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Herb and Jamaal, 2/22/08

Yeah, Herb! Those jeans are much beloved by people Ezekial’s age! You know, people younger than 18! People who are still in school, and live at home, and aren’t yet legal adults! If only there were some kind of handy word that could describe people who fall into that category … but what could it be?

Actually, this weird circumlocution is yet another instance of Herb and Jamaal’s quest for total timeliness. When I watched It’s A Wonderful Life again this Christmas, I was struck by just how damn high up Jimmy Stewart wore his the waistband of his pants in the scenes where he’s supposed to be in his early 20s — just like old men puttering around nursing homes wear them today. It made me realize that the ludicrous styles your parents make fun of when you’re 16 are the exact same ludicrous styles your grandchildren will be making fun of when you’re 75. In other words, come 2050 or so, all the legacy Herb and Jamaal artist will need to do is erase the mustache on Herb and add it to Ezekial and WHAM! Instant up-to-the-minute relevance, with all the dialog the same!

Mary Worth, 2/22/08

It’s a good thing Mary is such a master meddler, as no mere tyro could have possibly pulled off this awesomely convoluted platitude. Seriously, it took two panels to execute in full. I’d love to see it in cross-stitch.

Dick Tracy, 2/22/08

Ha ha, Louise Brooks, the jig is up! You should have known that by selling supplies to so-called “artists,” you’d eventually attract the attention of an honest lawman like Dick Tracy! He’ll make you pay for enabling the depiction of the human form in somewhat abstract ways!

Six Chix, 2/22/08

Most pointless second panel ever. That … that’s pretty much how a frequent buyer card works. Yup.

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Ziggy, 2/11/08

Every once in a while, something deeply strange and more than a little bit wonderful peeks out at you from the cracks in the tired old surface of a long-running comic strip. Today, Ziggy, having long failed in his quest to make human friends, and routinely mocked and derided by his own pets, is searching for companionship from a machine, which, he sadly believes, will be able to soothe his loneliness. But he’s not satisfied with the run-of-the-mill answering machines that merely record phone messages and play them back at the touch of a button; instead, he’s searching for an advanced model with basic decision-making abilities. In so doing, he touches on a philosophical dilemma that has troubled great thinkers for centuries: can truly rewarding affection come from an entity lacking free will? If Ziggy’s answering machine is forced by its programming to love him, can what it feels truly be said to be “love” at all, rather than mere slavish devotion? But, on the other hand, if the answering machine is allowed to decide on its own what to feel about Ziggy, won’t it respond with the same mixture of pity and disgust universally held by the service employees, animals, and newspaper readers who encounter him daily?

Dick Tracy, 2/11/08

I was going to laugh mightily at Dick Tracy’s decision to make up, and then explain in a footnote, a completely nonexistent slang term for being nefariously rendered unconscious by a baddie with a roofie and/or a dart gun, but then I consulted Urban Dictionary and found that “smacked” can mean getting high from smoking marijuana or taking Ecstasy. While this doesn’t necessarily conflict with the narrator-supplied definition of “foreign substance in system,” it obviously puts an entirely different spin on the scenario: the problem is not so much a stealthy, sinister baddie willing to do anything to kidnap the Chief, but rather an out-of-control drug problem that’s affected even the police force’s most elite officers. Fortunately, once Chief Liz has been recovered, Dick Tracy will deal with the hippie slacker responsible, probably with the butt of his pistol.

Gil Thorp, 2/11/08

OH SWEET SWEET SWEET lunging out of the mental hospital and into the third panel at a bizarre, inexplicable angle: it’s self-bashing Tyler! Who, uh, looks actually pretty much exactly like Andrew Gregory. Really, is there a Valley Conference rule that says that one spit-curled player must be on the court at all times?

Spider-Man, 2/11/08

Oh, man, no matter how often Spider-Man is felled by getting hit in the back of a head with a lead pipe with absolutely no warning from his spider-sense, it never gets old. Never.

Mary Worth, 2/11/08

do it Drew do it just turn the wheel a little to the left LIFE’S NOT WORTH LIVING do it do it do it

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We mock, but cartoonists’ lives are hard. The drumbeat deadline, day after day for decades, enfevers the brain ’til it cries out, “Stop!” And stop it does — every cartoonist has a trademark way of putting the strip on autopilot so they can take a freaking break. And February, when the days are grey and the year ahead looks endless, is a great time to knock off for a bit. Here’s how they do it:

Crankshaft, 2/6/08

Tom Batiuk relaxes by expanding weak puns into multiple panels for weeks on end. This one is part of a recurring series, “Crankshaft mispronounces stuff.” The setup is completely arbitrary: Ed doesn’t cook, and wouldn’t use a frou-frou ingredient like balsamic vinegar if he did. If you really must make sense of it, assume that vinegar is Ed’s beverage of choice and they ran out of malt.

Dick Tracy, 2/6/08

Dick Lochler just hits the “pause” button on his calendar. Honestly, Chief Liz has known for more than a month that having your “gross” portrait in the museum gets you disappeared — that’s why she called Dick in the first place. Today’s strip is the equivalent of, “Yeah — what you said.” Somebody needs his Gretchen.

Curtis, 2/6/08

Ray Billingsley famously repeats the same themes year after year (this one is “Curtis’s Black History Month essay”). I suppose we should be grateful that Curtis recycles its material every year — Marmaduke does it every freaking day.

Get Fuzzy, 2/6/08

Darby Conley creates some of the best characters on the comics page today, but everybody deserves a break, and goddammit, he’s taking one. Lately, he seems to have taken to his bosom the cause of the television industry writers’ strike — an issue of pressing concern to no one on the face of the earth.* Phone us when you get back, pal.

– Uncle Lumpy

* Emphatically not true! See discussion in the comments, and retraction at #144