Post Content

Apartment 3-G, 8/20/10

“Going soft?” Bite your tongue, Lu Ann! Margo isn’t freaking out about getting her hair cut because, unlike you, she hasn’t linked her sense of self-worth to something frivolous and external like a hairstyle. Margo knows that hairdos come and hairdos go, but that whatever happens to her hair, nobody can touch her heart, her core. Margo will always be Margo. Her self cannot be harmed by whatever silly makeover plans Kat and Kitty have in store.

She also sees the hair-styling portion of the show as a great opportunity for escape: all she has to do is grab a pair of scissors and stab her way out.

Crock, 8/20/10

What if you wrote a comic strip that nobody, not even your editors, read or cared about? Would you keep dutifully churning out the lame jokes, day after day, so long as the checks kept clearing? Or would you grow resentful and eventually just replace the dialogue with banal non-sequiturs, just to see if anybody noticed?

Mary Worth, 8/20/10

“And if one of the bums I interrogated didn’t know anything, I made ’em switch clothes with me. That might seem strange to you, kid, but I was on the street, and I had to live my life by the codes of the street. And those codes say that when a man doesn’t help you with your vengeance mission, he forfeits his right to his clothes. That’s how it works. On the street.”

Post Content

Shoe, 8/16/10

Upon first glance, you probably found this Shoe comic pretty depressing! After all, it reveals the fact that our hero Cosmo is such a slob that he spilled enough spaghetti sauce on himself to soak through his clothes, or maybe that he simply sits around eating spaghetti with no shirt on, to make cleanup easier; furthermore, it appears that he was so numb to his own slovenliness that the resulting mess went unnoticed for hours or perhaps even days. However, I would argue that he still clings to a shred of dignity, in the form of that towel around his waist. Someone who had totally given up on life would just stand there in the nude while rambling to his doctor on his cell phone, but some feeble sense of modesty causes him to cover his lower bird bits, despite the fact that, given that he’s describing his symptoms verbally, he is presumably not speaking on some kind of advanced picture phone.

Crock, 8/16/10

I first saw this comic as a somewhat smaller graphic, and in that form the Desert Sage’s eyes looked sad to me, and the strip seemed quite poignant: the Sage knew he had to clear the bats from his sand-cave home, but he had grown to love them, and would thus do them one last kindness before euthanizing them. But in this larger version of the graphic, his eyes look downright sadistic, as if he’s cackling with delight at the prospect of drawing the bats’ last days out as long and as cruelly as possible. Then I realized the real tragedy, which was that I was trying mightily to discern human emotions from the meaningless scribbles that make up a typical Crock strip.

Marmaduke, 8/16/10

Ha ha, don’t be silly: nothing resembling “democracy” could possibly be happening in a pack of dogs surrounding by Marmaduke. No, those dogs are raising their paws because they’re pledging their allegiance to their Dark Lord, who will soon lead them in an assault on the poor townsfolk that will leave rivers of gore in its wake.

Post Content

Crock, 8/1/10

Why the long face, Captain? In addition to all the other advantages to being a handsome Legionnaire that you mention, you apparently are also in possession of eternal youth! Go on, seduce the young woman, safe in the knowledge that, like her grandmother, she will age and wither and eventually die, while you grow more handsome with each passing day.

Family Circus, 8/1/10

Wow, is this the greatest Family Circus ever? It provides no punchline, no play on words, and yet still gives America exactly what America wants: little Jeffy crying his little eyes out. Of course, we may come to regret this momentary pleasure, as history may record August 1st, 2010, as the day that the Winkerbeaning of the Family Circus began.