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Herb and Jamaal, Shoe, and Six Chix, 8/15/07

Oh, hey, everybody! Did you hear that it’s iPhone day in the syndicated funny pages? No? Well, fortunately, these three team players did. Yes, there’s nothing that will help make the comics relevant to young people like jokes about a hot piece of electronic gear that was released to great fanfare and media hype eight and a half weeks ago. Actually, that’s close enough to what I imagine the comics lead time to be that it makes me think that someone got a look at gadget-hungry types waiting camped out in the streets outside Apple Stores and thought “comedy gold!” And thank goodness we’ve finally got to see the results.

Herb and Jamaal has worked its cutting-edge cell phone joke into a storyline involving a hip young priest who’s been sent to clear out the clerical deadwood from the diocese of wherever the hell it is that Herb and Jamaal takes place. This might be interesting, except that nothing that ever happens in this strip is remotely interesting, so this won’t be interesting either. I like the way that “hip” is signified by the earring and the indoors sunglasses — he’s like Herb and Jamaal’s Coach Kaz! Though with less propensity for violence, hopefully. The strip is pandering to the newspaper comics’ core audience of angry old people by making this fellow as unlikable as possible; presumably he’ll be shuffled off to another diocese in disgrace soon enough, once the altar boys start complaining.

Shoe, meanwhile, manages to make no sense at all in its particulars, though it does manage to reflect the higher truth of its characters’ well-established personalities, since the Perfesser is well known for his food addiction. Six Chix thinks that the “a seashell is like a cell phone” joke somehow becomes funny when transformed into an “a seashell is like a particular, much-hyped kind of cell phone that was recently released” joke. For the record, it doesn’t.

B.C., 8/15/07

Just in case anyone’s wondering, the new, post-Johnny Hart’s death, assembled-from-existing-drawings B.C. is terrible. I’ve never been a huge fan of the feature, and I sort of have been waiting for the new team to find its bearings, but it’s kind of shocking how much worse it’s become. Today’s strip practically boggles my attempts to enumerate criticisms of it; I’ll start with the weird, mangled look of the figures in panel one (is this what happens when the new team deviates from pre-drawn templates?), the actively crude looking baseball and blimp, and the bizarre orthographic choice to end “Lookie, the blimp” with a period rather than an exclamation point. The saddest thing, as I’ve noted before, is that zombie B.C. is occupying space in hundreds of papers that could be used by someone trying to break into the comics business, or, failing that, by a nice ad for an auto dealership that would help the newspaper afford to buy more comics, or pay its copy editors.

Mark Trail, 8/15/07

Check out where Andy’s paw is going in panel three! Ha ha, Cherry, you’ve been rude-synonym-for-vagina-blocked! She knew that her one chance to have relations with her husband for the fifth time since their wedding was to hop on him the moment he got out of the car, while he was still disoriented; fortunately, Mark’s trained his faithful St. Bernard well to save him from the unpleasantness of physical love. Looks like Cherry’s got another night of furious masturbation in store while Mark blathers on about duck innards to her father!

The Lockhorns, 8/15/07

Actually, “Leroy” is French for … oh, you know what, just forget it.

Oh! And! Faithful reader Flipper earned that virtual penny and more with this utterly amazing Mark Trail squirrel montage. Are you ready to have your mind blown?

Also, faithful reader loudfan shares this evidence that Spider-Man is whoring himself out for the postal service. Thrill as he runs errands for Aunt May! Gasp as he surfs the Internet! Boggle as he puts a cold compress over his eyes, for some reason!

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They’ll Do It Every Time, 6/4/07

As a freelancer, I have a kind of … relationship with the postal service. Traditionally, most businesses pay their freelancers via paper checks, sent through the mail, rather than via the direct deposit that most folks with 9-to-5 jobs (and, for that matter, Social Security recipients) can get. Plus, you can never really be sure how quickly some of your clients are going to pay you (past speed isn’t always an indicator of future performance). Some of my biggest clients have in the past couple of years finally switched over to electronic payment, but I still get enough money in the mail that I’m always a little bit anxious about when it’s going to arrive.

Thus, in my six years as a freelancer, I admit to being a little bit of a mailbox hoverer. Especially when I lived in apartment buildings, in urban areas where the mail carrier and his or her schedule was likely to change from day to day, the game of “Is the mail here yet?” was a fun one to play, and gave me a little chance to walk around a bit, get out of the apartment (if not actually outside in the fresh air), and, occasionally, open my mailbox and find a check. It was a little like playing a slot machine, except I didn’t have to pay any money. And, once in a while, I admit to griping (to myself, of course, since I almost never encountered the mail carrier in person, and would never be mean to them if I did) that a check had arrived too late for me to take it to the bank that day.

