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Spider-Man, 6/9/11

Every once in a while Spider-Man feels like it needs to let us take a breather from its nonstop lazy superhero action and dabble in a little media criticism. As you can tell from the the arc here — “But your photojournalism could hurt feelings!” “Eh, probably not, and anyway, I gotta buy you stuff.” “Oh, OK!” — it’s generally as half-assed as everything else in this comic.

Crankshaft, 6/9/11

I am seething with anger over this comic’s misrepresentation of modern youth. Oh, kids today are in fact Internet-addicted drunks, I’m not denying that; but it’s also well known that children’s bus chants by their very nature scan quite well. The dialog in that first panel simply cannot be chanted in the implied sing-songy fashion, no matter how hard you try.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/6/11

A recent trip to the mall left me idly contemplating the ways of modern capitalism. Did you know, young whippersnappers, that the corridors of indoor shopping malls used to stretch unbroken from the Foot Locker on the east to the Ann Taylor on the west, with plenty of room to walk and no kiosk in between hawking kibbutz-manufactured facial cream or calendars with cute cats on them or the same cell phones you could buy in two or more of the actual stores in the mall? You see, most shopping malls are owned by publicly traded corporations these days, and investors aren’t just satisfied with retail that makes more than it spends: it has to show an improved profit year after year, which for most older shopping malls means trying to extract more revenue from the same square footage, which in turn means that the broad indoor boulevards where old people used to power-walk are now cluttered with as many little store-shanties as management can cram in there.

In its own way, the mighty pharmaceutical industry is in the same boat. With most Americans now doped up on between two and six prescription medications at any given time, the drug companies need to cast an ever-broader net to find more customers for their wares. And if that means that pharmaceutical reps need to travel to isolated communities where you can still get burned at the stake for selling cures that aren’t root-based poultices, and then seduce lumpy-faced inbred nurses as if they were the villains of a Flannery O’Connor story, then so be it. The demands of the capital markets are remorseless.

Mark Trail, 6/6/11

“You have to return to your loved ones once every six months or so, and make a few days’ worth of awkward small talk! That’s what I do! Don’t worry, you don’t have a wife, so you won’t have to touch lips with anybody.”

Crankshaft, 6/6/11

Ha ha, it’s funny because everyone hates the bus drivers and wants them to quit! Some people are trying to make sure they quit, by threatening violence against them. That … that’s the punchline?

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Luann, 5/27/11

Ha ha, can you imagine an “urgent, passionate” “rap” set to Luann’s poem of self-loathing, “I’m A Snot”? You don’t have to, because you can go to the URL in the third panel and listen to it yourself, in all its glory! But don’t feel obliged to do so. I think we all remember the “Hey Boy” debacle of 2010. Maybe it’s better to hear the passionate, urgent rapping, in your mind. Maybe if you heard it in your actual earhole, it would be so passionate and so urgent that your passionate urges would get the better of you and then who knows what would happen next? Probably some pulsating of some sort, that’s what! So, in conclusion, barf.

Crankshaft, 5/27/11

What must it be like, being a prisoner of the Funkiverse, where every depressing, emotionally loaded conversation (and lord knows there are plenty of those) must be accompanied by smirking? And, in Crankshaft, puns? I think Jeff in today’s strip made some kind of bargain with his cruel God: “Look, I’m trying to share some really heavy stuff with my wife here, OK? I’ll smirk, or I’ll pun, but please don’t make me do both. Let me keep a shred of dignity!”