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Shoe, 11/23/09

It is not often that I offer unironic congratulations to the writers of any comic, let alone to those of Shoe, but: Unironic congratulations, writers of Shoe, for slipping what seems to me to be a fairly transparent premature ejaculation joke past the censors at Cassatt and Brookins, Inc. I guess you could just bat your eyes innocently and say, “Oh, no, that’s just the length of their relationship!” but, uh, yeah. And the joke would have maybe worked better if she had said “six and a half feet,” though would anyone actually say that in idiomatic English? Also: six and half foot tall prematurely ejaculating bird, yeesh. But still, a comics coup!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/23/09

Speaking of coups, I’m pretty unsettled by the sheer quantity of ammunition that Snuffy is stockpiling in his rickety rural shack. Apparently he’s tired of just killing muskrat for stew and firing warning shots over the head of the occasional revenuer, and has decided to launch a full-on armed assault on Sheriff Tait, who as near as I can tell is the only legally sanctioned authority figure resident in Hootin’ Holler. If Lukey’s head-shakin’, tongue-wagglin’ approval is any indication, he assumes he’ll have a privileged position in Snuffy’s New Order, though of course one can never really trust the word of an unstable military dictator.

Gil Thorp, 11/23/09

Tightly wound rage case Duncan Daley has been working hard at being good because of some inspirational blah blah his brother tried to hand him before he went to prison, but now that his brother is starting prison fights, Duncan has decided that being good is for suckers. His disconcerting facial expression in panel three — the tight little smile, the faraway eyes — promises that he’s going “celebrate” with grim, fanatical intensity, possibly leaving a trail of bodies in his wake.

Crock, 11/23/09

OH OH WAIT EXCEPT WE LIVE IN THE SAHARA FUCKING DESERT

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Slylock Fox, 11/15/09

Something seems seriously askew about the justice system in the world of Slylock Fox. Count Weirdly is the defendant in an elaborate trial with no fewer than five witnesses against him, yet we all know from experience that no matter what the verdict, he’ll be back in his critter-filled lair, plotting deranged, pointless evil, in only a few weeks’ time. It has to really make a lawfox like Slylock question the importance of his vocation, as he busies himself arranging the order in which his witnesses will testify in a needlessly complex fashion.

Meanwhile, in the Six Differences, our pastoral painter is about to learn about the drawbacks of photorealism the hard way, as a befuddled pooch, unable to differentiate between the representation and the represented, urinates all over his artwork.

Hagar the Horrible, 11/15/09

Yes, this bachelor rarely enjoys a home-cooked meal! He generally eats out, or eats a meal that he, uh, cooks at home. Oh, wait, I get it, “home-cooked” is code word for “cooked by a vagina-bearing individual!”

Panel from Blondie, 11/15/09

I found this panel strangely touching. While Dithers generally subjects Dagwood to nothing but persecution and abuse, when he finally admits to himself that his mind is going, he realizes that he’s driven away all intimate companionship with his bluster, and that Dagwood is the closest thing he has to a friend. However, subsequent panels completely fail to follow up on the notion of Dithers gradually going insane, and thus I quickly lost interest.

Panel from Crock, 11/15/09

Meanwhile, because the bottom half of the telephone handset depicted here seems to have vanished, when I first saw this panel I thought for a moment that Crock had decided to put a gun to his head and end both his life and the strip named after him. IF ONLY.

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Six Chix, 11/11/09

I suppose the joke of this strip is that our MC is admonishing not the audience but the actors on the necessity of turning of their cell phones, because HAW HAW THE KIDS TODAY AND THE CELL PHONES, amiright? But I’m frankly much more interested in the historic and dramaturgical significance of the largish cane being brandished by pilgrim #1 on the far left. Will he be swinging it about over the course of the show’s dance numbers, including “(The Church Ought To Be Organized On A) Congregationalist Model,” “My Goodness But I Am Very Hungry,” and “A Buckle On My Hat — What’s That About?” Or is it a vaudeville-style hook, to be used to drag off the lady pilgrim (for displaying the Sin of Pride by wearing whorish non-black-and-white clothes) or the Native American (for using all the good land)?

Apartment 3-G, 11/11/09

This is why you shouldn’t hire an aspiring Hollywood screenwriter as your PI, as he’s always trying to force the messiness of real life into his preconceptions of narrative entertainment. “Just think about it, Bobbie: what aging man doesn’t at some level yearn to recapture his lost youth via a tryst with a younger woman? And what wife doesn’t secretly worry that she won’t keep her husband’s attention as she gets older? The older, sophisticated audience we’re reaching for here will all be able to relate. And, I mean, check out the framing on these pics — see how the streetlamp serves as a spotlight on the secret lovers, isolating them in an island of illumination against a sea of darkness, symbolizing the way the whole world fades away when they’re together? It’s box office gold, baby! And once I figure out what the emotionally devastating denouement is going to be, I can guarantee that it’ll be Oscar time.” Instead, you should seek out experimental filmmakers in the tradition of Andrei Tarkovsky or Bela Tarr, who aren’t afraid to point their camera at the subject of investigation and just film his everyday activities for hours at a time.

Crock, 11/11/09

I was going to complain that Grossie’s comeback made little to no sense, but then I remembered that in the ever-shifting poorly drawn hell-world of Crock, one cannot count on one’s facial features or body parts remaining symmetrical, so it’s fully possible that “Sexy” Crock Lady Character Whose Name I Forget might from time to time have legs of wildly varying lengths or widths. But this is a universe where kneeless leg-stumps might be considered someone’s “best feature,” so I’m not sure if the punchline here is really an insult per se.