Then I moved in with my wife-to-be, which also marked the first time that I lived in a real house (as opposed to an apartment) since I graduated from high school. This move also meant that I lived two doors down from Bill. Bill is a bachelor retiree, and is a very nice and helpful guy; he’s got spare keys for everyone in the neighborhood, and he brings in packages if you’re not home. He also has something of a … relationship with the mail, more for something to do than anything else, I imagine. The problem was that his relationship started interfering with mine. Because Bill watches everyone and everything in the neighborhood from his front room, he’s very much aware of when the mail gets here, and, more to the point, when I was looking to see if the mail had gotten here. If I opened the door to check, before I could even open the mailbox, I’d hear, “Not yet, Josh!” from two doors up.

For a while, this really bothered me. The “Is the mail here yet?” gig was my obsessive game! How could I enjoy it if Bill kept interrupting me? Eventually, though, I made peace with it. In fact, I like to think that seeing Bill’s obsession with the mail allowed me to let go of my own obsession a little bit, to realize that if a check sat in the mailbox for a couple of hours, and didn’t get cashed until the next day, it would really be OK.

Plus I figured out that I could see the mailboxes across the street from our living room, and thus didn’t even need to go outside to check.

Anyway, my larger point here is that I feel a tiny bit of resonance with Old Man Lugar’s attitude here, although like every TDIET character he takes it to a place of horrifying bitterness and negativity, cursing at an underpaid worker who probably does not, in fact, draw up his own duty schedules. I would like to say that it’s probably best to keep on the good side of someone named “Luger” if at all possible.

Blondie, 6/4/07

Mailman Beasley is getting a similar bit of blowback today, but since he rightfully doesn’t perceive Dagwood as any sort of threat, he responds not with terrified cringing a là TDIET but with passive aggression.

The Phantom, 6/4/07

Never mind Newt Gingrich’s attempt to psych himself up to murder in panel two; what the hell is the deal with that giant forearm in panel one? The perspective makes it look as if the elbow to which it’s attached must be hovering somewhere around Captain Poor SAT Verbal Score’s thigh. My theory is that it’s been hewed off of a Bob’s Big Boy statue and bolted permanently to the floor of the ship’s bridge, as only such an enormous fiberglass hand could properly hold the gigantic sandwiches that these seamen crave.

Dick Tracy, 6/4/07

I really hope that this isn’t how a lot of law enforcement and intelligence gathering works — “Sure, it would actually be faster to just look at one of the arrival boards, but that would mean we wouldn’t have a chance to intimidate someone by flashing our badges!” — but I fear that this might be one of Dick Tracy’s more accurate installments.

Herb and Jamaal, 6/4/07

Dear Herb and Jamaal artist checking to see if anyone at the syndicate is actually reading your cartoon to ensure that it makes some vague sort of sense before sending it on to the newspapers: Sadly, nobody appears to be doing so.

Update: It’s apparently a black thing that I didn’t understand. Point withdrawn, though the punchline is still pretty convoluted.

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Herb and Jamaal, 6/2/07

In an attempt to put a fresh and non-copyright-infringing spin on a joke that’s been cracking ’em up on the message boards outside churches around the country since 1998, today’s Herb and Jamaal ties itself into serious theological and philosophical knots. “Knee mail” (i.e., prayer) is of course the preferred method of making contact with a deity of the type that most religious folks today believe in: a God of pure spirit who exists on a plane separate from the physical reality we inhabit. Thus, Rev. Croom’s answer to Herb’s question (about which he looks rather disgustingly satisfied, incidentally) doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. We already talk to the spiritual God via knee mail, rev; Herb wants to know how to make contact with a hypothetical physical God. My suggestion: poke Him with a stick. Not too hard, though.

Blondie, 6/2/07

If I were a clerk at The Book Barn (or, well, you can’t see the “k”, so it might be The Boon Barn or The Boob Barn, but never mind that) and a customer brought me a copy of every mid-sized book in the store with a cover the same exact shade of blue, my first response would be less “You sure enjoy all kinds of different books” and more “Sir, I know that obsessive-compulsive disorder can be a life-afflicting problem, but the first step is to admit that you need help.”

Beetle Bailey, 6/2/07

So … does this strip make any sense to anyone, anywhere, at any level of familiarity with golf? I thought I had it — Gen. Halftrack is about to be caught cheating by Lt. Flap and Hitler-Mustached Mid-Level Staff Officer Whose Name And Rank I Forget Or Perhaps Never Actually Knew as they Keep On Truckin’ towards the reader, and Lt. Fuzz is demanding advancement in rank in exchange for his silence. But if Flap and H-MM-LSOWNARIFOPNAK have already seen the general’s perfidy, then Lt. Fuzz’s collaboration won’t help matters; if they haven’t, then their presence in the second panel, which seems to be the incentive for Fuzz’s sudden blackmail bid, is irrelevant. O wiser heads on the Internet, answer this conundrum!

A more philosophical question: Why are these two golfing together in the first place? Usually Halftrack is willing to humiliate himself by hiding under his desk or hanging out the window just to avoid a few loathsome moments spent with his subordinate. Surely any golf outing with the two of them would result in the younger man being brained by a club somewhere on the front nine.