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Sally Forth and Curtis, 7/24/06

Ah, yes, summer’s here, making the decaying flesh of commuting zombies all the more pungent, so this confluence of jokes seems obvious. At least Ted’s loopy Ted-ism is supposed to not make sense. Curtis, on the other hand, goes from biting his lower lip in anticipation of zombie carnage to making the universal face from Warner Brothers cartoons caused by swallowing alum, which is supposed to represent — well, I don’t know, exactly. Either it indicates that he’s taken his father’s caustic comment to heart, or that he realizes his dad has, like Ted, gone around the bend. Fortunately, Hilary is grooving to her iPod and can’t hear her dad taking the next step in his slow descent into madness.

Crock, 7/24/06

This strip would be a lot funnier if Crock’s artist were capable of accurately drawing a pretty girl.

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Crock, 7/18/06

If there was ever a time in the thirty-year history of Crock — a comic strip about a group of Western military men engaged in a seemingly unending mission somewhere in the Arab world — in which it ought to by right match up to the geopolitical moment, this is it. Unfortunately, and yet to the surprise of nobody, it hasn’t lived up to the challenge. One doesn’t expect Ph.D.-level theses on interactions between Western and Islamic culture, but one does expect someone identified as a “nomad” to look less like a parody of a cold-war era spy, complete with totally-inappropriate-for-the-desert all-black clothes, and more like, oh, I don’t know, a middle-eastern nomad. Surely a picture could be found in a book or magazine to serve as a guide. Interestingly, the artist may be somewhat embarrassed about this: in panel three, the nomad is forced almost completely out of the frame, giving up screen space to a lovely palm tree.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 7/18/06

Some of you commentors have reacted to this TDIET with disparaging comments along the lines of “What the hell is wrong with this guy” and “Nobody does this ever.” You people don’t understand that you’re seeing a master at the top of his game. Look at how he diagrams the entire joke for you along the right of the word balloon. In the hands of a lesser artist, revealing how the process works like this would be an open invitation to host of imitators, but even if you see all the individual pieces of the puzzle, you can never fit them together in that oh-so-special TDIET way. It’s like the time I saw Penn and Teller and they did a trick twice, the second time explaining what they were doing as they were doing it, and you still came away amazed. The “P.S.” at the end is just a little reminder that you that this, in fact, is how we roll in They’ll Do It Every Time. Oh yeah!

Marvin, 7/18/06

Ha, ha! You see, in the west, we’d use “sticks and stones,” but in the east, they’d use “bamboo and pebbles.” Because, see, they don’t have trees in China, just bamboo. Lots and lots of bamboo. And pebbles are … um … zen … oh, Christ, this strip is just totally appalling to me.

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Gil Thorp, 7/4/06

Ah, it’s summer! That means that Gil Thorp’s interminable and incomprehensible baseball-themed storyline has finally wound up, and the summer vacation hijinks can begin. Last summer we started off with innocent polka antics that quickly degenerated into a dangerous stalking situation, so my hopes for the next few weeks are high. This strip, which features hands and lips freak Mandy taunting the sexually frustrated Brent by forcing him to chase her while she tools around in a golf cart, holds a lot of promise, as does the return of squareheaded smart-ass Milford alum Von, whose lameness is confirmed by the fact that he didn’t flee from these high school kids the moment he saw them.

For those of you who were on tenterhooks, by the way, Mama Jolene decided to let Brent and his fluffy hair go to junior college because she got a free trip to Phoenix. No, I don’t understand it either.

Crock, 7/4/06

Let’s ignore for the moment the fact that this strip isn’t funny. It might have been funny, for instance, if “tar” and “mayo” formed some sort of natural pairing of words, or were opposites, or were ever discussed in the same context, really. Or it may have been funny if “mayo pit” was a phrase that anybody actually used in real life. But we’re ignoring that.

Even ignoring that, we’ve once again got a big coloring problem. Tar is black. Sand is … yellowish brownish, so I suppose the yellow used here is close enough. Mayo is white! White, people! Not yellow!

Unless it was, say, left out in the hot sun.

Like, in the desert.

In a … pit … of some kind.

Then I imagine it would get pretty yellow.

It’d smell pretty bad too.

So I guess the coloring job was OK. Which brings us back to the strip content. Which isn’t funny.

But I said we’d ignore that, didn’t I? All right then.