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Heart of the City, 5/14/07

Heart’s worries are all too well-founded. When I was in sixth grade, I spilled a pot of boiling chicken soup on my foot while I was stirring it and had to go to the emergency room; I ended up with bandages around my foot for some weeks. My plan was to refer to the cause of my injury as “boiling water,” but I made the mistake of telling someone the real deal and was “noodle foot” for the remainder of the school year. What I’m trying to say, Heart, is that I only wish I had hurt myself doing something cool, like cheerleading practice.

Wait, I think that might have come out wrong.

Slylock Fox, 5/14/07

Ever felonious? Try ever sextaculous! Seriously, if Slylock Fox is part of some secret long-term plan to make kids more open and accepting of the lifestyle of furry fetishists, I’d say it’s scoring another point every time Cassandra Cat appears, especially if she keeps showing up in paradoxically prim-yet-sexy outfits like the turtleneck sweater/tartan combo she’s got on here.

The amount of time our fox/mouse detective duo spend tailing (ha ha, see what I did there?) Miss Cat probably indicates their forbidden lust for her more than their desire for justice. Max Mouse’s infatuation with the sinister feline is well known, so it should come as no surprise that he’s checking out a Krazy Kat collection, since that feature revolved around a cat in love with a cruel mouse tormentor — no doubt the reversal of the real-life situation soothes his tiny besotted bowler-covered brain. Slylock’s appearance here reminds me of another episode from my misspent youth: when I was in high school, I worked in the local branch of the public library, and one day a patron appeared who was apparently notorious for exposing himself in the reading room, and I was assigned to keep an eye on him and kick him out if he did anything funny. He mostly just sat there with the newspaper in his lap, though not with the disturbing look of preternatural alertness that Slylock is sporting here.

Mary Worth, 5/14/07

I can’t even begin to explain to you what the hell is going in the second panel. Is Mary about to demand a horsey ride from Vera? A horsey ride of meddling? In panel one, Vera is following the lesson she learned from hard experience — “be ever vigilant in guarding your crotch” — so Mary may have had no choice in going for the backside attack. But since Vera appears to still be sitting on the bench, what in God’s name has Mary done with her legs?

Gil Thorp, 5/14/07

If Clambake isn’t giving down-home, country-style prostate exams by the end of the week, I for one will be very disappointed.

Ziggy, 5/14/07

Ziggy is going to die from some kind of venereal disease.

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Gil Thorp, 5/10/07

As part of my cantankerous mission to defend the indefensible, I’d like to speak up for the art in Gil Thorp. I won’t attempt to justify the baffling action sequences, or claim that a reasonable person can tell who the hell anybody is. But if there’s one thing that Gil Thorp does well, it’s smug. I draw your attention to the Central slugger in the first panel and invite you to imagine his internal narrative. “Ah ha! Another snail-slow meatball of a pitch from Jim Gross that I’ve just blasted over the far fences! I think I’ll stand here and follow its trajectory into the next county for a bit, then let the bat slowly and casually slip from my fingers before I begin my stately trot ‘round the bases! La di da!”

For a previous instance of Thorpian smuggery, I urge you to check out this post from two years ago, when I was still new to the ways of Milford athletics. This post prompted the following hilarious comment from faithful reader Incident, which still makes me chuckle:

What really makes this strip is Von Haney’s crazy diagonal smug leaning pose. I know in my heart he’s going to keep doing it throughout the entire game, ergonomics be damned, because he’s JUST THAT HARDCORE about being smug. Sally Forth is his bitch.

(Speaking of funny things other people are saying about Gil Thorp, I’m pretty sure I’ve already linked to This Week In Milford, but if you aren’t already reading it, you really should be.)

Blondie, 5/10/07

Speaking of smug, panel one of today’s Blondie screams “I’m white, middle-aged, and self-satisfied, how ya doin’?” so loudly that I sort of want to smack Dagwood, and I’m not even a particular fan of hip-hop. Fortunately, in the rest of the strip he makes a quick and gratifying descent into insanity.

Mark Trail, 5/10/07

Yes, sexy Sam the sexy biologist just couldn’t get rid of all the birds — not even with a constant series of controlled explosions (scroll down a bit) — so she just DESTROYED THE WETLANDS WHERE THEY LIVED! And, as a double bonus, they were able to build a mall on the former swamp! Win-win! It’s a good thing Mark Trail could never ever punch a woman, because otherwise Sam Hill would be in big trouble. In fact, I’m not convinced she is a woman, what with her disturbingly masculine first name. I think she’s a male Mark Trail villain, and her “breasts” are where she’s hiding her facial hair.

