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Shoe, 1/13/09

Not to wax rhapsodic about the decline of any sense of community in American life beyond the bounds of commerce, but … shouldn’t this cartoon, in which someone ambushes a baffled person behind a desk with a pointless faux koan, be taking place in a library? Isn’t the venerable reference desk the place where corny unanswerable questions are thrown at stereotyped librarians? (In this case, for instance, we could have also gone with “Why do we drive on a parkway but park in a driveway,” or any number of other stupid things that your aunt may have forwarded you from her AOL account.) My first impression was that this little scene was instead playing out at your local Enormous Chain Bookstore, because … I’m not sure why. Maybe because the books have their covers facing out whorishly, practically shouting “Buy me! Buy me!” instead of being demurely tucked spine out onto the shelves like they are in the library stacks, where you can take them out or not, doesn’t matter to us. I see upon further examination that this place-where-books-exists is actually just labelled BOOKS, so it may in fact just be the books ghetto of your local Enormous General-Purpose Chain Store, where remaindered copies of Twilight and The Purpose-Driven Life and Oprah’s Book Club picks from 2006 go to die.

Wherever it’s taking place, it sheds no light on when exactly this wizard’s (whose name in the strip I think is merely “Wizard”) status as a wizard, which was once some kind of metaphor for his prowess in computer-fixing, actually became just, you know, a wizard. Doubtless it’s another random aspect of the Shoe universe, where bird-reporters and wizard-birds fly, or drive, or live in trees, or shop in BOOKS, because whatever, why not, who cares.

Beetle Bailey, 1/13/09

Never mind for the moment that Beetle and Sarge “play for the same team” or that Sarge has a “habit” of pushing Beetle down onto the ground from behind with a hardy (W)HUMP. No, I’m more concerned about the lower half of Beetle’s body … or rather, the lack of a lower half. In panel one, Sarge has squashed everything below about mid-thigh into two-dimensional nothingness; in panel two, it all seems to have just vanished entirely. Normally I’d blame this on the colorists, but given that Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Enterprises LLC has seen fit to only provide two vaguely football-player-like blobs floating in some kind of featureless void to work with, you can hardly blame them for doing thirty seconds of desultory clicking with Photoshop’s Paint Bucket tool and then moving on in disgust.

Funky Winkerbean, 1/13/09

Oh, Bull, you and your “supportiveness” and “fairness” and “hard-working athletes.” Don’t you and your feminazi friends realize that the whole point of high school sports is so that everyone concerned can secretly view the interaction of the boys on the court/field/what have you and the girls cheering on the sidelines as some sort of elaborate mating ritual? (They will view it this way repeatedly in their minds, later, in private.) Get ready for a treatment of teenage gay panic with that extra dash of bleak that only Funky Winkerbean can provide!

Mark Trail, 1/13/09

Jeez, Cherry, I dunno, maybe she left so quickly because she got within good viewing distance of your enormous, terrifying head. I’m sure if I were confronted with the vision in panel three, and then the hairline started talking to me, I’d get the hell out of there with considerably less politeness and aplomb than Patty did.

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Mark Trail, 1/5/09

With yet another Mark-spurns-a-pretty-non-wife-lady plotline behind us, it looks as if Mark Trail is finally going to touch the third rail of Mark Trail storytelling, by tackling the pretty wife-lady whose advances Mark also routinely spurns. Cherry is so worked up that she’s dispensed with her usual polo shirt and put on a sexy pink robe that’s allowing us to see her collarbone. “I hope he notices that I’ve changed my hair again!” she says, as she gingerly touches the vaguely rearranged curls perched upon her unnaturally large skull and stares at nothing in particular with her horrifying pink eyes. All the while, she’s thinking about her plans to fall on Mark and ravish him the moment he walks in the door, like an owl grabbing a mouse in its razor-sharp talons and tearing it to bits with its beak, only hotter, and with Mark maybe not being killed at the end.

Meanwhile, Doc is thinking “I hope he notices that I’ve paired up this baby blue cardigan with my orange shirt! I think the color combo really does wonders for me!” But he’s too shy to say this aloud, so he just stands there smoking his pipe, and waiting.

Beetle Bailey, 1/5/09

As you may or may not know, for the first six months of its 58-year existence, Beetle Bailey was actually a college strip, following the antics of Beetle and his fraternity brothers; then, one day in March of 1951, Beetle spotted the two girls he was dating both heading towards him simultaneously, ducked into an Army recruiting office to escape, and has been in the military ever since as the subject of some kind of terrifying black-ops time-freezing experiment. The draft has ended and he completed his term of service decades ago, so technically he can leave whenever he wants; however, as his totally neat and keen outfit today suggests, the still twenty-year-old Beetle is completely unequipped to deal with modern collegiate life, with its Facebooks and casual sex and kids wearing flip-flops in the dead of winter for some reason. He will no doubt go crawling back to his captors at the Defense Department’s Chrono-Retardation Corps soon enough.

Crock, 1/5/09

Today’s Crock is actually a philosophical masterpiece of metanarration. Poor Figowitz’s whole purpose for existence in the world of the strip is to be an unlovable sad sack; by deciding to abandon his deepest essence and force his features into a grin, he unravels the very fabric of his universe and brings everything in it — that is, the strip Crock — to an end, plunging his world into inky nothingness. This is intriguing from a metaphysical standpoint, and heartening in that it implies that Crock will cease to exist and we won’t have to read it anymore. If we’re really lucky, the universe-collapse will also occur along the time axis, eliminating the past of the strip and our memories of ever having read it.

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Shoe, 12/17/08

Hey, here’s something fun I like to do when I’m having coffee with an old friend: in the middle of a conversation, I deliberately structure my sentences so that they’re ambiguous and my interlocutor has to ask for clarification! It’s great way to “mix it up a bit”!

Ha ha, just kidding, obviously, if anyone in real life did this you would think that they were unbearably pretentious, or perhaps suffering from some kind of head injury. “But Josh,” you’re probably thinking, “aren’t these birds? Shouldn’t we be impressed that they’re using recognizable English at all? Cut them some slack!” I suppose you’d be right if we saw these birds engaged in more typical bird-oriented activities — flying, chirping, preening, hanging out on tree branches and telephone wires, crapping on cars, vomiting half-digested insect parts down the throats of their offspring, etc. But these birds have developed any number of advanced behaviors, including coffee-drinking, cup-using, clothes-layering, and crappy-art-from-Pier-One-hanging, so I frankly expect more from them in terms of pronoun use.

Beetle Bailey, 12/17/08

If the U.S. military’s mandatory retirement age applies to Camp Swampy, then General Halftrack was born no earlier than 1944, so even as a young man he must have been quite the nostalgist. Still, we shouldn’t question the wizenedness of someone who either appears to have been utterly defeated by this newfangled “CD player” thingamabob, or is simply too feeble to get up and walk six feet to put the disc in. (The possibility that this is all an elaborate ruse to get Miss Buxley to bend over in front of him does come to mind as well.)

Spider-Man, 12/17/08

Wait, don’t count on … him … can’t saving Jameson? Man, the tension and drama in this strip are entirely syntactic.

Marmaduke, 12/17/08

Marmaduke was in that window being groomed long enough for his many enemies to get wind of his location and arrange this ambush.