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Hi and Lois, 9/14/08

Here’s a rare case of a Sunday strip being radically altered by the presence or absence of the throwaway panels in the top row of the comic. If, like me as I read my physical dead-tree comic section, you saw the strip beginning with Dot asking Ditto “What do you want to do today?” you get a fairly pedestrian parable about young boredom. But with those first two panels, the strip suddenly stands at one step removed, with Dot setting her Dale Carnegie-like powers of persuasion against Ditto’s persistent and chronic ennui. Dot isn’t trying to have fun with her brother; she’s set herself up in mortal combat with his own shapeless self, trying — and, as you can see by Ditto’s state at the end of the strip, supine and refusing even to move, failing — to mold her brother into a man of some semblance of action.

Crankshaft, 9/14/08

Much as I enjoy the thought of Crankshaft spending a week alone stewing in his own old-man filth, I must object to his barber’s use of the neologism “batching it” in the third panel. I’m assuming the terms derives from the word “bachelor,” but I fear that it may also somehow involve Crankshaft’s batch.

And here’s a couple of amusing out-of-context-panels for you:

Panel from Beetle Bailey, 9/14/08

This is a charming and whimsical scene, as Corporal Yo regresses into nonsense child-talk as he drifts aimlessly through the sky.

Blondie, 9/14/08

This is funny because it makes it look like Dagwood is paying for sex.

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Hi and Lois and Pearls Before Swine, 9/8/08

I got about a jillion e-mails about this today basically asking me OH MY GOD DO YOU THINK THIS IS A COINCIDENCE?, which I have to say that I pretty much do, as the jokes don’t work together quite well enough for it to be a coordinated effort. I think Pastis just picked the wrong day to make fun of Hi and Lois (though when the Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC hired goons burn down his house, he’ll find that any day is the wrong day to make fun of Hi and Lois.) It might at first be hard to imagine that Hi and Lois would be taking on any kind of international politics, but keep in mind that this strip was one of the first to tackle the subprime meltdown, so it’s smarter than it looks.

I’m intrigued by Ditto’s shirt. It looks like when the time comes for him to take absolute power from his sister’s ailing hands, he’ll have a spiffy logo for his paramilitary organization all ready to go.

Family Circus, 9/8/08

There’s something off about this cartoon. Big Daddy Keane’s indulgent smile clashes with his complaint that the days when his house wasn’t cluttered up by four pants-pooping submorons and their many overpriced toys are now as distant as the Fillmore Administration or the Thirty Years War. And the children’s rather generic hijinks don’t at all imply a brash solipsism in which everything that preceded their birth is consigned to a single inchoate prehistoric moment. Presumably this panel is designed to be repeatedly trotted out and assigned a new “parents say the darnedest things about their kids” caption as needed — which captions, I predict, will only become more bitter as time goes on.

Marvin, 9/8/08

Say, remember the Hulk, the sort-of popular comic book character that became the basis of a hit TV show in the late ’70s, and then later of two not-quite-blockbuster films in the ’00s? Well, Marvin hopes you still have “Hulk fever” as a residual effect of the marketing behind these media properties, because we’re apparently going to get some lame Hulk-themed jokes for the next few days. No matter how bad they get, we can at least console our selves that they appear not to actually feature the hated Marvin himself.

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Mark Trail, 7/19/08

Smart thinking, Kelly! After all, if you’re a foolish young woman prowling around at night with a forty-year-old camera and an off-tan slab of bacon, the last thing you want is to be surprised wearing only your sexy body-shaping slip. No, it’s best to put on your mom jeans and tuck in your shirt. But be careful! Make sure you don’t wake up your fellow campers with the sounds of rustling polyester as you tie your cravat and adjust it to that kicky angle that all the boys like.

Beetle Bailey, 7/19/08

At last, the idea that Beetle Bailey is completely out of touch with today’s military has been disproved! Obviously General Halftrack refuses to be shown up by those jerks over at the Air Force and has managed to divert Camp Swampy’s allotment of anti-terrorist money to the construction of his own comfort capsule.

Hi and Lois, 7/19/08

Today’s unsettling thing that sounds like the title of ’70s exploitation movie about prostitution and should not be coming out of the mouths of little girls in the comics: “Torn between profit and pleasure.”