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Herb and Jamaal and Wizard of Id, 3/3/07

OK, cartoonists, white and black alike, we get it, we get it. Rap music is a defining genre for a generation of young people, black and white alike, but you just don’t care for it. Feel free to intersperse your rants against rap among your rants about the fact that young people don’t seem to find the comics relevant anymore.

At least the admonishment in the Wizard of Id makes some vague sort of sense, since it takes place centuries before the birth of hip-hop. Presumably the rap aficionado is a time traveler from the future, being urged to keep quiet about his aesthetic choices lest he somehow alter the timeline and create a twentieth century Earth ruled by Hitler, or possibly by KRS-One.

Gil Thorp, 3/3/07

More proof that Marty Moon is from Mars and the Lady Mudlarks are from Venus. “Nothing seems to bother the girls”? Jeez, Marty, do you think they always look like a bunch of numb-eyed, emotionally stunted zombies? Oh, wait, this is Gil Thorp, I suppose they do.

Mark Trail, 3/3/07

Mark’s doing exactly the right thing here. When I took a swim safety class in high school, they taught us that you can save a drowning person just by believing in their abilities hard enough. Also, in a situation like this, you should never leave your breakfast unattended, because your bacon might get cold.

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Marvin, 3/2/07

All right, Marvin, listen to me: “like that popular toy” isn’t something that any human being would ever in a gazillion years say. An actual human being would say “like Dancin’ Elmo” (and substitute the actual brand name of whatever animatronic Taiwanese-manufactured hunk of plush crap is being demanded by all the little squallers this year for “Dancin’ Elmo”). The only situation in which you’d say “like that popular toy” is if you had a law firm on retainer that was terrified of angering some major toy manufacturing concern vetting your dialogue before you speak it.

Of course, these are all Marvin’s thought balloons, and I suppose that we don’t really know how pre-vocal infants think, so it’s possible that their internal narrative sounds like it was composed by a committee of overcautious corporate lawyers. But I kind of doubt it.

By the way, Floppet, if the way I’m interpreting that last panel is correct, as soon as Marvin starts walking around and shaking his diapered butt vaguely in time to the Barney song, you’ll be finding yourself in a box at the Salvation Army in short order.

Herb and Jamaal, 3/2/07

I find it charming that Ezekiel’s mom looks so horrified that her son is apparently making the essentially arbitrary choice of underwear style by a somewhat whimsical method. Presumably, if she knew the truth — that Ezekiel had gone through some horribly misguided career-selection algorithm that boiled things down to two possible life paths, one of which involving hundreds of thousands of dollars in education expenses for her, the other involving her son being repeatedly punched in the head until he’s left a near vegetable at the age of thirty, and that he’s using random chance to determine which road to take — she’d be totally fine with it.

Family Circus, 3/2/07

P.J. from the Family Circus + pornstar mustache = my weekend ruined, thanks a lot.

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The Phantom, 12/16/06

I’m not going to lie to you: I love love love the Phantom’s always awesome NEXT: boxes. They can be by turns catchy and taunting. This particular example raises the intriguing prospect of NEXT: boxes that consider the ancillary details of the situation being portrayed. Like if the big purple guy is secretly hitching a ride on a military helicopter to Rhodia, and we get NEXT: What’s the weather like there? Or if the Ghost Who Walks is punching out some ne’er-do-wells as faithful Devil looks on, and we’re confronted with NEXT: Heartworms!

This strip is well known for its love of the interrobang, but Denton’s administrative assistant is so startled by the sight of President Luaga’s muscular assertion of executive authority that she’s just plain bangobanging.

Herb and Jamaal, 12/16/06

You know, I’ve always thought of Herb and Jamaal as, if not B.C.-style theocratic or even Family Circus-style churchy, at least kind of church friendly. That was before today, when we saw that the seemingly friendly Rev. Croom is in fact a money-grubbing charlatan. I look forward to future installments, where the good Reverent is forced into a reparative therapy facility after being caught with a male prostitute and boatload of meth, and his flock mostly turns their back on Christ as a result.

Pluggers, 12/16/06

So, pluggers are Bloods, eh? That’s it, I’m joining the Crips.