By the way, if you think “bird strikes” are only a problem in the funny pages, think again!

Mary Worth, 5/10/07

Yes, after a big blow-out over “some silly matter” (Vera won’t tell Mary anything more, so you just know it was something awful she did), Vera was flung bodily out of the vinyl-sided family mansion onto the lawn! In a driving drizzle! With nothing but her hideous periwinkle and purple outfit and tiny, tiny handbag! And from that day forward, she swore she’d express all her aggressive and negative impulses in thought balloon form! CURSES UPON YOU, VON!

Speaking of curses, I’m still mostly averting my eyes from the horror of Funky Winkerbean, but for those of you who think that the person on the other end the hilarious Lisa-really-does-have-terminal-cancer-after-all swapped-scans mix-up has had all of his or her problems solved, think again.

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Archie, 5/8/07

From today’s comments, I’m glad to see that the bulk of you share my horror at the Archie-Joke-Generating-Laugh-Unit 3000’s attempt to understand the human soul. The AJGLU 3000, having been programmed with the main motivations for everyone in Riverdale, apparently believes that it would be amusing to see these three running eternally after their hearts’ desires (Jughead: a White Castle slider; Reggie: a dollar sign written on a piece of paper; Archie: Betty’s severed head), never getting closer, their numb faces reflecting their dawning awareness of the Sisyphean nature of their task.

One sometimes wonders to what degree human beings intervene in the AJGLU 3000’s workflow. On the one hand, Coach No-Name, despite his boasts about the track team’s prowess, has a thousand-mile stare in panel two; clearly he knows just what an awful thing he’s done to his innocent charges, and expects retribution, either from a merciful God or in a lawsuit for emotional distress. That moment of self-awareness could never have come from a computer. On the other hand, if people edited this strip, you think they’d have noticed that all three runners have had their left arms hacked off, or that Archie is about to stomp on a puppy.

Gil Thorp, 5/8/07

Hey, does that middle panel of inscrutably drawn young women staring silently confuse you and creep you out as much as it does me? You’re actually supposed to be seeing things through Branden’s eyes as her attempt to rally her teammates into a world of harmony and goodness flops terribly. You’ll note that the two girls the back of whose heads you can see in panel one are facing forward in panel two — Paris, who God only knows why I remember her name, and stripy-tank-top-girl, who I think might be the nosey newspaper reporter maybe? And then there are some blondes. Anyway, even to get this far into understanding what’s going on, you have to have read this damn thing every day and take a minute or two to connect the dots, which means that only I and twelve other people in America have done so. The artists would be better off making all of their panels look like panel two: wordless collections of random people staring at you with dead eyes.

Speaking of dead eyes, Coach Mrs. Coach Thorp is horning into Funky Winkerbean territory, waiting to hear back on the results of some chronic and inspiring illness that she’s been so busy dealing with that she can’t beat some sense into her feuding softball team. Evidentially she doesn’t want to hear what the doctor has to say, as she’s put the earpiece of her phone outside her hair and halfway back her skull.

Luann, 5/8/07

I don’t want to say that Luann’s plots should feature explicit, hardcore, toon-on-toon sex, but … wait, do I want to say that? No, no, I don’t. But I do want them to stop acting like the characters are screwing or fooling around or kissing or having meaningful non-platonic relationships when they so clearly are not. If you had seen this strip out of context, you’d assume that Tiffany had come down to the fire station and hurled herself at Brad, and that they had gotten it on in the back of the ambulance, or at least made out for a while. Instead, what actually happened is that she ran her fingers up his tie and made several double entendres. The end. And now, Luann is going to freak. Because she’s in the Taliban or something and Tiffany has polluted her brother with her harlot fingers. It makes no God damned sense at all.

Also, Brad made some reference to previously having a girlfriend, by which he could only be referring to his totally pretend not-relationship with Toni Daytona. Which means that Brad has no idea what a “girlfriend” actually is, which I do find kind of plausible, now that I think about it.

On a different subject, many of you cruelly mocked recent maybe-widow and smooth corporate operator Heather Avery for having a pig nose in today’s Rex Morgan, M.D. But faithful reader bobbaloo (aka bob byrd) took a more charitable view: he thinks her nose just became detached from its moorings and accidentally flipped upside-down. Behold his correction! (The original is on the right.)