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Archie, 9/1/06

Ahh, the joke-writing computer rears its ugly head again. You can tell because Dad Archie uses the phrase “1-cent coin” in panel one, which has never been uttered by any carbon-based native speaker of American English ever. My guess is that both the first and third panels originally used the word “penny,” but some rule in the mechanical comic creator’s humor-generating algorithm required that key words in the joke not be repeated and instead be replaced by synonyms, so this clunker got pulled out of some second-rate thesaurus and plopped into place.

More proof of this strip’s robotic origins: Jughead appears to have pulled a fully-formed, ready-to-eat hamburger out of the refrigerator. A cybernetic artist would obviously be unfamiliar with the details of how biological life-forms acquire their fuel.

Mary Worth, 9/1/06

Man, look at their faces in panel two. Those two are about to have some angry, angry sex.

I have to confess something. I used to own a shirt that looked remarkably like the one Aldo is wearing. And this wasn’t some long-ago artifact of my non-fashionable youth; I wore it regularly until it developed a hole in it about a year ago. It was long-sleeved, and was just a V-neck rather than a polo shirt with a collar, but the color and the stripe are pretty much exact matches. It creeps me out a little.

Apartment 3-G, 9/1/06

The saddest thing about panel one is that Tommie thinks she’s flirting.

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Mary Worth, 8/9/06

That’s right, Mary, let the rage and hate flow through you. But wait until he’s actually standing in front of you to unleash that left hook.

Archie, 8/9/06

I have to admit that this is a pretty stunning layout — I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a comic strip divided up like this before. I don’t know how it would look shrunk down to the size necessary to cram it into a newspaper comics section, but it looks good here. It’s a particularly good fit for the broad vista in the top panel. Too bad it’s all in the service of such a joke so spectacularly lame that I think it’s the product of a joke-generating computer — and not a good one, either. Some of Betty’s butt might have helped.

Hi and Lois, 8/9/06

Shitting. The baby is talking about shitting.

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Dick Tracy, 8/8/06

The composition in this Dick Tracy cartoon is so striking — with the two lone figures crawling along the parapet of the Capitol dome, glowing in the dark night — that it seems a bit petty to note how spectacularly lame the dialogue is here. I’m particularly dissapointed in Detective Tracy’s choice of epithets: “Loser” seems a little, well, dude-ish to be coming out of the mouth of this hard-boiled agent. How about “terrorist scum”? Just a suggestion. Admittedly, from what we’ve seen of him so far, Al Kinda is kind of a loser, but that doesn’t mean you’re exempted from your responsibility to keep the patter snappy.

Also, note to Dick: “Chicken” usually consists of two people running towards each other, not one person running away from another person while they shoot at each other. Just FYI.

Gil Thorp, 8/8/06

As Ben Franklin goes all golf shark and starts bilking gambling addict Marty Moon out of his pathetic DJ salary, and Coach Brown feeds her charges the socially acceptable lie that real beauty is on the inside, Gil Thorp gets into its adrenaline-fueled groove, switching back and forth between plotlines willy-nilly. This might generate some excitement if either golf or gymnastics were interesting, but they aren’t so it doesn’t.

Archie, 8/8/06

I’m not one to get hot and bothered over the smuttiness of comics, but Betty’s shorts are, um, alarmingly short.