Post Content

Click the banner to help sponsor Josh’s novel and to reserve your copy! Details here.

Everyone: just wanted to offer a huge thanks to those who participated in my novel’s Kickstarter campaign, and those who helped spread the word. I have been humbled by everyone’s support and I promise to present you the best novel I can, in a year or so!

Family Circus, 7/27/12

I hope I am not breaking any hearts or spirits when I tell you that the Family Circus, like many legacy comics, is pieced together from a huge library of clip art that is modified to the extent necessary and usually no further. At least we know that today’s panel features a genuinely new joke, both because today really is the opening of the 30th Olympiad and because only in today’s fallen, degraded society would the squeaky-clean Keane Kids even know that “XXX” denotes morally repugnant grown-up kissing without baby-making. Still, the TV in today’s panel is kind of interesting to me, as it’s not the usual Carter-era console set, but instead appears to be a flatscreen sitting directly on the floor, which … I don’t think is how anyone actually watches a flatscreen? Especially kind of a small one, like this? Which makes me think that this is just a modified version of an older drawing where a weird brown flatscreen has replaced the traditionally faux-wood-paneled console set. Although who knows, maybe this little TV-on-the-floor is specifically for Jeffy and Dolly (they’re not allowed on the furniture, for OBVIOUS REASONS) and the fact that they have access to such things explains why they now suddenly know that sin exists.

Gasoline Alley, 7/27/12

I really don’t have much to say about it, but I am in awe that this Gasoline Alley faulty DVD player storyline continues against all odds to exist, as it has gone on forever and nothing keeps on happening. Now they’re openly acknowledging that they’re repeating jokes! At least I assume that the referenced joke actually appeared in the strip in another go-round of this endless scenario. My memories of the details are vanishing into time’s mists.

Gil Thorp, 7/27/12

Honest question: Are there people who just assume that any amputee in street clothes is a war hero? What if they lost an arm doing something stupid (e.g., playing with dynamite) or evil (e.g., tried to strangle an orphan, had stranglin’ arm chopped off by an actual hero with a machete)?

Mary Worth, 7/27/12

Every Mary Worth of course takes place in a baffling dreamscape of non-Euclidean spatial relations, but I’m pretty confused about what we’re looking at in panel two. Normally a cruise ship’s deck wouldn’t be that close to the water, right? Is the boat tipping over, and the fellow in red isn’t so much leaping with unnatural strength to safety as tumbling out into space? Or is it sinking straight down, with the lower decks already swamped and the water quickly rising up to reach our heroes? Either way, I admit it’s a bit churlish to question anything about a Mary Worth panel that features a crazed man in a bow-tie screaming “It’s the only option!” as he points to the churning waters of the Mediterranean. But such is the critic’s curse!

Apartment 3-G, 7/27/12

Hey, remember when Lu Ann found out that the woman she always thought was her cousin was really her mother, and suddenly realized why the couple who raised her and her sister were always so bitter and distant, and went off to South Dakota to confront them all and sort out the emotional consequences of this elaborate web of deceit? That all sounds like it would have made for compelling drama! I guess we’ll never know now, though.

Post Content

Blondie, 7/20/12

Because of my 100% total commitment to YOUR ENTERTAINMENT AND EDIFICATION, I actually determined, by looking it up on Wikipedia, that “Untold Stories of the E.R.” is not a made-up T.V. show but an actual program carried on TLC. This is how Wikipedia describes the show:

In this program real-life emergency room doctors tell about their most bizarre and puzzling cases. Typically these involve medical sabotage, violently or strangely acting patients, life-threatening injuries, or even situations in which the E.R. physician is too overwhelmed to handle the caseload and can’t transfer responsibility for the patient to someone else.

Which is funny, because based on the dialogue we’re getting on-panel, I had assumed that it was carried late nights on Cinemax and every episode started with “Dear ‘Untold Stories of the E.R.’: I never thought this would happen to me, but…” and depicted people who came into the hospital with high fevers or head injuries quickly getting to third base with the triage nurse. I’ve also never seen “Cake Boss,” because we don’t have cable and also live in Baltimore and so are required to be loyal to the “Ace of Cakes.” Does “Cake Boss” involve the creepy eroticization of desserts? Someone involved in the writing of this dialogue really wants to fuck a cake, is what I’m trying to say.

Mary Worth, 7/20/12

I know I never unironically praise the art in Mary Worth, but I would like to unironically praise the art in today’s Mary Worth. I love everybody’s faces in panel one: the lady in the foreground and the ginger dude with the flapping hair are just going for flat-out screaming in terror, while the blondie lady with the pearls is thinking “I’m well-dressed and well-to-do, so nothing bad could possibly happen to me! I’m sure this will all work out fine.” Meanwhile, Wilbur looks genuinely crushed that he’s brought his only child on a doomed cruise that will kill them both, while Dawn just looks resigned and numb. Life is brutal. She already knew it.

The second panel is, if possible, even funnier. “Mama mia!” says the captain. (That’s a swear word in Italian, so they had to censor it.) “I didn’t see it!” He shakes his fist at whatever obstruction he just rammed the boat into. Meanwhile, his three assistants are standing absolutely still with neutral facial expressions, hoping nobody notices that they’re there.

Gasoline Alley, 7/20/12

I’m really kind of in awe of how long Gasoline Alley has managed to drag out its not-remotely-interesting-even-by-Gasoline-Alley-standards “Skeezix buys a new DVD player” plot. But I’m comfortable saying that it was all worth it, because it led to the sentence “Now to hook this baby up so we can watch some DVDs!” appearing in newspapers nationwide. The fact that it depicts an old man somehow managing to electrocute himself while hooking up composite cables is really just icing on the cake.

Apartment 3-G, 7/20/12

“Have you come up with a name for my granddaughter, Scott?”

“Not yet, Fred. I was hoping for a girl.”

“And how about you, Nina? Are you going to answer me in a way that indicates that you actually understood the question I asked?”

Post Content

Funky Winkerbean, 6/29/12

I had never given it much thought, but I can see why Les, a goateed self-styled intellectual, would feel a certain affection for Snowball, the character in Animal Farm meant to represent Leon Trotsky. It’s more of a stretch, but I’d even be willing to see Les and Funky’s sometimes strained friendship as a metaphor for the relationship between Trotsky and Stalin. You know, anything to move us along to the part where Les gets killed in Mexico by a guy with an axe.

Gasoline Alley, 6/29/12

So this week Gasoline Alley abruptly pulled away from its extremely mildly entertaining storyline about a demon-haunted cat to instead focus on Skeezix’s problems with his electronic equipment. “How could this get any more boring?” I said, but then I got to today’s strip and I was all like “Oh.”

Gil Thorp, 6/29/12

“You know, come over here unannounced and then whine to your two-year-old son about his athletic failures. I can’t decide if it’s more creepy or more pathetic. Is there a word that combines the two? Creepthetic?”