Post Content

Family Circus, 4/11/06

Ah, the desperate stab for relevance! See, Sudoku’s all popular now, and it’s Japanese, and … heh. Relevance. You see. Well, as a typical reader, let me assure you: it didn’t work. The Family Circus appears right under the Sudoku puzzle in my paper, but it still didn’t make this cartoon relevant or funny.

Also, this cartoon? Deeply racist. Sudoku means roughly “Single number,” and it’s an abbreviation for a larger phrase that means “the numbers must occur only once” (“Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru”). It is not, in fact, anybody’s name. Keep right on writing those letters to the editor, Sarah Ditmars.

Sally Forth, 4/11/06

This is an awesome meta-moment … but Ces, you tease us. We all know that whatever Ted’s new job is, it won’t be as good as any of these.

In addition: Tan shirt? Just-one-shade-darker tan pants? Electric blue tie? Ted Forth is not gay, everybody.

Gil Thorp, 4/11/06

I think the commentor who suggested that Trey Davis’ t-shirt is foreshadowing has hit the nail on the flat-topped head: Gil Thorp must be determined to match Funky Winkerbean and Doonesbury with a depressing Iraq War storyline of its own. Of more immediate concern is the snoopy reporter in panel three, who is clearly Andy Dick in a bad wig.

Luann, 4/11/06

Hey Gunther, even if she did want you to put on a dog suit, this is girl who you forced to dress up as a giant pen at a comics convention in your doomed bid for fame last year. You might want to dial down the self-righteousness while you’re adjusting the invisible control panel on your forehead there.

Post Content

That’s right! I couldn’t settle one just one, so I’ve got four comics for today! I hope this is storing up goodwill against those days when I don’t post anything at all.

Apartment 3-G, 4/6/06

Tommie’s secret thought balloon in panel three: “Ugh … Lu Ann’s self-actualization … so boring … must pinch neck … to keep myself awake …” Fortunately, she’s a medical professional, and won’t accidentally cut off the bloodflow to her brain and collapse in a heap on the floor. Not that it would stop Lu Ann from nattering on.

9 Chickweed Lane, 4/6/06

Yeah, go ahead, show him the address. After all, he’s a priest! And we all know that they never do anything disreputable or pervy. No sir.

(So I’m going to hell for that. But I was going anyway, so I might as well enjoy the ride.)

Family Circus, 4/6/06

So this is the cookie aisle, right? And all the boxes are arranged on the shelf so that their fronts, with their lovingly detailed close-up pictures of delicious, delicious cookies, are turned so as to be largely invisible to hungry shoppers, while their sides, with detailed information about the massive amounts of fat, industrial chemicals, and animal byproducts in said cookies, are prominently displayed for all to see. Plus, the boxes are all a muted brown. Where do these people shop, the Depressing Store?

Also (and this next paragraph is an extended shout-out to my professional linguist homies over at the Language Log, who have linked to me several times despite my near-total absence of linguistics content), I’ve always found the verb construction Mom’s deploying here pretty stilted and weird. It’s a verb of being governing a negative infinitive, which makes it … well, hell, if I knew that, I’d be writing “I analyze syntax so you don’t have to,” or, you know, the Language Log, instead of this thing. I reached back a decade and rummaged around my half-remembered memories of Latin for a while and came out with the phrase “hortatory subjunctive,” but I don’t think that’s right. Anyway, it does have a certain advantage in that saying “Don’t open it until you get home” would make her look pretty dumb, since he’s already opened it. This way she gets to make a general statement of fact without having to either ignore or explicitly acknowledge the reality of her greedy, gobbly, smarmy little brat of a son.

Gil Thorp, 4/6/06

I’m going to hazard a guess that a year from now the Rap-Dog is still going to be fetching menthols and Mello Yello for his overbearing trailer-bound Momma. Either that or he will have killed and taxidermied her, though even then he’ll probably still be alternately cowering from her wrath and having sullen arguments with her in his mind. Come to think of that, he might very well be doing that already.

It’s hard to stay mad at a woman whose shirt is decorated with tasty Doritos, though. Mmmm … Doritos.

Post Content

OK, so I skipped a day yesterday … so, to make it up, here’s a big mishmosh of stuff from the last couple of days, arright?

Get Fuzzy, 3/7/06

When I was a little kid, I used to think that white people were pink, in the sense that, if I were coloring and I wanted to color in a person who was supposed to be white, I’d reach for the pink crayon. Kinda weird, I know, but I also thought my father was black. (Hey, he has kinky hair and is really swarthy and I didn’t understand genetics, alright?) One day in first grade, this little girl who I had a crush on (to the extent that a six-year-old can understand what a crush is) decided she wanted to color with me, and we were coloring together and then she asked to borrow a pink crayon, and I assumed it was to color one of the people we had drawn, but she started using it to color in the background instead, and then I got upset yelled at her that she wasn’t doing it right, and so she left in a huff. First in a long series of relationships I managed to sabotage from the start. In retrospect, the fact the she herself was black might have had something to do with it. Interracial romance is tough, don’t let anybody tell you different.

Anyway, this may be why my all-time favorite Bucky-deployed anti-Rob slur is “Pinky.” This strip gets special props from me because it manages to use three different variants of the term in four panels.

Gil Thorp, 3/7/06

God damn, but Gil Thorp is awesome. I don’t know what’s wrong with you all that you can’t appreciate it. Where else would you see a high school basketball fan taunt a homeless teen by dressing up as a hobo? North Bend must have a strong drama department, with an emphasis on the Theater of Cruelty.

Mary Worth, 3/8/06

Yeah, she’s a pilot of sorts … the “sort” of pilot who knows how to “fly a plane.” Which is pretty much the usual “sort.” There’s only two possible motivations for Salty Cal’s ripped-from-an-infomercial line in panel two: either he thinks “pilot of sorts” is code for something kinky (and is thus in for a bitter, bitter disappointment) or he’s the first character in the history of Mary Worth who knows how to correctly use sarcasm.

Also, that little sign at the bottom left of panel one, which appears to depict a giant fish playing pinball, is the single greatest bit of incidental art ever to appear in this strip.

Dick Tracy, 3/8/06

I have no idea why this horse is dragging an unconscious German infantry mime through the snow here. I just think it’s funny that Dick Tracy has finally come to terms with the fact that his wrist-phone is no longer cutting-edge technology.

Marvin, 3/8/06

Ha, ha! Marvin’s grandmother thinks Marvin’s grandfather is fat! Oh, that kills me. Really kills me. It makes me feel dead inside. Is this what you have to look forward to after forty years or so of marriage? I can’t wait. The best part is the contrast between her smug smile and his look of utter mortification. I’m surprised she isn’t extending the weigh station metaphor and charging him.

Meanwhile, in Judge Parker, Ned has been weeping one slow-motion, gelatinous tear after another for five straight days:

Also, Rex Morgan? Still gay.

Oh yes, let’s.