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Ziggy, 4/8/10

Man, I can’t even pretend that I know what the hell Ziggy is talking about here (the way I pretended with yesterday’s Family Circus — it was about Easter eggs, apparently? Ha ha, people eat Easter eggs! Who knew!). As I usually do when I’m confronted with a slang term that I don’t understand and I want a repulsive definition for it that was fabricated by 14-year-olds, I consulted Urban Dictionary. The first definition given there — “the word used to replace ‘share’ in a request to do so with someone” — can’t be right, as Ziggy is a loser with nothing to share with anybody; he even seems to have once again misplaced his recently rediscovered pants! Thus, we’re left with definitions two (“Defecation. Derived from the term number two.”) and three (“Spar’s strong white cider, sold in bottles of 2 litres, originally for 2 pounds, hence the nickname twosies, often abbreviated in writing to ‘zz.'”). These are both strong possibilities, actually; Ziggy’s facial expression, with undereye bags and a crooked half-smile, could be taken as indicating that he’s shat himself, or that he’s drunk in public in the middle of the day on some British cider drink, or that he’s shat himself in public in the middle of the day after getting drunk on some British cider drink.

Gil Thorp, 4/8/10

You know what would actually be pretty great? If, just as Derek “Slim” Chance has discovered that being a teenage alt-country singer in a Central City bar is about a bazillion times cooler than being a pitcher for the Milford Mudlarks, the Gil Thorp comic strip would realize that, just for a few months, following the adventures of non-athletes might be a bazillion times more interesting than watching yet another team of dim jocks try and fail to make the playdowns. Since it’s been widely acknowledged that the last spectacularly awesome Gil Thorp storyline came three summers ago when Kaz punched his way into Gail Martin’s entourage, the reconnection of our be-mulleted hunk with the world of music can’t in any way be a bad thing.

Boding particularly well is Slim’s rhinestone-encrusted, dice-festooned outfit. I know that’s supposed to be cowboy-style fringe hanging off his sleeve in panel one, bit it looks like his arm is just leaving a trail of pure light behind it as it moves, indicating that Slim is truly a magical, transcendent figure, or that Kaz’s acid is finally kicking in.

Apartment 3-G, 4/8/10

I just want to pause briefly in the midst of all this awesomeness (Ha ha, “She won’t dare shoot me!” And look at Margo’s face in the second panel! “Hey, lady, only I get to insult and belittle my father!”) to contemplate the word “stepmother” for a moment. Is this really the right term for the relationship between Margo and Bobbie? I mean, yes, technically Bobbie is a woman who is not Margo’s mother but is married to her father, at least until state of New York or that illegally purchased firearm dissolves that union. But generally the word is reserved for a woman your father marries sometime after you were born and his relationship with your mother dissolves, and not, say, the woman your father was married to when he knocked up the maid, and who raised you as her own, hating you and him and herself all the while. I have no idea what the correct term would be, though, and I’m open to suggestions.

Baldo, 4/8/10

Ooh, Tia Carmen and her supermarket romancer, who normally only interact in soap opera strip art form, are going on a real date! We’ve been shown that he’s apparently gone nuts and bought a wedding ring already, but he may be reconsidering that decision now that she’s shown up for dinner dressed as Cruella de Vil.

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B.C., 4/5/10

You might think that the familiarity that comes with reading and criticizing the comics section every day for years would breed a certain amount of contempt for the medium and its perpetrators. But I’ve actually gained respect, or at least sympathy, for cartoonists in the process of writing this blog. For one thing, I’ve learned how hard it can be to come up with something funny to say every day, and realized that sometimes you have to write something only semi-coherent, tell yourself that they can’t all be winners, and then move on. And, once you’ve assembled a body of work over several years and know that you have a long-term audience, you’re faced with the dilemma of writing something that stands on its own or going back to that in-joke well.

Take today’s B.C., for instance. That’s Wiley in the hat, manager of the strip’s ever-hapless baseball team. And there are his players, visible only from the neck up; at some point in the mists of the strip’s history, there was a gag in which the baseball diamond’s dugout was depicted as a literal hole literally dug out of the ground, which has now stuck.

