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Cathy, 1/10/08

Whenever anyone, usually a woman, in a comic strip, or some other narratively undemanding medium, declares, “I want to talk about us,” it only leads to one place: disputes, anger, tears, madness, and broken lives. The marriage of Cathy and Irving, solemnized in February of 2005, is thus almost certainly on its way out. Will Cathy become more readable (or, really, readable at all) if Cathy is ACK-ing not to her accountant, but to her divorce attorney? Will Irving’s bug-eyed manias be more acceptable if they involve an obsessive catalog of all the gadgets that he brought to the marriage that should by right be his after the divorce? Will I be able to derive sick pleasure from week after week of their bitter, heart-rending, and expensive court proceedings? Will Cathy finally be forced to testify, under oath and before a judge, about why exactly she doesn’t have a nose?

Apartment 3-G, 1/10/08

It’s not clear whether Blaze is actually paying to have his super-cool New Year’s bash catered by Magee Dangerous Emotional Mood Swing Event Planning LLC and Ruby is filling in so that Margo and Eric can have sex, or if he’s just conned Ruby, his sister/cousin/whatever (I believe where they’re from it just all falls under “kin”) into cooking for nothing so he can mingle with the hepcats. On the one hand, Blaze’s last professional dealing with Margo came several years ago, when she was a wildly unqualified publicist rather than a wildly unqualified event planner; he hired her to promote his play and she, like, forgot or something, so you’d think he’d be wary of throwing more money her way. On the other hand, there are some pink, green, and yellow balloons in the living room, and that’s just the sort of half-assed and aesthetically misguided touch we’ve come to expect from Margo’s crack team.

That plate of whole, unskinned potatoes sure looks to be piping hot! Thankfully, Ruby can just set it down on the bottom of panel two.

Gil Thorp, 1/10/08

I don’t really have a lot of dealings with teenagers — they made me anxious when I was a teenager, and I haven’t really seen anything since that’s made me change my mind about them — but the idea of Andrew Gregory desperately texting his ex-girlfriend to boast about his athletic achievements strikes me as a slightly more accurate depiction of the emotional contours of high school life than most things that happen in this strip. Not accurate, however, is the way Andrew’s Vulcan ex is holding her phone in the last panel. It’s like there was pre-existing drawing of her holding a dead fish, and it was reused with just a little redrawing.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 1/10/08

Say, if my records are right, “Patrick Duke” is none other than faithful reader captainswift! Congrats to you, Patrick — but did you send this one to Al by e-mail or real letter? Or by smoke signals?

Bonus Scadutoism: “Fumpher”.

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Hey, everyone, new comics soon-ish, but here’s a couple of things that I’ve been meaning to link to.

• Gil Thorp aficionados are all well aware of faithful reader Jason Beattie’s This Week In Milford blog. Polls are now open there for best panels of 2007! All your favorites from last year are there — self-clubbing Tyler! Gail Martin! Gil orders a hit! If these are the best, I’m really looking forward to seeing the worst.
• Speaking of single-strip blogs, a few weeks ago faithful reader Dan sent me a link to his effort, Understanding Judge Parker. It might be better titled “Creating Fascinating But Inscrutable Art By Combining Judge Parker With Other Comics”, but it’s still pretty great!
• UPDATE: I almost forgot, I got the following e-mail the other day from Clifford Meth: “I am helping [recently deceased comic book artist] Dave Cockrum’s widow Paty sell off Dave’s personal comics collection — Golden and Silver Age books, his X-Men file copies, etc. Please be kind enough to mention this at your blog and share the news with others.” Done! Check out the details.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/8/08

The current Rex Morgan plotline got exciting some weeks back and, as is ever the case when that happens, I immediately lost interest. I discussed this phenomenon, which I call The Rex Morgan Problem, a while back, and here it comes around again just like clockwork. I think part of the problem is that “exciting” is really not something these strips do well. Ludicrous? Overwrought? Brimming with unspoken and petty resentments? Cryptohomoerotic? Yes, yes, yes, and you’d better believe that’s a yes. Exciting? Not so much.

Anyway, speaking of unspoken resentments, I do kind of love Niki’s expression in panel three. To quickly sum up several weeks of ostensibly exciting developments, Niki was briefly left alone in the cabin with one the escaped prisoners, who tried to relate to him as a fellow lowlife and offered him some stolen cash to switch sides; Niki refused because of his fear of letting Rex down. In today’s final panel, he looks to be contemplating the fact that right now he could be (a) warm, (b) dry, (c) rich, and (d) about to be embarking on an awesome cross-country crime spree instead of trudging through the dark, wet woods with a sullen and vaguely creepy doctor.

Spider-Man, 1/8/08

Speaking of non-exciting “excitement,” Spider-Man has actually toyed with superhero-on-villain action for the past few days. I refuse to label the Persuader a “supervillain” despite his descriptive one-word name, because he wears street clothes and his only “power” is his unusual stature; still, he’s proved more than a match for Spidey, escaping from his spiderwebs and failing to get in the way of the web-slinger’s wildly misdirected web-slinging. Maybe it’s time to admit that Peter Parker’s longstanding refusal to fight crime or even get off of the couch comes not from laziness or apathy but of a crippling fear of exactly this sort of inevitable failure and humiliation. The self-esteem issues that would naturally arise go a long way towards explaining his eternal passive-aggressive attitude towards any hint of his wife’s success.

Dennis the Menace, 1/8/08

The teacher in green’s wide, crazy eyes are more terrifyingly menacing than anything Dennis has done in my lifetime. She looks like she’s about to go on a killing spree, and, even more troubling, that she’ll testify that Dennis’ fairly tame caricature spoke to her and told her which of her students should live and which should die.

Gil Thorp, 1/8/08

“Frankly, it smacks of math. And the last thing I want my players wasting their time with is math. That’s why we have the poindexters who sit at the scorer’s table!”