Post Content

Archie, 4/30/07

I was going to say that coming up with a spoof of the Gap called “the Goop” was the funniest incidental gag I had yet seen in the Archie newspaper strip, but then I realized how very, very low my bar for this feature has been set and I got kind of depressed.

Either the Goop has wowed the fashion world this season with a new line of clothes made entirely out of lead, or the strain of trying to keep Riverdale’s hottest brunette and hottest blonde emotionally and sexually satisfied has sapped Archie’s man-essence and left him a feeble weakling. Either way, Dilton is rightfully horrified.

Mark Trail, 4/30/07

Some commentors seem to think that this supposed to be a response to my claims that Mark is gay; in fact, I’ve never asserted anything of the kind. Rex Morgan? Gay. Beetle and Sarge? Very gay. But Mark Trail? Mark is completely asexual. His desire for physical intimacy with other human beings regardless of gender is either entirely absent or buried so deeply by psychological trauma that he only gets aroused by peeping in on frogs and birds while they do it. Frankly, today’s strip does not disabuse me of this notion. I dare you to imagine Mark’s right hand in panel two as about to do something erotic without shuddering.

Ballard Street, 4/30/07

At first glance here, I assumed that Scooter was imitating his Wall Street heroes’ habit of celebrating business victories with a little nasally-ingested stimulation. I still think that version is funnier.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/30/07

I’m very excited about the potential feedback loop being set up here: Rex stalls Hugh, then Hugh says something condescending that makes him sound like a pompous jackass, which pisses Rex off and makes him all the more determined to delay him. This could go on for weeks, with each strip ending with a sitcom-style muted horn going “Wanh Wahn WANNNH”. Eventually, Rex will just be walking in place somewhere in the bowels of the garage, mime-style, while Hugh berates him.

This isn’t the first time someone’s let lose an aside like Hugh’s within earshot of Rex, though usually it’s in regard to his medical procedures. “I’m sure it’s the kidney … or maybe the liver?” “Well, which one is it man?” “Maybe it’s the spleen!” “Of all the incompetent…”

Post Content

Archie, 4/25/07

I defy you to offer an explanation for the third panel that isn’t totally insane. Since no fungus (or fung-us) I know of looks like that, or attracts flies, I have to assume that Archie has been hoarding his excrement and building a lingam out of it in his hamper. And that Jughead chose to touch it. And that when Jughead arrived, Archie was just lounging in his chair, looking at it with a big, satisfied grin on his face. The awful thing is that the other explanations I can think of are worse.

Hi and Lois, 4/25/07

This strip is funny (by which I mean “funny”) because Lois is baffling her little kid with her high-falutin’ vocabulary. Which would make this a middling Family Circus-style gag if it weren’t for the fact that Trixie is entirely pre-verbal. Yeah, I know, thought balloons, whatever, but the fact is that she doesn’t know those words because she doesn’t know any god-damn words at all. Maybe her thought balloons are just ideas other people project on to her, and her eyes have gone wide like that because she’s wet herself again.

Marvin, 4/25/07

This strip is funny (by which I mean “horrifying”) because it’s about the sex lives of babies. I actually kind of like Carl’s wide-eyed look of shock and horror, because that’s exactly what you’d feel if your girlfriend left you for an infant.

Post Content

Sally Forth and Zits, 4/4/07

Man, I guess the liberal media really is determined to undermine the traditional American family. First, Disney insists on churning out movie after movie featuring single parents, and now Sally and Ted and Connie and Walt have dropped any pretense of wanting to spend time with their offspring. The Duncans have at least waited until their son was legal to work in some dead-end job before abandoning him to his fate; the Forths apparently don’t care whether Hilary forth ends up as a child prostitute or in some kind of Dickensian pickpocket ring, as long as they’re left alone to screw.

Gil Thorp, 4/4/07

Typically, Gil Thorp storylines come to a screeching halt as soon as each team is eliminated in the playdowns. (Can anyone remember the last time that any Mudlark team actually won a championship? That’s the sort of hard-hitting question Marty Moon would ask Coach Thorp if he weren’t so drunk.) After each season ends in shame and defeat, a new one begins, full of hope and new difficult-to-follow drama. That’s why I’m so pleased to see that the lady jocks of Milford are moving from basketball to softball and still buzzing over l’affaire autoclub, as the French punks in Judge Parker would say. I’m dying to know exactly what it is that Tyler is going to say to the softball team that’s going to get Brynna Antenna back into their good graces. I hope that he stands there in the outfield for a minute while they all stare at him, then clubs himself in the back of the head a few times and runs off.

On the self-clubbing tip (ew), why haven’t more of you entered the Self-Clubbing Tyler lookalike contest? I mean, how hard is it to look like this?

Well, actually, it’s really quite hard, but the lure of fortune and glory should overcome that. I’ve gotten a few entries so far — and to be frank they’re all quite strong — but nowhere near the numbers we saw for the Finger-Quotin’ Margo contest. So send in those pictures, damn it!

For Better Or For Worse, 4/4/07

I really have no desire whatsoever to wade into the twisted swamp of teenage gender politics here. Really. None. Whatsoever. But I did want to feature this strip because it contains my new hero. I speak, of course, of the dude at the far right in panel two, the one with the gap in his teeth and the eyes the size of dinner plates who’s saying “Hoooo!” I shall call him “Gap-Toothed Starey ‘Hoooo!’ Guy.” It’s clear that he needs to be brought front and center in this feature right away, and possibly given his own spinoff strip. What makes Gap-Toothed Starey “Hoooo!” Guy tick? What’s his home life like? What, other than risque gossip with his buds, makes him say “Hoooo!”? Will he be going to university? Now I can’t wait until next month’s letters are up on the Foob site on May 1; I’m really looking forward to his missive, which will be entitled “Hoooo!”

Archie, 4/4/07

Man, right up until that last panel, I was convince that the Archie-Joke-Generating-Laugh-Unit 3000 had discovered absurdist whimsy. Replace Archie and his dad with Griffy and Zippy and it would make a great deal of sense. Sadly, it all gets very bourgeois in the last panel.

Archie himself has never looked more like a baffled and angry lowland gorilla than he does in panel two.

Beetle Bailey, 4/4/07

Ignoring the ostensible joke of this strip (remarkably easy to do, since it doesn’t make a lick of sense), I have to say that there’s something unspeakably creepy about the way that all of the assembled soldiery at the ostensible celebration in the second panel is completely lacking in any indication of joy or excitement or any other normal human emotion. The affectless Beetle handing a balloon solemnly to General Halftrack is just the icing on the cake. If you told me that all of these people were about to unholster their sidearms, blast their commanding officer to bits as he stands on his makeshift podium, and then walk away in silence, I honestly wouldn’t be a bit surprised.