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Cathy, 1/27/07

Dilbert, 1/27/07

Kudzu, 1/26/07

Some comics get trapped by success. They build a big audience with a new message – professional women are insecure, cubicle life is tough, Southerners are people too. But their audiences develop expectations the authors are afraid to disappoint. So they stop taking chances. Creatively, the comics stop growing and die, often at the peak of their popularity. But they don’t go away. They keep going and going and going and merciful Heaven why don’t they stop stop just freakin’ STOP YOU HEAR ME CATHY I’M TALKIN’ TO YOU!

Ahem.

Everybody admires giants who walk away at the height of their game: Gary Larson, Bill Watterson – have there been any others?

But credit two authors trying to revive franchises that died long ago:

Garfield, 1/27/07

When he gives Jon Arbuckle a life, Jim Davis pushes Garfield out of the frame. And that could cost him a lot of desk calendars, Mylar® balloons, and suction-cup car toys. I don’t like Garfield, but I’m not the one keeping Davis in lasagna. So: bold move, pal. Way to go.

Mary Worth, 1/27/07

I owe Karen Moy a debt. I have followed Mary Worth since the freaking Kennedy administration without seeing a centimeter of character development. Now, in just six months, Mary is the center of the story, out of Charterstone, and showing the faint beginnings of self-awareness – even self-doubt. Baby steps, maybe – but steps. Thank you, Karen Moy!

OK, blah, blah, blah. Where am I going with this?

For Better or Worse, 1/27/07

Trapped between a huge, dim, slavishly-devoted audience and a self-satisfied, ham-handed Stalinist author, this strip is creatively as dead as they come. Yet it will run on and on as a Frankenstein’s monster stitched up from Mike’s mewling brats and zombies from the Good Old Days, glued up with glop from that “novel.”

But suppose somebody wanted to make it good — and without losing the current audience. Could they do that? How?

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Slylock Fox, 1/15/07

This has to count as one of the most frankly sexual newspaper comics I’ve ever seen. I neither expect nor at any level want to see red-hot mouse-on-mouse action in Slylock Fox, but in a medium that tippy-toes around the love life of three healthy single women in Manhattan and goes to excruciatingly unrealistic lengths to protect Elizabeth Patterson’s virtue, the matter-of-fact presentation of Max “visiting” Melody in the middle of the night — and of the two of them obviously being woken up by Slylock’s frenzied late-night call — is kind of shocking.

This sidekick business is clearly no cakewalk; clearly, Max must be forced to carry a beeper around with him, or to give his vulpine boss the phone number of all his lady friends’ houses. Either that, or he’s only cultivated his relationship with Melody because he knows she lives across the street from a fence. As soon as the stolen goods are recovered, Max is moving on, leaving a tiny broken heart in his wake.

For Better Or For Worse, 1/15/07

In my policy of trying to find the bright side of everything, I’m really enjoying Liz’s verbal humiliation at the hands of her Mtigwakian supposed friends. As I’ve noted earlier, the Noble Natives of the North may have been intended as a heavy-handed bit of ethnography, but they have ended up being the only people in Foobonia allowed to frankly call Liz on her crap. Not that I endorse the overarching “stick with your own kind” message here, but wrapping up “Girl, she stole your man! Snap!” in some kind of mystical “spirit journey” hokum is pretty hilarious to me.

I think we all know that Liz doesn’t have to worry about guidance. Her journey is like a cruise missile, zeroing in on The Mustache at an unstoppable rate.

Antifoobitarianism is spreading to the Webocmic world, by the way. Check out these recent offerings from Crap I Drew On My Lunch Break and Shortpacked!

Dick Tracy, 1/15/07

Boy, Dick Tracy is getting soft. Dick actually looks kind of concerned that he may have accidentally destroyed a man’s mind while engaging in pointless plot-stalling exposition. It takes mustachioed industrialist Diet Smith to supply the appropriate level of callousness. “Now, Tracy, this man is my employee, and when he signed his contract, he waived his right to sue or press charges over accidental brain erasure. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure the empty shell of his body is disposed of with some degree of dignity.”

The phrase “he spilled his thought beans” makes me uncomfortable on a number of levels.

Mary Worth, 12/15/07

Not only is Mary Worth honest-to-God going to Vietnam, but she’s managed to go from decision to airborne in less than a week. Meanwhile, she’s still having disturbing dreams. I’m guessing that “Hanoi … Peace Village” has something to do with this, but it’d be so much cooler if it were actually the site of the Communist mind-control lab where Mary was brainwashed forty years ago. It’d play out like The Manchurian Candidate, with Mary playing the part of both Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury.

At first I was jealous that Mary was flying in some kind of magical airplane with wide, comfortable seats and several inches of elbow room between neighbors, but then I realized where that extra space came from: there doesn’t appear to be any aisle. Presumably once the plane reaches Vietnamese airspace, the bottom of the plane will open up and the passengers will be dropped onto their destination.

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Folks, we’re all going to have a lot of Foobish anger to work out this weekend. I hereby provide this post as a discussion thread for you to do it on. To start things off, faithful reader Wille Thompson offers the following discussion points for Paul’s future romantic prospects.