Post Content

Mary Worth, 4/15/14

Last week Wilbur urged Iris to apply tough love to her layabout drug dealing son who may or may not be working hard to find a job (a task which, for the record, is often quite difficult for ex-cons), and she blew up at him about it, putting Wilbur’s sad love life in jeopardy. But ever since then, Iris has been musing about whether maybe she should be harder on Tommy. And who’s there to swoop in and catch her at the moment she’s ready to speak these uncomfortable truths aloud? Wilbur? Don’t be ridiculous. It’s Mary. Mary’s been watching her from afar all this time, patiently waiting for the moment when Iris is ready to split at the seams, when she can turn Iris to her way of thinking with just an innocent, nonspecific question. This right here is a meddling master class. Run along and write your little advice column, Wilbur; the pros are working here.

Dick Tracy, 4/15/14

So God bless the new Dick Tracy creative team for the great art and reverence for comics history and all, but sometimes the plot gets so reverent of comics history that it’s literally impossible for anyone but comics obsessives to follow. At the moment, for instance, the strip is switching back and forth between what appears to be a search for Little Orphan Annie, a followup to an earlier plotline that references characters and scenarios from the strip’s loopy sci-fi era of the 1960s and 1970s, and a fictionalized take on intra-comics industry feuding that started in 1942. Anyway, I’m just glad today’s strip sticks to the core Dick Tracy brand of Dick being a remorseless killer. “Soooo … these guys went out into deep space and … probably suffocated in terror?” “It looks that way, Diet,” Dick nods, satisfied.

Six Chix, 4/15/14

Six Chix appears to be using the week leading up to Easter to feature a a series cartoons about the birth and death of bunnies, with each strip guaranteed to disturb and unsettle! Anyway, all I’m going to do with this one is give you the phrase “rabbit cloaca” and rest easy in the knowledge that you won’t be able to extract it from your mind for days.

Beetle Bailey, 4/15/14

I spent a long time staring at this Beetle Bailey cartoon and trying to figure out what it meant. Then I realized I should follow Plato’s lead, which is to say: recognize it as inane nonsense, and wander off to find something better to do.

Post Content

Website technical thingie note: Hey all, I’ve tweaked the formatting for the site again, so if things look really wonky, you may need to reload the page while holding down the shift key, and if that doesn’t work, you might need to clear your browser cache.

Dennis the Menace, 4/7/14

OK, so I get that if you came up with a joke about “what if the Venus de Milo wanted to do some texting, but she couldn’t? eh? eh? because she hasn’t got any arms? eh?” and you had a nationally syndicated comic panel where your jokes could go, this would be hard to resist. That said, there’s a lot of setup to this joke that has to be glossed over, with the most important aspect being that the Venus de Milo is in the Louvre, which means that the Mitchells, who have never been seen before doing anything more exotic than driving to tourist traps in their station wagon, have packed up Dennis and taken him to France. I feel like we were deprived a number of potential gags of various menacing levels here — Dennis sullenly resists Margaret’s attempt to teach him even a rudimentary amount of French, Dennis announces at the TSA checkpoint that he’s packed something dangerous and/or alive in his suitcase, Dennis loudly says “But dad, he doesn’t look like a frog at all!” in front of a Frenchman Henry is trying to impress, etc. Honestly, the fact that they’re standing in front of a topless statue means that a Dennis-makes-reference-to-human-sexuality-and-everyone-is-uncomfortable is a much more likely and entertaining scenario here than some dumb texting joke.

Hagar the Horrible, 4/7/14

So it appears that, while concubinage was common in early Norse society, Vikings didn’t really practice polygamy except at the very top of the social pyramid, and certainly Hagar, the leader of a smallish and incompetent war band, doesn’t qualify. Nevertheless, this strip is an interesting look at how attitudes might differ in a culture where marriages are thought of not primarily as a romantic attachment between two people but as a basic unit of economic production.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/7/14

Oh, it looks like Jess is going to take another stab at making a movie about her dad, John Darling! She has to refer to him as “my dad, John Darling” whenever she brings him up, because she only brings him up every year or so. Anyway, today she acknowledges that all human endeavor is basically a race against the final destruction of our planet, a race that can seem easy to lose when you’re smothered under a heavy blanket of depressive torpor.

Better Half, 4/7/14

At last, Stanley has found a phone sex line that caters to his fairly specific needs.

Post Content

Shoe, 4/3/14

The workings of the human mind are mysterious and arbitrary. My own particular mind, for instance, struggles to remember the identities of the advanced hominids in B.C., but uses valuable neurological space to retain the names and schticks of each and every one of the bird-people of Shoe. Loon, for instance, is a sort of noble fool character whose jokes often revolve around his simplistic misunderstandings of life events. Thus, despite Roz’s Goggle Eyes of Murderous Rage here, I think we’re supposed to read his statement not as cruelty but as a harmless literal interpretation of a metaphorical product name. Still, he seems awfully sanguine for someone who casually believes that a substance exists that makes face-flesh invisible and, when applied properly, leaves its wearer’s brain and sinus cavities visible to anyone who wants to take a look.

Beetle Bailey, 4/3/14

I’ve never been in the military and I’m not a gun guy, so I could be wildly off-base on this, but my guess is that Sarge is less mad about Gizmo’s unauthorized but high-tech modifications to his rifle and more about his appalling attitude towards weapons safety, since he appears to be casually pointing the barrel without really looking in the direction of his fellow soldiers (and, more specifically, in the direction of Sarge’s crotch).

Funky Winkerbean, 4/3/14

Last year we breached the narrative space-time barrier between Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean, two strips existing in the same universe but 10 years apart, and reality wasn’t torn to shreds, so we have more of that to look forward to, I guess? It appears that the current dullsville “Cory’s mom looks is trying to complete his comic book collection while he’s in Afghanistan” plot is going to dovetail with the even snoozier Crankshaft “Jeff finds his beloved comic books in the attic” storyline (for certain limited definitions of “story”) from earlier this month. Glad you enjoyed those comics again, Jeff! In ten years, your daughter is going to sell them to some lady. Anyway, for everyone who reads Crankshaft and hates its title character, the good news we get today is that 10 years in his future he’s ranting and raving in a squalid old folks’ home somewhere, where nobody’s listening to him.

Pluggers, 4/3/14

PLUGGERS WERE USED TO THINGS BEING ONE WAY BUT NOW THEY’RE ANOTHER WAY WHY ARE THINGS ALLOWED TO CHANGE WHHHYYYYYYY