So, if you’re a long-term reader of the strip, all these visual cues would make some sort of sense (but not really all that much). But let’s assume, for a moment, that there are people who, right now, are picking up the newspaper or loading their Web browser, and reading B.C. for the very first time. Would there be a single thing in this cartoon that they could grasp, at all? Would you look at Wiley and understand his outfit as a baseball manager’s and not, say, a train engineer’s? Would you look at the hatless, baseball-equipment-less players standing in an open trench and think, “Oh, yes, these are baseball players, in a dugout, ha ha?” Wouldn’t it all just be madness to you, a sea of symbols without an organizational system?

The answer to that last one seems to me to be an obvious yes! But, on the other hand, the “Wiley is a baseball manager and his team’s dugout is a hole in the ground” tropes long predate my first reading of the strip, and yet here I am patiently explaining them to you, so somehow I’ve managed to pick up on them. And I’ve never even particularly liked B.C.! The determination of the human mind — or at least my mind — to make sense of larger narratives is impressive, I suppose. But I do wonder, now that people are more likely to find their comics on the atomized Web rather than on collected on a newspaper page, if people will have the same patience with strips they don’t get right away.

And with that said, here are a couple of comics and commentaries thereupon that probably won’t make any sense if you aren’t a regular reader of this blog!

Gil Thorp, 4/5/10

So, our basketball-season stories have wrapped up with surprising grimness: the girls’ team is defeated in the playdowns, Cassie ditches her erstwhile fiance and is ditched by her friends in turn, and Steve Luhm gets punched in the face and is still a janitor. I imagine that we haven’t seen the last of at least some of these clowns, but now we’re launching into our exciting baseball-season stories, which will involve baseball in the sense that the sport is mentioned in the first panel before we move on to whatever sort of sleazy underground S&M den Kelly is trying to forcibly drag Coach Kaz into. “The Pit” doesn’t sound that hot to me, honestly, but since most of their romantic encounters take place at Kaz’s sex dojo, her standards are probably pretty low.

Apartment 3-G, 4/5/10

We’re pretty much all in awe of Margo’s quotin’ and naked ringless fingers, but I’m not sure if they’re really the match for an actual loaded pistol that she seems to believe they are. Still, I wouldn’t mess with her, armed or no!

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Gil Thorp, 3/31/10

Oh, look, it’s another Milford team failing to win a title! Yes, there’s been a championship basketball game going on while the red-hot fisticuffs happen elsewhere. The Mudlarks losing again is of course utterly unremarkable at this point — presumably the whole loss exists just to set up the drama of faithless Cassie being shunned by her teammates for abandoning them — but today’s strip manages to offer an intriguing counterpoint to the concept of the uncanny valley — the slopes of the uncanny mountain, perhaps? Panel one disturbs and unsettles with the absence of details on the crowd in the background, as it appears that a tribe of identically black-garbed faceless, hairless automata have shown up to cheer on either Milford or Tilden; but panel three shows us that more detail isn’t necessarily any better, as we are confronted with more of Marty Moon than we ever wanted — the shine of his greasy goatee, the hollowness of his cheekbones, his glassy eyes, each and every one of his molars. We can practically smell his breath (Mr. Boston gin mingled with coffee from the AM/PM, not quite masked by the cloud of Axe Body Spray that hovers around him at all times).

Family Circus, 3/31/10

Ha ha, yes, this is a cartoon about how having four kids and a husband who doesn’t know how to iron would lead any woman to murder, but the thing I find most interesting is the fact that Billy is apparently dressed in a nice shirt and tie, for some reason. Perhaps Mommy can fashion Big Daddy Keane’s mushy, vaguely bunny-fur-like shirt into a makeshift rabbit costume and send him to school in it, and neatly dressed Billy can go into the office. Both problems solved, and we can move on to the question of why Dolly is attempting to brush her hair into the soup.

Herb and Jamaal, 3/31/10

It appears that Jamaal hasn’t quite gotten this “cruising for anonymous gay sex” thing down yet.