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Marmaduke, 8/1/06

You ever think that maybe male poodles (who by my guess make up about half the poodle population) get tired of the poodle being the epitome of sexy cartoon dog femininity? It’s not their fault if they have to have the girly haircuts. On the other hand, how do I know that all these randy dogs lined up on the couch are boy dogs looking for some lady dog tail? This could be a big doggie buffet of canine polymorphous perversion. I saw a dog hump an ottoman once, so they can’t really be that discriminating.

Dick Tracy, 8/1/06

Al Kinda, who so far has proved to be al Qaeda’s most incompetent terrorist mastermind, manages to pull off something special in panel two: history’s longest-distance pistol-whipping. Seriously, I don’t think that Capitol cop got within ten feet of that gun. Maybe after the Cynthia McKinney incident, the Capitol Police are all just taking a dive whenever anyone swings something cell-phone sized at them, just to keep the media circus to a minimum. Or maybe Kinda’s wacky outfits have something to do with his abilities to work spooky Levantine magic.

Get Fuzzy, 8/1/06

Considering this is Bucky, he’s being remarkably thoughtful by doing it in the bathroom. More than I can say for some rubber-band eating cats I know and live with.

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Dick Tracy, 7/5/06

I’m beginning to suspect that this Dick Tracy storyline is an extended apologia for the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program; thus, it’s somewhat ironic that it brought up the subject of the U.S.’s secret monitoring of terrorist financial activities weeks before the New York Times did. Still, one begins to see their point: if our terrorists enemies are as dumb as Al Kinda here — who, while sitting in his Washington, D.C., office, changed from Western clothes into some sort of costume from a touring dinner-theater production of Sinbad the Sailor, and then greeted the entire al Qaeda network by name on his enormous wireless phone — then they probably won’t be smart enough to realize that they’re being spied on until they read about it in the liberal media.

Shoe, 7/5/06

Speaking of morons dressed in ridiculous outfits, here’s today’s Shoe. I have to admit that I’m charmed by the idea of some kind of Shakespearean method actor who refuses to change out of his costume, ever. Apparently, despite the fact that the vast majority of stage productions in this country feature contemporary characters dressed in essentially street clothes, the artist felt most Americans would fail to recognize Ye Olde Birde as an actor without this faux-Elizabethan getup, even though he utters the words “my” and “play” (in that order) in the first panel. This is a troubling assumption, but, sadly, it’s probably a safe one.

Mary Worth, 7/5/06

Ooh! Ooh! Mary Worth is being stalked! Mary Worth is being stalked! By, apparently, the world’s dumbest stalker, who appears to be standing approximately fifteen feet away from her and thinking, “Nobody can see me! Why, that branch is barely three feet above my head! I’M INVISIBLE! MOO HA HA HA!”

Oh, and: mustache, light hair — is our sinister fellow erstwhile Dawn Weston paramour/effette intellectual snob/violent rage addict Woody Hills? Dare to dream!

Slylock Fox, 7/5/06

I’m less interested in these so-called “facts” about peanut butter (no doubt supplied, along with a generous honorarium, out the deep pockets of the American Peanut Butter and Peanut Products Council) and more in the little tableau that accompanies them. From the look on the face of the groovy, hippie headbanded chick, she’s about to hit her breaking point. I’ll bet when she visualized her future as a young girl, it didn’t include dealing with a couple of buck-toothed freaks (are they brothers? father and son?) fighting over a condiment while she cleaned up after them. All I can say to Greedy McSandwicheater is that he’d better clean up those globs of peanut butter he’s spilled on the table, because that knife is temptingly close to his throat.

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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!