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Garfield, 10/18/04

Marmaduke, 10/18/04

Regular readers of this feature know of my affection for theme days here, so you can imagine my joy when I saw not one but two dancing animal jokes in today’s comics section. I was a bit stymied at first, though, because I couldn’t really think of anything funny to say on the subject. Then I thought to myself, “Hey, these cartoonists couldn’t either!”

Zing! I tell ya, this stuff practically writes itself, especially when I’m being needlessly cruel.

OK, let’s find something nice to say … um … well. I think the expression on Jon’s face is funny in the third panel of Garfield, though he should really be inured to bizarre cat behavior at this point. I also like the clothes that male-Marmaduke-owner and female-Marmaduke-owner (do these people have names?) wear, especially the hat on the former and the chunky-patterned dress on the latter. They live in America, circa 1967, and they’re adults and all, but they aren’t quite square.

On the note of comic-page animals, I should point out that I went over to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (is there a more mellifluous name in the annals of American journalism?) Website to download these two comics and found that neither of these mainstays grace the pages of the Pacific Northwest’s most prominent daily. I had to reassure many anxious readers that my recent dream about moving to Seattle was in fact just a dream, but the idea that I could live in a land where I get to read Mark Trail and not Marmaduke in the paper is an intriguing one. If only it didn’t rain 320 days a year.

There’s some more dancing animal action over in the Peanuts rerun today as well. So why didn’t it get put up here with these other two? Well, mostly because, as usual, it’s funny. Oops, there I go again! Best stop now before I cross the line into unpleasantly hostile. You all are just lucky you didn’t get another dose of Mary Worth. All I have to say is: “Save it for the judge!“