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Hi and Lois, 4/23/10

Comics aren’t just casual fun entertainment; they can also help you grapple with everyday but still painful life dilemmas. For instance, what if your son, who you love very much and who you only want to help succeed in life and be happy, turns out to be a terrible, miserable failure? Worse, what if he’s unable to recognize his own incompetence, and runs to you, his loving, nurturing parent, for the emotional affirmation that he’s learned to expect from you? How do you react? Hi and Lois doesn’t claim to have the answers, but Hi’s frozen, heartbroken expression in the final panel at least assures you that, if you’ve ever found yourself face to embarrassing face with your useless hump of an offspring, you’re not alone.

Dennis the Menace, 4/23/10

Making sex-themed jokes about cartoon kids is a little discomfort-making even for me, but then I’m not the one who used as the punchline for my child-populated comic a Las Vegas marketing slogan carefully constructed to evoke images of binge drinking and strip clubs, am I? Anyway, the most icky thing about this comic is the contrast between how pleased Margaret looks and how angry Dennis is at the thought that the smooching news might get out. Looks like he’s gearing up to be Dennis the emotional menace, am I right?

B.C., 4/23/10

Totally not at all discomfort-making or squicky to me at all is this apparent depiction of one reptile paying another for some kind of emotiono-sexual service. It’s like he’s a dominatrix, but with cuddling? And also he’s a turtle? Anyway, it’s all good clean fun!

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Funky Winkerbean, 4/21/10

Funky Winkerbean’s trip to New York featured a few moments of publishing hope for long-suffering victim Les (though surely we’ll see those dreams get squashed later), but we’ve quickly moved back to familiar territory: impotent, misplaced rage. Actually, “rage” is the wrong word: the dialogue seems rage-y enough, but the slouchy body language and numb faces denote a total absence of the passion that is rage’s necessary prerequisite. I stand by the impotence, though.

And the misplacement. There are any number of greedy, amoral morons who can be blamed for our current macroeconomic state of affairs; but, assuming that Funky is maundering about the failure of the Montoni’s franchise in New York to take off, I think it’s unlikely that, even in the best of economies, crappy midwestern pizza would have been a big hit in a city well known for its many well-established and much-loved pizza vendors. It’s not like Goldman Sachs was nefariously creating synthetic CDOs based on pizza futures and then betting against them.

Beetle Bailey, 4/21/10

Towards the end of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, God is briefly depicted as an enormous flaming aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The God of Beetle Bailey is much less impressive, consisting merely of the tiny and non-fiery Name of the strip’s creator. Today, God is attempting to make Beetle sound like someone you might actually want to go on a date with, with mixed results.

Mark Trail, 4/21/10

From my long and dedicated observation of the fauna in this strip, I’ve learned that when a senator starts emitting visible sweatballs, he is on the verge of a heart attack. This is a good illustration of the moral difference between our two rival lawmakers: Senator Good Senator only suffered a cardiac event after engaging in righteous fisticuffs with some longhair, while Senator Bad Senator’s heart is going south as soon as he realizes that arrest and/or punching might be in his future.

B.C., 4/21/10

Ha ha! The bird is afraid of being killed and eaten, but the snake thinks that the bird is afraid of being sexually assaulted!

Marmaduke, 4/21/10

Yeah, so, uh, this happened. Let’s never speak of it again, shall we?

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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!