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Beetle Bailey, 11/19/06

Beetle Bailey is totally divorced from anything actually happening in the U.S. military, as has been repeatedly noted by everybody ever. Today’s strip gives me an intriguing idea, though. What if the reason that Camp Swampy was so unlike the real army is that nobody there was actually in the army? It’s just a bunch of weirdos/re-enactors/lunatics wearing a mishmosh of army uniforms from different eras who have got a hold of some surplus army jeeps and are playing out a bizarre drama for their own inscrutable purposes. The missile in panel five indicates that the real army has finally wind of their little game, and has declared war upon them for impersonating the military and sullying its good name with their rampant incompetence and stupidity.

The General Halftrack piñata is panel seven is just about the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. Since all Beetle Bailey characters are incredibly cartoonish anyway, it’s difficult to portray something that’s supposed to be a stylized version of one of those characters in the strip, so it pretty much just looks like the general’s been lynched by his angry men.

Curtis, 11/19/06

When I first saw this strip without the top two supposedly disposable panels, I was pretty baffled by Gunk asking Curtis to “take me to a mailbox.” I mean, I know he’s from tiny Flyspeck Island and all, but surely he’s lived in the neighborhood long enough to know where the major landmarks are. Panel two reveals the real source of the so-called humor: Gunk is such a wacky crazy foreigner who doesn’t understand our ways to such an extent that he doesn’t even know what a mailbox looks like! Whoo! This, of course, is dumber than a sack of hammers, as is the Curtis convention of one character simply vanishing in the last panel as a reaction to another character’s outrageousness. Poor Gunk never will find that mailbox, but that’s OK, since his hand-drawn stamp won’t take his mail back to Flyspeck Island. God, I hate Gunk.

Mary Worth, 11/19/06

Oh, so they like each other now. How depressing.

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Curtis, 11/17/06

You know, many once-great works of continuous narrative art reach a certain point where they, for reasons mysterious to us on the outside, feel a need to add an adorable character whom everyone hates. Though this is a move to keep things fresh, it ends up disgusting fans and ruining everything. So, for instance, the Flinstones had the Great Gazoo, and Scooby Doo had Scrappy Doo, and now Curtis has “Oogie.” Except that this is Curtis, so I’m not sure “ruined” is really the right word here.

Apartment 3-G, 11/17/06

Wow, Gina is the most socially inept person who’s ever managed to get out of high-school alive. The only thing I can think of is that she’s a serious method actor, and her character was just punched in the jaw before coming on-stage.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 11/17/06

You know, I like to think that I’m a pretty close reader of TDIET. In fact, I probably spend more mental energy parsing its panel every day than 99 percent of the people in this country. And yet I can’t tell you exactly what it means when the narration begins with the phrase “Living on the edge,” as it does fairly regularly. Nothing even remotely edgy happens in the panels that contain this phrase; it’s just the usual litany of insane, petty rants and human degradation. Today is a good example, though it might indicate that Ma and Pa are on “the edge” of death; they certainly have the stunned stares of a couple who are suddenly coming to grips with their own mortality. I gotta say that if my dad were sitting around inside with his eyeglasses up on his forehead, I’d be looking into homes, too.

Mark Trail, 11/17/06

“Man, if only we had some way to, I don’t know, explosively propel tiny metal projectiles into them, thus killing them! But where would we get such a thing? I guess we’re just going to have to tie them up to death.”

Family Circus, 11/17/08

“It’s a little channel I like to call ‘Ambien,’ and it’s on 24 hours a day, honey!”

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Apartment 3-G, 11/8/06

Panel two of today’s Apartment 3-G is a thrill for Margo lovers everywhere (which, I think it goes without saying, is ALL OF YOU, if you know what’s good for you). She’s moving in for the kill, and looks like she’s either going to ravage Eric Mills’ hapless assistant with red-hot Margo-style smooches or bite off her face. The girl’s facial expression, which is one of terror mingled with excitement, matches this dramatic ambiguity.

Margo’s near-victim bears a striking resemblance to Alan’s barely legal paramour from that infamous party. Did anyone leave that event not tangled up in this boring blue-suited billionaire’s life one way or another?

Margo’s lonely “Oh.” in panel three demonstrates a great use of word balloon punctuation and white space.

For Better Or For Worse, 11/8/06

I imagine a crisis meeting over at Foob Central: “Dammit, people, we’re getting murdered by Funky Winkerbean in the depressing realism department! We need to bring out the big guns!” How else to explain this harrowing plot twist, in which Grandpa Jim’s fully functioning mind is trapped in a shattered shell of a body, unable to communicate and prevent his unbearable and continuous humiliation? I’m going to imagine him remembering the morse code he learned in his days in the Royal Canadian Air Force, desperately tapping out “KILL ME” on his portable tray with a spoon, hoping that Iris will stop smothering him emotionally and start smothering him with a pillow, while Metallica’s “One” blares on the soundtrack.

FW is really going to have to raise its game here. Wally’s gonna have to accidentally blow up a busload of Iraqi orphans and puppies, then shoot himself, if they want to keep up.

Curtis, 11/8/06

I’d like to ignore the usual tomfoolery with Derrick and “Onion” (something that’s all too easy to do) and focus on Curtis’ alarming laughing fit in panel three. I wonder if the word balloon had been predrawn to accommodate some much longer bit of exposition, and the iterative, punctuationless laughter was stuck in there in a fit of horror vacui, or if we are really meant to understand that Curtis mechanically repeated the word “Ha” 25 times.

In a move that further undermines this pair’s fearsome reputation, “Onion” (or maybe it’s Derrick, I don’t know) appears to be taking fashion tips from Dennis the Menace’s Joey.

Mark Trail, 11/8/06

By having Ranger Rick utter the phrase “hold up,” Mark Trail has now successfully deployed more street lingo than Curtis has in its entire run. No, really, take a look at the Curtis strip above. The part where Curtis says, “Oh, I’ll be!”

Spider-Man, 11/8/06

“Or didja ever see Hitler having dinner with a Romulan?” Jesus, this strip is weird.