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Shoe, 5/23/07

There’s something I find deeply unsettling about the lovingly rendered paper coffee cups, complete with sippy lids and little cardboard sleeves, that Roz and her one-off-punchline-providing friend are drinking out of. Maybe it’s because Roz herself is the proprietor of an anachronistic diner in which coffee comes in two varieties — regular and decaf — and is decanted out of a clear glass coffeepot into porcelain mugs, and thus to see her drinking her venti half-caf americcino with steamed milk or whatever seems like a vision of treason. Maybe it’s because everything in this whole elaborate Starbucks-esque setting, with the standard-issue fixings bar in the background and round tables and such, is in fact, like everything else in Shoe, precariously perched on a tree limb, as the foliage in the background indicates.

Unfortunately, the fact that one-off-punchline-providing friend can describe with heavy-lidded indifference the gazes of those who yearn to slice her up and remake her to match their own vision does not, in fact, unsettle me. It’s far from the worst that can happen to you in Shoe. At least nobody is proposing to fry and eat her.

Archie, 5/23/07

See, here’s how you would do this strip: You have Mr. Flutesnoot fiddling around with Bunsen burners and test tubes and Erlenmeyer flasks and all sorts of science-y whatnots, and, because he’s a chemistry teacher, you assume that he’s conducting some kind of experiment, but — surprise! — he’s just making coffee! Ha ha, ’cause see, you can do it using a lot of the same equipment!

Or you could have Flutesnoot making coffee with an ordinary coffee-maker, and it would only serve as evidence that Mr. Weatherbee, who no doubt has an assistant to make his coffee for him, is an out-of-touch buffoon. Ha! Buffoon!

Or you could, you know, have all the relevant action obscured by the body of one your characters. Then it won’t make any damn sense at all. Be sure to lavish plenty of attention on the wrinkles around the armpits, though.

9 Chickweed Lane, 5/23/07

OK, so this has quickly gone back from “interesting” to “ever so tiresome,” but I’m glad somebody has finally noted that the ladies of 9 Chickweed Lane, sexy as they may be from the neck down, are a bunch of receding-chinned jawless freaks with monkey faces. If that somebody has to be a unicorn magically dropped into New York, then so be it. It needed to be said.

Mark Trail, 5/23/07

Hey, look, everyone! It’s “Buzzard”! Or, as I like to call him, “Overalled No-Neck Hillbilly Stereotype Stock Character #2”! You might remember ON-NHSSC#2 as the patriarch of the horrifying clan of backwoods petnappers from the winter of 2005-06. He’s wearing a hat now, and his stubble has disappeared, but it’s pretty obviously the same guy. The latter change is probably attributable to his last tangle with Mark, who as we all know can remove facial hair with the raw power of his wrath.