a particularly memorable installment of Da Ali G Show. Sorry, Ralph, but Jack Elrod begs to differ.)