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Cathy, 2/26/07

So. Um. Here goes:

I actually … sort of … found Cathy funny today.

I mean … not hilarious or anything, but … I actually laughed. Well, “laughed” is a strong word. Strictly speaking, I exhaled out my nose a little harder than usual. Still and all, I need help. I know it.

Apartment 3-G, 2/26/05

I didn’t cover Sunday’s Apartment 3-G, mostly because I don’t think it’s particularly cool when comics encourage kids to do drugs. But now that I’ve seen Monday’s strip, I have to say that it’s one of the more egregious instances of content recycling in recent memory:

Apartment 3-G, 2/25/07

I know that the soap opera strips have to spend Monday recapping Sunday because not everyone gets to see the Sunday strip, but this week Apartment 3-G seems to have mainly tweaked the dialogue and taken out the Margo panels. And is removing Margo from an installment of Apartment 3-G ever a good idea? No, no it is not. You could show three panels of Margo reading the newspaper and sneering at no one in particular and it would be more gripping than anything that ever happened to Tommie.

Blondie, 2/26/07

There are so many layers of insanity to this strip that I barely know how to approach it. Do the police ever ticket drivers for excessive musical volume? Does Dagwood labor under the assumption that the theme from Bondanza can never be played too loudly? Was he sitting at a stoplight, his subwoofers causing all the cars around him to vibrate, only instead of blaring Master P as God intended, he instead treated the world to that all-too-familiar “dun da duh dun da duh dun da duh dun da DAHH DAHHHH”? Still, what disturbs me the most is that somewhere out there in Blondie land, there’s a radio station dedicated to classic TV theme songs. I’ve been telling people for years that the 517 different channels available on satellite radio will eventually destroy all that’s decent about our society; maybe someone will finally listen to me now.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 2/26/07

“How it is dept.: Libertariana and Rando are sick of their taxes being used to fund city schools and parks for poor people, so they move into a condo complex that keeps the proles out. But howzat? Homeowners Associations can also force you to pay for improvements for the common good? OH YEAH!!!” I’m surprised the acknowledgment line didn’t read “Anita and Sol, Unnamed Heavily Armed Encampment, Somewhere in Montana.”

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Shoe, 2/23/07

To me, the tropes in Shoe range from the mildly amusing (“the Perfesser has trouble with deadlines”) to the bland (“Skyler doesn’t know the answer to a test question, so he comes up with an ‘amusing’ response”) to the irksome (“Shoe is hounded by his ex-wives for money”). However, there are few I find more more outright distasteful than “the obese older male birds hit on ‘sexy’ fortysomething birds who look like they have been used hard by life.” And few strips in that genre have been as unpleasant as today’s, in which the Perfesser drunkenly attempts to initiate sexual relationship with a barfly, only to be repulsed to discover that she’s even more intoxicated than he is. So, um, congratulations, Shoe, on bringing me to this new level of ick. Don’t feel any obligation to top yourself in the future or anything.

Apartment 3-G, 2/23/07

So the Apartment 3-G creative team had done a decent job depicting Albert Pinkham Ryder’s face, though his ghost is dressed rather nattily for someone who spent the latter part of his live a shut-in. But considering that most of Ryder’s work consisted of dark, moody landscapes that presaged modernism, I question whether he would go through the trouble of coming back from the dead just to help Lu Ann paint her bright, faux-Victorian botanical still lives on white backgrounds. I suppose he doesn’t really get to pick the tastes of the artists he inhabits. Being dead must be even worse than I thought.

Kudzu, 2/23/07

Most of the time, Kudzu’s hateful “modern bible translation” bits involve slang that’s at least five years out of date, which allows me to feel young and scornful. But I had to goggle at today’s strip for a good five minutes before I figured out that “friend” as a verb is probably supposed to mean “to add as a friend on MySpace or Facebook or whatever those social networking hoo-hah sites are that I’m too old and cranky to use.” Sussing out the meaning was made even more difficult because the phrases in the Lord’s Prayer it replaces — “trespasses” and “trespass against” in the King James, “sins” and “sin against” in more modern translations — don’t correspond, like, at all. It’s just an attempt at slapping in a random neologism in place of a word that may be vaguely suitable for replacement because in the King James translation it’s kind of archaic and confusing. So, in conclusion, I hate it, and it should die.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/23/07

I usually look away when Funky Winkerbean hits its high points of horror, but I have to ask: does anyone else think that the black blob between Wally’s outstretched arms in panel three that doesn’t seem to be attached to anything is his head? Take that, Mrs. Wally! You think it’s so damn tough going through life with one arm? How about going through life with zero heads, huh? Game, set, and match!

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Family Circus, 2/18/07

You know, there are literally millions of people working in the IT industry, from the theoreticians who come up with the big-picture advances that make faster processors and clearer monitors possible, to the engineers who build the chips and the programmers who write the code, to the human factors experts who make it all accessible to the ordinary user and the factory workers in Taiwan who put the physical parts together. And I think all of them would look at this cartoon and say, “This? I spent the last fifteen years of my life for this? ‘A whole line of sleep?’ I should have gone into insurance like Mom said.”

Doodles by Mac & Sack, 2/18/07

Why is it so hard for this poor, dumb koala to keep out of the gullets of various koala-devouring beasts? Why aren’t the little frogs at right more concerned about the presence of the freakishly oversized mutant frog in their midst? How did said freakishly oversized mutant frog find a freakishly huge mutant lily pad to sit on? Why doesn’t the Doodle Zoo feature two snogs, snogging? These are serious questions and I demand answers.

Apartment 3-G, 2/18/07

I’ve been treating the totally insane Wacky Adventures of Lu Ann and Albert Pinkham Ryder storyline in Apartment 3-G with the comics-reading equivalent of covering my ears with my hands and shouting “LALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU,” but I have to admit being charmed by the look of disgust on the grim specter’s face in the second panel of the bottom row. “Oh, great, I command you not to tell them about me, and then you just go and say my name so everyone can hear it. Why don’t you just take a picture of me with your cell phone camera while you’re at it? God, I keep forgetting what a bad idea it is to haunt stupid people.”

Funky Winkerbean, 2/18/07

“This is a good start — they’re rooting for a team that’s being soundly defeated and declaring that their Friday night is wasted. But have you considered giving one of them a fatal disease? Maybe shearing off a limb? Think about it.”