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Crock, 1/18/10

One of the interesting aspects of following a decades-old comic strip as it runs through its mildly lucrative paces is that you’ll start to notice all the visual and conceptual cruft that is kept in place for reasons nobody can really remember. For instance, once upon a time, a prominently cleft chin à la Cary Grant or Rock Hudson was sort of a stereotypical marker of an especially handsome man, so naturally comically attractive Crock character Captain Preppie was outfitted with one. His chin cleft has only grown more exaggerated with time, even as society’s appreciation for cleft chins has waned, and one wonders if the artists remember what exactly that is at the end of his chin or what it signifies. At least the anatomically alarming bulbs depicted in panels one and two today are somewhat within the bounds of comic-strip stylized chins; but the two growths dangling asymmetrically off the bottom of Preppie’s jaw in panel three … well, let’s just say that they don’t speak well of the Foreign Legion’s medical care, or of the aesthetic judgement of the local ladies, who are generally depicted as being unable to get enough of the captain’s tumor-ridden face.

B.C., 1/18/10

Of course, you always have the option of just ignoring long-running visual features of your strip. Look, Wiley’s other leg grew back!

Mary Worth, 1/18/10

Mary Worth does nothing better than shattering our expectations for excitement and fun, but I’ve been really disappointed by the lack of drama in this bastard-son storyline so far. So, Wilbur and Kurt reconnect via the Internets, and, after a little initial awkwardness, bond over fishing and … all is well? NOT HARDLY! Look at that crazed, murderous expression on Kurt’s face in the final panel as he describes his mother’s lovers coming and going out of their lives, if you know what I mean, and I think you do! In a transparent bit of Freudianism, Kurt never got over the jealousy he felt when confronted with his mother’s sexuality as a child, and now has decided to track down every man Abby ever slept with and kill them one by one. Better start waddling for your life now, Wilbur!

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Mary Worth, 1/11/10

You’d think that after, what, five and a half years of analyzing this nonsense “professionally,” my capacity to be amused and delighted by the total inability of Mary Worth characters to speak the way that the humans do would have slowly been dulled. But you would be mistaken, as nothing in today’s comics got as big a laugh out of me as “I suffer from an uneasy restlessness” did. It might actually seem here that scruffy neo-hobo Kurt is going to offer a radical alternative to this strip’s suffocating bourgeois values, and will lure Wilbur away from his comfortable condo life towards a new less stable and more vital existence, traveling from town to town to see what experiences the world has in store. But Kurt came into Wilbur’s life via the Internet, and everything associated with the Internet in Mary Worth is bad, so clearly this storyline will end with that sort of disaster averted and Wilbur returned safely to his ordinary soul-numbing life.

More proof that Kurt and Wilbur may actually be related by blood: their shared impulse to wear jackets and hats of precisely the same hue.

Jumble, 1/11/10

Speaking of suffocating bourgeois values, there’s something quite poignant about today’s Jumble, in which a group of crazed shoppers respond to a half-off sale on sodium-laden processed semi-food with a level of frenzy usually reserved for the Beatles circa 1964. I’m particularly saddened by the dude in the background, who’s cheerfully running over to the freezer case to make sure that he can bring home as many trays of microwaveable goop as possible, unaware of his life’s essential emptiness.

Crock, 1/11/10

I have many gripes against the creative team behind Crock, but one particular unlikable aspect of the strip as I encounter it is beyond their control: the fact that the desert setting is routinely slathered with a neon yellow unlike any found in nature must be blamed on the post-production colorists, not the credited artists. Still, it’s distracting, as in today’s strip, where it appears that Kerwood is being worked to death in some kind of sand mine.

Marvin, 1/11/10

For decades scientists have wondered: Would it be possible to create a character less appealing than Marvin? Well, the creators of this long running crime against humanity strip have decided to take that challenge head-on, by creating a Tyler Durden-style alternate personality for the titular hell-infant that encapsulates all of his worst qualities. The horrible little pig-faced monster is wearing his hat backwards for no good reason, which I suppose is a start.

Ziggy, 1/11/10

Thanks to a challenge from Stephan Pastis, Ziggy briefly experimented late last year with putting pants on its title character. That experiment has now thankfully been abandoned, but today we can see why Ziggy usually eschews trousers, as even a few weeks of wearing them has horribly mangled his legs. Are his feet pointing backwards?

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Crock, 1/6/10

I originally read the cook’s line in the opening panel as “I’ve been feeding the men dog for weeks.” This pleased me — not because I advocate dog-eating, but because I advocate the long besieging of the Crock characters in their fort by a murderous enemy, forcing them to eat first their emergency reserves of canned food, then their livestock, then their pets, then each other. If we’re only one step away from cannibalism, then we’re only one step away from the end of Crock.

Marmaduke, 1/6/10

From the stunned, disbelieving expressions on the faces of Mr. and Mrs. Hitler there, not unlike those of the Wicked Witch of the West’s guards when they realized that their terrible mistress had been liquidated, I’m guessing they’re interpreting “bought it” as a variation of “bought the farm,” and that they are hoping against hope that the hated Marmaduke has expired right there in the middle of this furniture store. This seems like the most likely interpretation of the phrase, as dogs as a rule do not have access to money, and they certainly don’t have access to the kind of money necessary to buy a nice couch. But in fact Marmaduke is an immortal demon-hound and cannot die. He probably just bought the couch with their credit card, which he borrowed from them when they weren’t looking.

Blondie, 1/6/10

I love the carpoolers’ expressions of mingled fear and uncertainty in the final panel here — exactly the expressions you’d expect from people who just heard one of their associates addressed by name by the radio. It’s as if they’re realizing that they exist as minor characters in someone else’s narrative — and that someone else is the irritating guy with the bizarre hair who’s always holding up the car pool.