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Herb and Jamaal, 10/3/09

So Herb and Jamaal spent the entire last week engaged in a wholly unaccustomed but not actively offensive behavior: a multi-day storyline. Herb and Jamaal went hiking and Herb was supposed to be guiding them but he got lost but didn’t tell Jamaal for a while, ha ha, and then on Friday he indicated that he did pack one bit of wayfinding gear: his comically oversized cell phone! WOKKA WOKKA WOKKA!

But here’s the thing about doing a multi-day storyline, Herb and Jamaal: If you’re going to do one that lasts for five days, you really ought to just add one more installment, because otherwise the Saturday strip feels out of place. And if you’re going to do Saturday as a standalone, you really shouldn’t include just enough elements from the Monday through Friday story (Herb is lost, Herb is talking on a brick-sized cell phone from 1991) to make it seem like it’s sort of part of the work week’s story, because otherwise your readership will think that, say, Herb lured Jamaal deep into the woods to kill and eat him, before driving back home and engaging in hilarious banter with his mother-in-law on his enormous mobile phone.

Judge Parker, 10/3/09

It’s true that my love affair with Judge Parker has cooled a bit of late, as I’ve found myself unable to work up much enthusiasm to analyze either the abuse-of-power-tastic celebrity vs. paparazzi plot just completed, and the return to the thinly veiled Bernie Madoff revenge fantasy isn’t looking that much more exciting. But I will say this for today’s strip: it features Sam Driver wearing a tie that, somehow, is actually narrower than its own stripes.