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The Phantom, 1/16/08

Hooray, I did it! I managed to get through the entire previous incredibly moronic Phantom storyline without mentioning it in this blog once! This one is just getting started, and may turn out to be just as dumb, but I can’t resist today’s installment, in which Diana Walker (aka The Phantom’s Imported Caucasian Bride) is, as our narration box tells us, chatting with her friends about their career choices. (Side note: Hey, narration box, do you think that you don’t need a verb just because you have an exclamation point? Hmmm?) It sure was nice of Diana and her friend the cop to arrange to meet their friend the waitress for lunch while she was working the lunch shift. “It’ll be fun! We’ll talk while you serve us our meal! Maybe we’ll even tip you!” As if that wasn’t bad enough, cop-lady is stealing waitress-lady’s lifelong dream. “That’s the answer! Jungle patrol! Be sure to think of the adventures I’m having out on the frontier the next time an old man yells at you because his coffee’s too hot!”

Funky Winkerbean, 1/16/08

Not being married to a band director, I guess I can’t be expected to truly understand the horror that they go through, but I admit to not seeing the connection between being left home alone as your partner leads a group of teenagers through a forced march through the parking lot while they play an Andrew Lloyd Weber medley and this unappetizing combination of foodstuffs. There are a couple of possible explanations here:

• John’s total inability to cook, which I had blamed on a terminal case of Stereotypical Comic-Strip Maleness, is actually some sort of little-talked-about side effect of marrying a band director. Enormous bowls of M&Ms and six-packs of BEER-brand beer are actually the best he can do for hospitality, considering his condition. Since the other members of his meeting are in the same boat, they can’t complain about it.
• Being a band director’s spouse in Funky Winkerbean is some kind of double-whammy of crushing depression, and so the only thing for it is a tasty combo of alcohol and sugar. In fact, I’m not convinced that the colorful tablets in those bowls are actually M&Ms. I think the band directors are going to make their troubles go away with a cocktail of cheap beer and bootleg prescription pharmaceuticals — the “M&Ms” ruse is just to keep the kids none the wiser.

Judge Parker, 1/16/08

OK, I totally take back what I said earlier about Sam not being a sexual harassment risk. There’s really no good explanation for his pose in the third panel unless he’s about to casually look down and say, “Hey, whaddya know? My pants just came undone! Could you help me with that … partner?”

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Gil Thorp, 1/15/08

I’m pretty sure this is the most effort ever put into painting some kind of psychological portrait of a Gil Thorp character. Usually these demented cubist weirdoes just do bizarre stuff like cut off their legs or hit themselves in the back of the head with a stick without any obvious motivation, but for some reason we’re getting the full backstory on what makes the A-Train tick. Sure, it’s nothing ground-breaking — oh my God, a star high school athlete is kind of competitive! — but I have to admit to really liking the final flashback panel, where Andrew savagely crumples up his own paper when he discovers that his girlfriend is smarter than he is. His twisted, angry face makes it look like this is the moment when Lex Luthor decided to become a genius supervillain. “I’ll show her who knows more about American history … when I rule America! MOO ha ha!”

Judge Parker, 1/15/08

This is a good example of how having different people writing and illustrating a strip can result in an amusing disconnect. Gloria is Sam’s longtime legal secretary or personal assistant or something non-lawyer-y, and it’s totally possible that the dialog as written is supposed to be taken at face value and Sam really does think of Gloria as his real partner in the lawyerin’ business. But his heavy-lidded smirky expression in the second panel pretty much makes him look like the most condescending citizen of Smugville, U.S.A., and Gloria’s little insert closeup seems to indicate that she isn’t buying it. “OK, he’s a prick, but at least I don’t have to worry about him sexually harassing me,” she seems to be thinking.

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Judge Parker, 1/12/08

At last, the brownies’ “special” nature is explicitly acknowledged! Just what mind-expanding substance makes them “special” (complete with quotes) will no doubt be revealed in due time, which, since this is Judge Parker, means maybe by September. We know it’s good stuff, though, because in panel three Elvira appears to be so funky with ganja that she’s sporting visible odor lines, or perhaps her chemically altered brain is sending her down some kind of nightmare trip that’s beginning with her face melting and dissolving into the air. Normally I’d complain about the conversational discontinuity here — Elvira’s request that Biff respect neighborly etiquette and/or local general aviation regulations has little to do with her attempt to “turn on” the local squares — but these people are clearly so very high that we can’t expect them to make much sense. I’m looking forward to weeks of groovy psychedelia, Judge Parker style, which is to say that it will be slow, confusing, and ultimately frustrating, but there will be cleavage along the way.

Apartment 3-G, 1/12/08

The essential perversity of my entire blogging project can be summed up as follows: for the past four days, Rex Morgan, which I’ve ignored, has involved gunplay and our heroes fleeing into the woods in terror, whereas Apartment 3-G, which I’ve made sure to keep you current on, has involved boring people at a stupid New Year’s party. If you’re not down with that, then maybe the Comics Curmudgeon is not for you, my friend. Anyway, while we wait for Lu Ann’s inevitable discovery of Alan in the bathroom either shooting smack or offering to perform any number of unsavory acts in exchange for said smack, I want you to ponder this: of the 365 Apartment 3-G’s that were published in 2007, were there really not 13 or 14 that could have been combined, or perhaps even eliminated entirely, to so as to allow whatever Big Dramatic Moment is looming for midnight to happen in the strip actually published on December 31?

Family Circus, 1/12/08

Billy! As a native of Buffalo, the Queen City of the Great Lakes, I was doomed from birth to always have an undying affection for and rooting interest in the Buffalo Bills, despite the fact that with each passing year they find a new and exciting way to tear out your heart and stomp on it with their cleat-clad feet. Do not voluntarily pledge your love to them based merely on a coincidental match-up of names (yours being scrawled on your shirt, lest we not get the joke)!

Jeffy! There’s no such thing as the “Buffalo Jeffies”, but you’re a moron and so we expect no better of you. Your stupidity has in fact made you so well known that you don’t need any label on your clothes. Here, have a cookie.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/12/08

I have to say that I’m perturbed and unsettled by the verb tense in the first world balloon in this cartoon. “Did we ever argue like them” rather than “Do we ever” implies a certain temporal distance between the speaking couple and the ones being referenced. It would be understandable if the contentious pair in the background were a younger feller and his wife and the speaker were remarking ruefully on the tempestuous nature of early courtship among fiery rural folk, but the presence of long white beards on both men indicates that they have equal status as elders in this inbred hillbilly community. The only other scenario that makes sense to me is that the foregrounded couple are in fact dead and, like overall-clad semiliterate versions of the icy, reserved angels of Wim Wenders’ 1987 classic Wings of Desire, no longer argue about anything, but merely remark and observe. This would mean that they have been cursed by a vengeful God (who turns out to be some kind of liberal city slicker after all) to haunt the same chaw-stained shanty town where they spent their narrow, miserable lives rather than being permitted to enter the blessed afterlife.

Also perturbing and unsettling: “Honeypot.”