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Dick Tracy, 5/8/06

Um, just in case you were wondering, Dick Tracy is like TOTALLY NUTS now. How much do I love the thinly veiled Osama bin Laden character in panel one, who is wearing what appears to be a blindfold across his nose, presumably so that he doesn’t breathe in the stink of the Great Satan over his enormous cell phone? I love him a lot, that’s how much. A commentor said that they thought that “Al Kinda” (that’s the fellow apparently holding a much smaller and more modern cell phone with his foot in panel two) was an Arab caricature, but I don’t see it; he looks to me more like the reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan. (The thought of a zombie Reagan working for Muslim terrorists is so delightfully bizarre that I shudder just to think of it.) The leftmost guy in panel three may look like an ethnic caricature, but he’s actually recurring character B.O. Plenty; I can provide an explanation neither for his name or his hat, just as I cannot explain the rightmost person in that panel, who I think is supposed to be either a woman or a man in the least convincing drag in the history of cross dressing. Either way, I’m beginning to believe that Dick Tracy demonstrates some of the loopy, deranged majesty as Gil Thorp, though not at the same manic pace.

Meanwhile, in Mary Worth: Don’t turn your back on her, Lou! She’s about to deploy her Power Palm!

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Mary Worth, 5/7/06

STIRLING VS. STIRLING! BATTLE ROYALE! WHO WILL BE THE WINNER? As near as I can tell, it will be whoever can point the most vigorously. Kelly got into an early lead in panel two, with a triumphant index finger nearly poking out of the frame, but Lou comes back strong in panel seven with a point so powerful it leaves motion-line streaks behind it at two different angles. The sheer rage of this emotional combat is in fact reflect by the motion lines everywhere — trailing Lou’s hands, radiating from Kel’s spoon, and smearing off of the sides of her eyes as even nature takes sides against her.

That’s a pretty nice rant Lou’s worked himself up into by the final panel. “And I can’t follow you where you want to go with this!” Jesus, man, she’s not planning on murdering schoolchildren and then selling their organs for crystal meth money; she just wants to take a walk once in a while. Chill!

In other news, I’m going to have to revisit something I said last month. I claimed that a recent Phantom that featured Mrs. Phantom changing in a moonlit mountain clearing was one of the most gratuitous moments in newspaper comics history. But I clearly didn’t know the meaning of the word gratuitous until today:

The Phantom, 5/7/06

“There’s something out there, Kit … I’d better expose my breasts to it!” But just in case you get so hot and bothered that you forget that you’re reading the Phantom, panel five reminds you: it may be the first instance of comics erotica to feature this strip’s trademark interrobang.

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Pearls Before Swine, 5/6/06

I’m on the record as being annoyed by Pearls Before Swine’s crocs. But you know how sometimes you can’t define why something is funny but you’re pretty sure it’s funny anyway? Well, the fact that this she-croc is, unlike all the other crocs we’ve encountered to this point, perfectly capable of speaking English in a normal fashion in and not in that horrible croc-pidgin, is funny.

Also funny: The fact that PBS characters all seem to sit on that floppy little pillow when watching TV.

Also also funny: The she-croc’s enormous afro.