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Archive: Family Circus

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Innocent-seeming gingers

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Wizard of Id, 5/15/10

I must give reluctant kudos to the Wizard of Id for not only acknowledging its medieval setting, but using it as a springboard for an anachronistic play on words. The modern expression “fell off a truck,” a euphemism for stolen goods, would of course be meaningless to the inhabitants of Id, who are wholly ignorant the internal combustion engine, so “fell off a wagon” is the closest equivalent; but this in turn is itself a modern expression, denoting an addict whose attempts at reformation have failed. The combination of the archaic and the modern results in a commendably multilayered gag that ought by rights to be the stock in trade of these period strips.

The Wizard of Id also holds true to its milieu by depicting human beings being bought and sold like chattel.

Mary Worth, 5/15/10

Ho ho, we’ve spent all this time focusing on Bonnie’s piddling little compulsive shopping problem, and only now does she confess that she has “many bad habits”? I can’t wait to see how Mary reacts when she realizes that she’s spent all her meddling energy on a red herring. Does she have the strength left to deal with the cross-country bank robbery spree? The ketamine distribution ring? The dismembered drifters neatly packaged in Charterstone’s communal storage space?

Family Circus, 5/15/10

Soon Jeffy’s possessed demon-hand will lead to a string of gruesome stranglings. “Now, Jeffy, tell us why you did what you did,” the court-appointed social worker will ask. “I’m sorry!” he says. “It was my fingers! My fingers got away from me! My bloody, murderous fingers!” [GENTLE LAUGHTER FROM ELDERLY NEWSPAPER SUBSCRIBERS ACROSS AMERICA]

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Margo won’t sell out

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Mark Trail, 4/30/10

I know it doesn’t really pay to contemplate the economics of comic strips too deeply, but in these days when newspapers and magazines are cutting full-time staff, cutting back on freelance fees, and trying to smooth-talk eager “new media” types into blogging for free, how exactly is it that Mark and the Trail family have remained solvent? We’ve never even seen him file a story, since when he’s supposed to be writing he inevitably becomes involved in some fisticuff-heavy derring-do that would leave him unable to write with the kind of rigorous objectivity that the strict editorial staff of Woods and Wildlife demands.

What I’m trying to say, Cherry, is that unless your dad holds some kind of valuable patent on a powerful animal tranquilizer, Mark is going to have to scurry off over and over again to afford you the kind of elaborate lifestyle you enjoy, with all the pricey mom jeans and what not. “Oh, Bill Ellis! I’d better go to New York and see what he has to say!” “But Mark, you just said…” “Not now, honey. Bill Ellis needs me!”

Apartment 3-G, 4/30/10

While we all appreciate a good episode of Margo berating and humiliating Lu Ann, might I tentatively point out that Mills Gallery is broke, and that Lu Ann’s cheesy watercolors lend themselves perfectly to cheesy holiday cards (“Happy Fernmas, from the Mills Gallery”), the markup on which is presumably substantial? Jack used to be adamant about not “lowering our standards,” but the harsh reality of the modern art world has forced him into crass marketing. But whatever, Margo is suddenly all about purity of artistic vision now. All of Lu Ann’s bougie prints will be dumped in the back alley in short order — representational art went out in the fucking 19th century, kids — and the gallery space will be given over to a series of challenging and unmarketable performance artists. First up will be Tommie with a wrenching multimedia piece entitled Why Won’t Anybody Talk To Me Why Why Why.

Family Circus, 4/30/10

To nobody’s surprise, Jeffy’s breath carries the awful stench of death.

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Professor Papagoras: Bad choices cheerleader

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Marvin, 4/27/10

Regular readers of Marvin (a company of damned souls among whom I number) know that the strip takes occasional breaks from poop jokes to churn out multi-day theme weeks, like “Belly Laffs” or “CrySpace” or “Marvin’s Terrible Advice Column For Babies, The Name Of Which I Refuse To Look Up.” One of the least pleasant aspects of these sequences is that they feature jokes that are supposed to be jokes within the strip’s reality. We’re not just being invited to laugh at Marvin’s heavy-lidded antics; we’re expected to celebrate the characters’ own wit when they come up with hilarious “pregnant women get fat” gags. This to me doubles the offense of the whole project; it’s not enough that the jokes aren’t funny, but the structure of the narrative is built around taking the funniness of the jokes as a given, which makes the whole thing fail all the more.

That having been said, I have high hopes for this emerging “Marvin’s grandmother’s stand-up career” sequence. By looking at the expression of naked contempt on her face, we can tell that she has no illusions about the humorousness of her material. The fact that the easily amused and possibly senile residents of her retirement home are laughing uproariously at her litany of old people jokes doesn’t allow her to fool herself into thinking that she’s funny; instead, it just causes her to turn her internalized loathing onto her pathetic audience. If she can maintain this attitude of icy disdain, she shows great promise of becoming an excellent meta-comedian, with her entire act based on her own knowledge of her comic inadequacies and hatred for her fans.

Family Circus, 4/27/10

Speaking of comedic structure, I have no idea whatsoever why this Family Circus is supposed to be funny; however, I know why I like it, which is because Billy is having some kind of full-on manic episode, flinging envelopes of seeds all over the floor and gibbering out semi-comprehensible nonsense. I’m not sure why exactly Mommy, who will be responsible for picking up all those seeds when Billy runs shrieking into the fertilizer section, looks so pleased; maybe she knows that her eldest son’s brief enthusiasm for locally grown nutritious food will have passed within minutes, and she can continue to feed him Top Ramen and Pop Tarts until he’s felled by type 2 diabetes and/or hypertension at age 15.

Apartment 3-G, 4/27/10

This is almost certainly some sort of unnecessarily coy set-up to a “Tommie gets an ambush makeover from I Dressed In The Dark” storyline, but I’d like to believe that Ruby’s describing how, almost without noticing it, she became a phone sex operator.