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B.C., 4/5/10

You might think that the familiarity that comes with reading and criticizing the comics section every day for years would breed a certain amount of contempt for the medium and its perpetrators. But I’ve actually gained respect, or at least sympathy, for cartoonists in the process of writing this blog. For one thing, I’ve learned how hard it can be to come up with something funny to say every day, and realized that sometimes you have to write something only semi-coherent, tell yourself that they can’t all be winners, and then move on. And, once you’ve assembled a body of work over several years and know that you have a long-term audience, you’re faced with the dilemma of writing something that stands on its own or going back to that in-joke well.

Take today’s B.C., for instance. That’s Wiley in the hat, manager of the strip’s ever-hapless baseball team. And there are his players, visible only from the neck up; at some point in the mists of the strip’s history, there was a gag in which the baseball diamond’s dugout was depicted as a literal hole literally dug out of the ground, which has now stuck.

So, if you’re a long-term reader of the strip, all these visual cues would make some sort of sense (but not really all that much). But let’s assume, for a moment, that there are people who, right now, are picking up the newspaper or loading their Web browser, and reading B.C. for the very first time. Would there be a single thing in this cartoon that they could grasp, at all? Would you look at Wiley and understand his outfit as a baseball manager’s and not, say, a train engineer’s? Would you look at the hatless, baseball-equipment-less players standing in an open trench and think, “Oh, yes, these are baseball players, in a dugout, ha ha?” Wouldn’t it all just be madness to you, a sea of symbols without an organizational system?

The answer to that last one seems to me to be an obvious yes! But, on the other hand, the “Wiley is a baseball manager and his team’s dugout is a hole in the ground” tropes long predate my first reading of the strip, and yet here I am patiently explaining them to you, so somehow I’ve managed to pick up on them. And I’ve never even particularly liked B.C.! The determination of the human mind — or at least my mind — to make sense of larger narratives is impressive, I suppose. But I do wonder, now that people are more likely to find their comics on the atomized Web rather than on collected on a newspaper page, if people will have the same patience with strips they don’t get right away.

And with that said, here are a couple of comics and commentaries thereupon that probably won’t make any sense if you aren’t a regular reader of this blog!

Gil Thorp, 4/5/10

So, our basketball-season stories have wrapped up with surprising grimness: the girls’ team is defeated in the playdowns, Cassie ditches her erstwhile fiance and is ditched by her friends in turn, and Steve Luhm gets punched in the face and is still a janitor. I imagine that we haven’t seen the last of at least some of these clowns, but now we’re launching into our exciting baseball-season stories, which will involve baseball in the sense that the sport is mentioned in the first panel before we move on to whatever sort of sleazy underground S&M den Kelly is trying to forcibly drag Coach Kaz into. “The Pit” doesn’t sound that hot to me, honestly, but since most of their romantic encounters take place at Kaz’s sex dojo, her standards are probably pretty low.

Apartment 3-G, 4/5/10

We’re pretty much all in awe of Margo’s quotin’ and naked ringless fingers, but I’m not sure if they’re really the match for an actual loaded pistol that she seems to believe they are. Still, I wouldn’t mess with her, armed or no!

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Mary Worth, 2/12/10

Ha ha, look at Dawn’s face in panel one: she can barely contain her joy as this wave of class hatred washes over her. Lies and deceit? A father who never lived up to his responsibilities? A son who was rejected by his blood relatives because he came from the wrong side of the tracks? Whatever! Wilbur is HERS HERS HERS HERS again! It’s like Christmas! Thanks, spiteful and terrible old drunk lady! Dawn will never forget you!

Herb and Jamaal, 2/12/10

Wow, Herb and Jamaal has taken on an interesting new idea: making everyday sayings hilariously concrete. Either that, or Eula has finally decided to get rid of her hated son-in-law once and for all, by using a fast-acting muscular paralytic.

B.C., 2/12/10

Johnny Hart’s grandson Mason Mastroianni is less than three years into his gig as B.C. artist and already he’s gone mad with power, imagining himself as a wrathful God who keeps His creations quaking in constant terror.

Pluggers, 2/12/10

This is possibly the most depressing Pluggers every produced. Damn you, pluggers, I don’t care that your bodies are so ill-maintained that the mere thought of vigorous activity, sexual or otherwise, has you reaching for some kind of muscle-soothing unguent; I for one plan to take my clothes of for recreational purposes when I get old.

Of course, it’s possible that pluggers don’t have anything against sex per se, but simply find the combination of sex and nudity morally distasteful. Thus, they only get it on when their worn, greasy pajama pants develop holes in suitable locations.

Mark Trail 2/12/10

“Yeah, my doctor, he said, ‘Senator, you can’t just go around slapping people who irritate you, because one of these days someone’s going to beat the crap out of you and then you’ll probably die, you miserable old prick.'”

SAD AND DEPRESSING JUDGE PARKER UPDATE: Several readers wrote to tell me that it looks like Judge Parker artist Eduardo Barreto is gravely ill from meningitis and is unable to continue his duties on the soap strip. While I and others have poked fun at his, er, voluptuous ladies, I think we all appreciate his work on the strip, which is really unlike anything else on the comics page (with the possible exception of the art from his friend Graham Nolan on RMMD). I sincerely hope that Barreto’s health improves, and I know that it will be very difficult for King Features to find a replacement who will live up to what he’s done over the past few years.

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B.C., 2/3/10

Whoah, post-Johnny Hart B.C. is dangerously flirting with relevance, using as a cultural touchstone an actor whose career popularity peaked a mere 15 to 20 years ago! Perhaps — and this is just a suggestion — this joke shouldn’t have paired overacting with the name of a man who’s mostly known for squinting at the camera in an expression that might be described as either stoic or confused, depending on how charitable you’re being.

Momma, 2/3/10

It’s kind of disappointing that the first Momma to acknowledge that the title character is in fact 11 inches tall is also the one where her son leaves her outside in the snow to freeze to death.

Luann, 2/3/10

I’m pretty sure this is the opening scene of a film used as aversion therapy for porn addicts.