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Dick Tracy, 5/8/06

Um, just in case you were wondering, Dick Tracy is like TOTALLY NUTS now. How much do I love the thinly veiled Osama bin Laden character in panel one, who is wearing what appears to be a blindfold across his nose, presumably so that he doesn’t breathe in the stink of the Great Satan over his enormous cell phone? I love him a lot, that’s how much. A commentor said that they thought that “Al Kinda” (that’s the fellow apparently holding a much smaller and more modern cell phone with his foot in panel two) was an Arab caricature, but I don’t see it; he looks to me more like the reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan. (The thought of a zombie Reagan working for Muslim terrorists is so delightfully bizarre that I shudder just to think of it.) The leftmost guy in panel three may look like an ethnic caricature, but he’s actually recurring character B.O. Plenty; I can provide an explanation neither for his name or his hat, just as I cannot explain the rightmost person in that panel, who I think is supposed to be either a woman or a man in the least convincing drag in the history of cross dressing. Either way, I’m beginning to believe that Dick Tracy demonstrates some of the loopy, deranged majesty as Gil Thorp, though not at the same manic pace.

Meanwhile, in Mary Worth: Don’t turn your back on her, Lou! She’s about to deploy her Power Palm!

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OK, so I skipped a day yesterday … so, to make it up, here’s a big mishmosh of stuff from the last couple of days, arright?

Get Fuzzy, 3/7/06

When I was a little kid, I used to think that white people were pink, in the sense that, if I were coloring and I wanted to color in a person who was supposed to be white, I’d reach for the pink crayon. Kinda weird, I know, but I also thought my father was black. (Hey, he has kinky hair and is really swarthy and I didn’t understand genetics, alright?) One day in first grade, this little girl who I had a crush on (to the extent that a six-year-old can understand what a crush is) decided she wanted to color with me, and we were coloring together and then she asked to borrow a pink crayon, and I assumed it was to color one of the people we had drawn, but she started using it to color in the background instead, and then I got upset yelled at her that she wasn’t doing it right, and so she left in a huff. First in a long series of relationships I managed to sabotage from the start. In retrospect, the fact the she herself was black might have had something to do with it. Interracial romance is tough, don’t let anybody tell you different.

Anyway, this may be why my all-time favorite Bucky-deployed anti-Rob slur is “Pinky.” This strip gets special props from me because it manages to use three different variants of the term in four panels.

Gil Thorp, 3/7/06

God damn, but Gil Thorp is awesome. I don’t know what’s wrong with you all that you can’t appreciate it. Where else would you see a high school basketball fan taunt a homeless teen by dressing up as a hobo? North Bend must have a strong drama department, with an emphasis on the Theater of Cruelty.

Mary Worth, 3/8/06

Yeah, she’s a pilot of sorts … the “sort” of pilot who knows how to “fly a plane.” Which is pretty much the usual “sort.” There’s only two possible motivations for Salty Cal’s ripped-from-an-infomercial line in panel two: either he thinks “pilot of sorts” is code for something kinky (and is thus in for a bitter, bitter disappointment) or he’s the first character in the history of Mary Worth who knows how to correctly use sarcasm.

Also, that little sign at the bottom left of panel one, which appears to depict a giant fish playing pinball, is the single greatest bit of incidental art ever to appear in this strip.

Dick Tracy, 3/8/06

I have no idea why this horse is dragging an unconscious German infantry mime through the snow here. I just think it’s funny that Dick Tracy has finally come to terms with the fact that his wrist-phone is no longer cutting-edge technology.

Marvin, 3/8/06

Ha, ha! Marvin’s grandmother thinks Marvin’s grandfather is fat! Oh, that kills me. Really kills me. It makes me feel dead inside. Is this what you have to look forward to after forty years or so of marriage? I can’t wait. The best part is the contrast between her smug smile and his look of utter mortification. I’m surprised she isn’t extending the weigh station metaphor and charging him.

Meanwhile, in Judge Parker, Ned has been weeping one slow-motion, gelatinous tear after another for five straight days:

Also, Rex Morgan? Still gay.

Oh yes, let’s.

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Dick Tracy, 2/16/06

Popeye, 2/16/06

I recently made the drunken boast that I would start reading a slew of new comics, and today I’ve finally made good on that promise. I expected that it would take me a few days or weeks to get into the swing of things, but even on this first flush I am stunned by Popeye and Dick Tracy, to wit: Popeye and Dick Tracy still exist? Holy crap. I would not be more surprised if I found out that some kind of bastardized Krazy Kat was being churned out by George Herriman’s great-nephew and appearing in a few suburban dailies.

Both of these strips jumped out at me because they seem to be going out of their way to say “Look! We were written just last week, certainly not during the Harding administration! Really!” Dick Tracy, for instance, features an quite lovely picture of one of those new-fangled eco-friendly wind turbines, in flames and tumbling to the ground. Is this strip now focused on the battle for freedom against American’s addiction to oil? The presence of the “evil Oily” would certainly seem to point in that direction. Perhaps we’ll see the Halliburton board of directors armed with Tommy Guns in a future installment.

Popeye, on the other hand, seems to have fallen into a trap I noted earlier: making jokes about technology that nobody involved in the strip actually has a grasp on. Does Olive Oil’s mangled sentence in panel one mean that she’s putting her picture on a Web dating site? Olive Oil? Web dating site? That’s a very disturbing thought to try to get my head around, so disturbing that I’m going to stop … right now. Still, I like the wordless third panel: Olive stalking off hunched over, knuckles dragging gorilla-style, fuming furiously, while a clueless, black-eyed Wimpy can only wordlessly wonder “?” (Twice!)