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Gasoline Alley, 4/12/11

Let me tell you a little story that has something to do with the genesis of this blog. In 2002, I moved to Baltimore and, as was the style at the time, got a print subscription to the local paper. The early ’00s Baltimore Sun had four glorious pages of comics every day, including relics that I had heard about but never seen — Mark Trail, Rex Morgan, Apartment 3-G, and, of course, Mary Worth. The last strip was in the midst of a plotline involving a cantankerous old cuss named Smitty Smedlap, and I came in the middle of a dinner he was having with Mary (and maybe Dr. Jeff too? can’t remember now) at the Bum Boat — a dinner that lasted weeks, and that seemed to me to be extremely awkward, and yet day after day it continued, with no reaction from the other characters indicating whether that was the intended reading. By the end of the dinner, I was hooked, and there’s pretty much a straight line from that joyful discovery to these words you’re reading today on the Internet.

I bring this up only because this awkward dinner in Gasoline Alley seems to me a a pale shadow of the depth of awkwardness that Mary Worth is capable of. Still, you have to kind of respect the strip for its current metahumorous gambit, in which we have a character whose sole identifying characteristic is that he tells bad jokes, and yet each day his unfunny gags are presented as the strip’s punchlines. Still, a little of this goes a long way, and it’s already gone quite far enough.

Luann, 4/12/11

Like all artistic geniuses do eventually, Gunther has left behind conventional notions of what his chosen medium should do and has gone full-on into his experimental phase, just in time for Luann to be the most avant-garde contestant in Tiffany’s sham beauty contest. I like the fact that Luann begins the strip screaming in horror/aesthetic confusion, but by the time her parents arrive on the scene has settled into a state of droopy-eyed ennui. For is there anything more truly banal than a new artist’s first heavy-handed attempt to shock bourgeois sensibilities?

Crock, 4/12/11

I don’t think I’ve ever met this bugilist before, but since he’s a character in Crock I assume he has an entire backstory established over the course of the strip’s 109-year run, which is now mostly forgotten by everybody but can still be glimpsed in some of his characteristics. For instance, that round red blob on his head: is it supposed to be a beret (indicating that he’s a jazz-trumpeting hepcat) or a turban (indicating that he’s a cobra-charming fakir)? Fortunately, this is Crock, so we can move on with our lives safe in the knowledge that this character will not reappear for decades and we’ll never really have to worry about it again.

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Momma, 3/26/11

I was all set to just write this off as more of this strip’s typical Oedipal horror, but then I actually got a good look of the chinless, mouthless nightmare on the front of Tina’s head in panel two. I don’t care how much you love your wife, there’s now way you’re going to describe that as anybody’s “gorgeous face.”

Crock, 3/26/11

Oh boy! Is Crock going to feature more jokes involving Quench the camel either threatening to slobber on people or actually slobbering on people? I am very firmly in favor of this, as it’s the first even vaguely delightful development to come occur in Crock in the entire time I’ve been inflicting it on myself. Yay for more camel saliva! God, how low are my standards that I just said that?

Marvin, 3/26/11

Having dedicated its main focus to its title character’s noxious feces for some time now, Marvin has taken the logical next step, and has begun using the aforementioned feces as the solution to most of the problems that arise within the strip’s narrative.

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Crock, 3/20/11

One way to tell when something has been a well-understood facet of mainstream world culture for at least a year or so is that weird, fumbling, semi-coherent references to it start appearing in legacy comic strips. One thing I find interesting about both this reference to WikiLeaks and the one that appeared a a couple months ago in Marvin (beaten to the punch by Marvin! the shame!) is that the word in both cases is rendered in both small and capital letters, in contrast with the standard all-caps orthography. This just draws attention to the word in a sort of “Hey, look at us, bein’ topical!” sense, with a negative effect on the overall humorousness of the strip (though of course even without the typeface issues that, “humorousness” could only be detected with the most delicate scientific instruments). It’s as if the authors, barely understanding who or what a “WikiLeaks” might be, are convinced that the internal capitalization is crucial to the word’s totemic power and must be preserved at all costs, when in fact it’s just an irritating legacy that’s trickled down from late ’90s branding practices in the high tech industry.

Speaking of trickling down, though, while Crock lost to Marvin in the “making a stupid joke about WikiLeaks” race, at least Crock’s stupid joke isn’t about pissing oneself.

Panels from Crankshaft, 3/20/11

Ha ha, just another day in the Funkyverse! “I experienced a brief moment of triumph! But now the physical and emotional agony that is my life has come to the fore once again. You can’t win your way out of suffering!”