Curtis, 9/4/07
Please forgive me for the terrible things I said.
Judge Parker, 9/4/07
Please, Señor Driver . . . do let this woman have her way with you!
No, not Rosa, you idiot — are you blind?
Not Sophie, fer Chrissake — ICK!
Rusty, dammit — Rusty!
What’s that?
Any way she wants, Sam — any damn way she wants.
9 Chickweed Lane, 9/4/07
Please, please, please — just shut the hell up!
Thank you.
— Uncle Lumpy
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.
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.
Gil Thorp, 5/19/07
Everyone who’s been whining about how relentlessly depressing and maudlin Funky Winkerbean’s cancer storyline may change their tune once they get a load of Gil Thorp’s frenzied, hard-to-follow take on the same material. My guess is that Coach Mrs. Coach Thorp is not, in fact, being told that she has cancer — the “bad news” will be that her insurance co-pay has gone up from $20 to $40 or something — but her student will spread the news to her squabbling teammates that Coach is on death’s door, and hilarious lesser-Shakespeare-comedy-of-misunderstanding-style hijinks will ensue, interspersed among Clambake’s down-home, vaguely racially offensive antics. It’ll be all cleared up right around the time the Lady Mudlark softball team gets bounced in the second round of the playdowns, and we’ll all learn a valuable lesson: namely, that nobody you actually know will ever get cancer.
Meanwhile, nobody will pay attention to the emotional and physical scars left by the vicious monkey attack on Blondie McWhatshername in panel three. The sinister simian has already clawed off most of her nose, and now it’s coming back for more.
Blondie, 5/19/07
It was distressing enough to learn that the Bumsteads’ neighborhood is full of vicious feral dogs who travel under the cover of night. Now we see that even the day isn’t safe, as this middle-school mafia travels from house to house demanding cash for work they don’t perform. The suburbs are even more terrifying than I could have imagined!
Apartment 3-G, 5/19/07
Some might argue that the revelation that Lu Ann’s veins are filled not with blood but some viscous black fluid indicates that she’s a robot, which would go a long way towards explaining her limited emotional range and general dimness. I prefer to believe that she’s been possessed by the X-Files’ black oil, and that “Albert Pinkham Ryder” is an avatar of the alien invasion force that’s been forcing her to paint endless numbers of boring fern watercolors to advance their sinister and inscrutable plans. In makes as much sense as anything else, which is to say: none at all.
9 Chickweed Lane, 5/19/07
A lot of people have been kvetching about this week’s 9 Chickweed Lane, in which Edda waxes maudlin about how nobody seems to understand the difference between being a dancer and being a professional dancer. As a non-traditional-job-having type myself (though my wife informed me this weekend that I did not actually qualify as “funemployed,” as much as I might like the word), I had a bit more sympathy than most, but even I was finding it pretty wearisome by the end … until suddenly it turned into Edda wearing short shorts and encountering a centaur, or unicorn, or something in the middle of a New York City park, and BAM! HOW YA LIKE ME NOW? It’s totally insane and doesn’t make any sense, but at least it’s more fun that Lu Ann’s leaky, addled skull.
