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Beetle Bailey, 3/8/08

Heh, heh, old people have trouble remembering stuff. Oh, and the Halftracks’ marriage has degenerated into petty sniping on one another’s infirmities. Give tonight’s round to the General.

Get Fuzzy, 3/8/08

Satchel’s and Bucky’s relationship has always been a war of attrition. But Satchel, like Aesop’s tortoise or Archilocus’s hedgehog, knows how to pace himself.

B.C., 3/8/08

Hey, what’s this? At no time in recent memory have we seen B.C. combine a road trip, topical humor, and new (albeit throwaway) characters. Yeah, the joke is Family Circus-level wordplay, but you go, new guy!

– Uncle Lumpy

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B.C., 2/9/08

HO HO YES, THE POLITICIANS, THEY ARE ANNOYING! THOSE DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS, THEY MAKE ME ANGRY! That’s exactly the sort of barbed and targeted attack on people’s closely held beliefs that will get you pulled out of the paper!

Legacy artist, please. Your shit-stirring does not impress. Start writing rambling, incoherent poems about Jesus and/or explaining how Christ came to put out the menorah and then we’ll talk.

Crankshaft, 2/9/08

If there’s one saving grace in Crankshaft, it’s Crankshaft’s total and complete dedication to angry misanthropy. In another kind of strip, this lame punny punchline (I think it’s supposed to be punny, though I admit to being at a loss as to just what “doodle date” is a pun on) would have been issued by a cheery old man in an avuncular fashion; but the ’Shaft’s facial expression in the third panel makes clear his utter disgust for those ink-stained wretches who have the nerve to quit drawing and move down to some nice place in Boca. “You know, I’ve totally screwed up my retirement savings plans and will have to drive a damn bus and deal with children I hate every damn day for the rest of my bile-shortened life, so I don’t see why any of these cartooning jerkfaces should get to enjoy their old age. They can kiss my white, wrinkled, hate-clenched ass.”

Gil Thorp, 2/9/08

Jeez, Gil, you’re lucky Andrew was able to shrug, seeing as his impossibly long and thin body in panel one seems to have been completely de-boned. Honestly, this may be the worst new-head-attached-to-random-body-from-somewhere-else drawing I can remember in Gil Thorp, and it appears in the same panel as someone who’s arm looks to be on backwards.

The dude peeking over Marty Moon’s shoulder in panel three, meanwhile, seems to be on the verge of complete rapture. I know that high school sports is the primary form of entertainment in the blighted wasteland from which the Valley Conference schools draw their student body, but that guy is just too excited about the Mudlark starting lineup. My guess is that Milford’s “spirit squad” has started handing out Ecstasy to fans at the door.

Family Circus, 2/9/08

“You also may be a Neanderthal, with your protruding browridge and subhuman intellect. What I’m trying to say is, we’re selling you to a circus sideshow.”

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Zits, 11/15/07

So it appears that Funky Winkerbean has jumped ten years forward from the present to … the present. And you know what? It really doesn’t bother me that much. It’s just an extreme manifestation of the comics chronology problem that only For Better Or For Worse has avoided — everybody stays the same age, but the strip goes on for decades and the cultural references remain more or less current. Funky Winkerbean’s original cast was in high school for something like twenty years, which at least as much a violation of laws of time and space as the current age jump.

For whatever reason I’ve been kind of fixated on the problems that arrested chronology is causing in Zits lately. It’s definitely been discussed that Jeremy’s dad Walt, at least, is an ex-hippie, and I think they’ve gone as far as to mention that he actually went to Woodstock. My parents are part of the first wave of baby boomers (mom born in ’46, dad in ’48) and were both at Woodstock (separately, before they knew each other); at 23 and 21, I have to imagine that they’d have been among the younger people there. So, even if Walt had managed to sneak up there at 16 or 17, that’d make him at minimum 55 today, and probably more like 60 — starting to push it just a bit for someone with a 15-year-old son. This was a non-issue when the strip was launched 10 years ago, but it’s only going to get more unlikely as time goes on. Retconning the ages can have its own jarring effects. When I first began reading Sally Forth, I was the same age as Hillary, and so naturally assumed Ted and Sally were the same ages as my parents, an assumption that went unchallenged in my mind despite obvious evidence until a flashback-to-college storyline a few years ago that featured Sally (or was it Ted, I forget now) wearing a Sonic Youth t-shirt.

While I think this series of Zits strips have been cute, I also have to say that I find it a little unlikely that even a contemporary teenager interested in rock music to the extent that he plays in a garage band is only now discovering the Beatles. There was a funny story in the paper here a couple of years ago about the high-school aged rockers of today and their ongoing love of dinosaur acts (and honestly, who doesn’t like to get the Led out? I ask you).

None of this monkeying around with time in any way justifies the concept of Walt and Jeremy “hav[ing]” Connie “in common.”

Slylock Fox, 11/15/07

Oh, brave Max! Noble Max! Stupid, stupid Max! I know you’re desperate to do something useful for once in your life, but trying to catch an enormous red-suited gorilla-pimp who probably weighs 20,000 times as much as you do is not the answer.

I love that the gorilla-pimp is carrying his money around is the classic burlap sacks with dollar signs on the side. Do you think he carries the sacks around and makes the ladies in his employ dump his cut of their earnings into them? Does it make him feel like a big man?

Mary Worth, 11/15/07

…aaaand here’s the moment where absolute power officially corrupts Mary absolutely. “I’d hate to make it obvious that I am the unquestioned dictator of this joint, and that rules don’t apply to me! It might make it more difficult to force everyone else to obey the arbitrary laws I’ve laid down if they saw that I can just have them changed on a whim. Who’s a good dog? Yes, you’re a good dog!”

B.C., 11/15/07

Ho ho, there’s nothing zanier than ecological disaster! See, it’s funny because he dumped viscous oil on those seals to shut them up. Soon they will be dead! Mercy.