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Spider-Man, 7/26/06

I’ve been trying very hard to ignore the slow-motion train wreck of idiocy that is this week’s Spider-Man, but I can turn away from it no longer. See, they’re filming the climactic elevator battle scene between Marvella (played by Mary Jane) and $1.99 Walgreens Plastic Halloween Cat Mask Woman (played by washed-up has-been Narna Lamarr) in a novel fashion: they’re putting them in a real elevator, with no microphones of any kind (otherwise Narna’s bitchy off-script taunts would be picked up) and having them improvise some fisticuffs. (I hear this is exactly how Robert Altman filmed most of McCabe & Mrs. Miller.) Apparently there are multiple cameras filming from multiple angles, with the fight being edited on the fly and fed directly into the VIEW SCREEN that Beardo the director and Peter Parker are watching. This is, it goes without saying, so bonecrushingly moronic that I fear that I’ve dropped five to ten IQ points just by typing this paragraph.

Note Peter’s thought balloon in panel two: he clearly has the relative inability to suspend his disbelief of a spider.

Crock, 7/26/06

So “Trooper Megan” appears to be not the butt of a one-off joke but a new addition to the lovable and poorly drawn Crock cast. To which I can only ask: why, why, why, for the love of God, why. I’ve just started reading this comic again for the first time in 15 years, and before Megan sashayed sexily onto the scene, the cast was exactly the same as it was when I graduated from high school. Is this supposed to be like Beetle Bailey, where a new “relevant” character gets added every five years or so? If so, this implies that the creators of this strip have just now discovered that women exist who don’t wear burqas. C’mon, Illegible Signature Crock-Writing Dude Whose Name It Is Not Worth My Time To Look Up: you’ve earned the right to cruise on with the same group of ham-handedly named Frenchmen that you’ve been cruising along with for decades now. Don’t make more work for yourself for no good reason — and trust me, this isn’t a good reason.

Ziggy, 7/26/06

Note to Ziggy, Inc.: The 35 Years of Ziggy Classics must amount to better than 10,000 cartoons; thus, I’m pretty sure you can get through the length of Tom II’s vacation without reprinting one that contains a totally dated current events punchline that wasn’t even funny when it was topical. I know it’s cheaper to use a robot arm to just select a comic out of the file cabinet at random rather than have someone use editorial judgement, but you might want to change that process, for quality-control purposes.

Apartment 3-G, 7/26/06

Man, look at that sad face in panel three. Because if it weren’t for totally-not-actually-happening-and-only-implied-by-a-totally-unrealistic-series-of-events-and-sitcom-style-misunderstanding action, she wouldn’t be getting any action at all.

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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.