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Blondie, 1/3/09

Ah yes, “this” — by which we are surely meant to understand the first week of January — truly is everyone’s very favorite time of year! What with the lingering resentment towards one’s family after too many hours spent in close quarters with them, the need to box up all the Christmas decorations and figure out how on earth to dispose of the tree, the grim prospect of returning to work or school after an extended absence, the arrival of the first round of credit card bills with holiday gift purchases on them, the radical diets undertaken after the horrifying results from the first venture onto the scale in weeks … why, there’s just nothing not to like about it! That the Bumsteads have time for parties and get-togethers in the midst of all this is a tribute to their sandwich and/or meth-fueled stamina.

You know, it’s almost as if this strip, published on the first day of the NFL playoffs, were originally written when pro football’s regular season was shorter and the playoffs really did coincide with the holiday season. The last year that was the case was 1982, when the strip was a mere 52 years old. But the thought that Blondie might just be repackaging strips written years ago is obviously laughable.

Curtis, 1/3/09

Curtis Kwanzaa stories will now forever be judged against 2007’s glowing telepathic otter, and while the Three Unpleasant Maidens Who Are Jealous Of Some Other Maiden’s Magic Water Jug has been dullsville so far, things have undeniably picked up today, as they vomit out increasingly horrifying nightmare visions after drinking out of said magic jug. If the three-eyed frogs and baseball-sized spiders (side note: would these ancient Africans even know how big a baseball is?) rise up to devour our nosey trio, who, after all, only wanted in on an apparently unlimited fresh water supply in a society that doesn’t have indoor plumbing, this will certainly be the most gruesome Kwanzaa yet. Perhaps “mind-numbing terror” should be added as the holiday’s eighth guiding principle.

Judge Parker, 1/3/09

Ah, check out stone-faced Sam in today’s final panel. Just another crazed, murderous stripper shouting “I was dead a long time ago!” as she commits suicide by cop, charging knife first into a hail of automatic weapons fire. If you’re Sam Driver, it’s just another thing to drop a few ironic, detached witticisms about before heading off to the next adventure. The man is such a joy.

9 Chickweed Lane, 1/3/08

9 Chickweed Lane readers, when opening their papers and/or Web browsers Monday and discovering a strip that does not revolve around this endless Belgian cello competition and/or fucking, will come to the logical conclusion that the story has in fact ended with a triumphant Edda killing and devouring Amos right there on stage. To those pleased by such a development, I must temper your satisfaction by pointing you to this.

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Curtis and Archie, 12/20/08

The global economic crisis has become so bad that even the most unresponsive, insulated-from-the-real-world group in America has finally decided that it must address it, or at least appear to be doing so. I’m talking, of course, about cartoonists! Today we have two attempts to grapple with the meltdown’s real-life effects, with varying degrees of realism. As a couple of faithful commentors pointed out, it’s actually kind of weird that the Wilkinses would be experiencing Christmas cash flow problems “because of the economy.” Curtis’s family has always been portrayed as thoroughly lower-middle-class, with their main income coming not from the cratering stock market but from his dad’s no doubt modest but steady income as an employee of the DMV; and unlike the last long-term downturn in the ’70s, this one hasn’t (yet) featured inflation of the sort that would put a crimp in an paycheck that only goes up by a few percentage points every year. Even gas prices shouldn’t affect them too badly, as the whole family appears to take the subway everywhere (yes, I know, the gas prices spike was months ago, but these are the comics, you have expect some lag time). Unless Greg has, like some state employees across the country, been forced to take a few unpaid furlough days, the family’s cash flow should be pretty much normal. Conclusion: Greg has either been exploiting his family’s fiscal ignorance to squirrel away extra cash, which he will spend on cigarettes, or more installments of the syrup chapter, or God know what, or is too embarrassed to admit that he was actually laid off months ago, and spends his days wandering the streets weeping openly.

Archie’s Mr. Lodge, meanwhile, is exactly the sort of person that the current crisis would keep up at night. No doubt heavily invested in growth stocks, mortgage-backed securities, and invitation-only hedge funds/Ponzi schemes, the Lodge family fortune has probably declined in the past year from nine digits to only eight. Of course, the Lodges are still richer than you or I will ever be and will never ever have to do an honest day’s work in their lives, but those paper losses are still very traumatic for someone so attached to money that he has a framed picture of a burlap sack of it hanging on his wall.

Judge Parker, 12/20/08

Since I last covered Judge Parker, Dixie Julep the sexy psycho stripper has bowled over a SWAT team member who was training an automatic weapon on her, leaped through a plate-glass window, dropped three stories to the parking lot below, and then dashed off into the desert — and yet Sam Driver doesn’t think she’s tough, because she bleeds real human blood when cut. We now know what this seemingly asexual lawyer really wants in a woman: a robot, or a vampire.

Shoe, 12/20/08

Seeing as I have railed specifically against the portrayal of the “sexy” lower backs of “sexy” lady birds in Shoe, I’m going to choose take the lower back tattoo that the avian barfly is sporting in today’s strip as a personal affront. The fact that Shoe is openly propositioning her for some water sports action isn’t really helping.

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Mary Worth, 11/23/08

When I was a kid, my dad told me stories about his high school health teacher, who in turn told my dad a set of entirely fanciful “facts” in the course of his education, the most prominent and horrifying of which was that a gila monster could bite on to your hand and become attached so firmly that the only way to get it off would be through surgery. Though this was explicitly presented to me as not reflecting the true nature of that gentle if venomous desert lizard, it was nevertheless an extremely vivid image that my younger self spent far too much time dwelling upon.

I bring this up now because the usual metaphors used to illustrate a tenacious, unyielding grip — a vise, say, or a bear trap, or a pit bull — are wholly inadequate to describe just how tightly Mary is clinging to the dark secret Lynn hinted at earlier this week. There’s only one way to put this: Mary has locked her jaw around the thin limb of Lynn’s hidden scandal like the nonexistent gila monster of my father’s health teacher’s fevered imagination. She will remain just within Lynn’s earshot indefinitely, hissing orders that she give up the goods, until we finally learn just what dark stain on the poor young woman’s soul is making her so very unhappy. PREDICTION: It will turn out to not be particularly interesting.

Judge Parker, 11/23/08

Judge Parker has played the sexy lady card in this storyline particularly hard, in that the main guest stars are a sexy lady detective wearing leather pants and a sexy lady stripper wearing very little. But as we see illustrated today, the only thing more exciting than a sexy lady is a deadly, stab-happy sexy lady (though perhaps that’s a shade less exciting than a sexy lady wired with explosives.) Anyway, this will no doubt very quickly devolve into some sort of terrible pit of Mike Hammer-style faux-noir misogyny, with the only question being whether Sam trots out his detached monologue about dames gone wrong and the men they drag down with them at central booking or the morgue.

Slylock Fox, 8/23/08

There is no doubt that comics reflect the essential zeitgeist of their age. For instance, when Slylock Fox was launched in 1987, I’m sure most of the crimes Sly was called on to solve involved muggings, petty thefts, break-ins — the sort of threats that obsess the middle classes when they fear that the violence of the proletariat is on the verge of boiling over. Today, though, as our economy begins to unravel and we are told that the culprits are the captains of industry and financial instruments that we can’t begin to understand, our fox detective is more and more frequently being called on to prevent corporate flim-flam jobs and, as we can see here, shady real estate deals. If only Slylock were appointed to head the SEC, maybe we’d be able to get to the bottom of our financial woes, through careful and deliberate ratiocination and/or information that we aren’t actually privy to.