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Curtis, 1/9/06

Are Curtis‘s Kwanzaa storylines loopy, meandering, and incomprehensible? Yes. Do they generally last for days or sometimes weeks after January 1, the actual end of the holiday? Yes. Do they almost always take place in some sort of pre-modern Africa, despite the fact that the holiday was developed specifically for African-Americans in the 20th century? Do the storylines generally speaking fail to dovetail with any of Kwanzaa’s principles? Yes and yes.

On the other hand: do these Kwanzaa stories provide Curtis with an opportunity, generally lacking in this strip, to depict frickin’ awesome bat-winged bear beasts? That is a definite, hearty yes. Rock on, bat-winged Kwanzaa bear, rock on.

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Beetle Bailey, 12/6/05

Curtis, 12/6/05

Egads! Not one, but two comics today revolve around foul aromas arising from the bodies of their title characters — and yet there’s a complete absence of stink lines! Curtis is admittedly emitting visible anger radiation waves and a couple of Cathy-style sweatballs for good measure, but it’s not enough for me. I want stink lines! Give me stink lines!

The trio of uniformed soldiers, their identities effaced by those soulless, dead-eyed gas masks, seem to me to be not so much “jovially teasing Beetle about his smelly feet” but rather “creepy as hell.” They look like they’re part of some surrealist anti-war performance art piece, or possibly back-up singers for Devo. I’m pretty sure the guy on the right is Killer. I was trying to figure out the other two when I suddenly realized that I was spending time and energy determining the identities of gas-masked characters in Beetle Bailey, briefly had a serious moment of contemplation about the direction of my life, and then stopped.

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Three for Thursday today, folks:

Gasoline Alley, 11/10/05

Check out the turtle-mouthed death’s-head look that the hateful Lil Skinner is sporting in panel one. You don’t know how much I wanted this to be the harbinger of the horrible truth: that Lil really was dead, and that Slim was carrying on a week’s worth of Norman Bates-style insane conversation with her withered, husk-like corpse. Unfortunately, Clovia seems to see her alive and well in panel three, so I guess we’re stuck with yet more hijinks from the comics pages’ most transparent sociopath.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/10/05

OK, OK, Rex Morgan, we get it, OK? You like to look up Rex’s nose. But why do you have to make us look up his nose so often?

Sheesh.

Curtis, 11/10/05

Now, I mock Curtis a lot. I’m a Curtis-mocker, it’s fair to say. But I do like the art, and it’s growing on me more and more over time. What comic would spend time lovingly detailing a large, late-middle-age woman with a gynormous bosom as she levitates three feet off the ground in wide-eyed panic? Curtis would, that’s who. And I for one salute it.

Speaking of sociopaths, I’m guessing the perpetrator of this arachnoid outrage is none other than “Tuffy,” the kid who brought a gun to school a few weeks ago; it turned out to be a squirt gun, but it still would have gotten him sent to a lock-down facility in any actual school district in twenty-first century America. His capacity for over-the-top mischief seems matched only by his unfounded loyalty to Curtis, which could result in discomfort-causing storylines far more intriguing than that damn invisible lizard’s latest antics.