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Today I atone for posting slack by presenting you with three quickies:

The Lockhorns, 1/10/06

I spent an inordinate amount of brainpower trying to work out if this was supposed some sort of double entendre (involving the words “pussy”, “ball”, or “yarn”), but I think it’s just the typical, straight up, please-God-kill-me-now Lockhorns shtick. I draw your attention to the emotionally deadened faces of the non-Lockhorn half of this foursome. There are no non-Lockhorn recurring characters in this feature; presumably Leroy and Loretta inevitably pull their dinner-theater George-and-Martha routine in every available social situation and never get a second invite.

Mark Trail, 1/10/06

How much of a square-jawed, raven-haired badass is Mark Trail? He’s totally ignoring this heavily armed overalled hillbilly to have a conversation with his dog about how the two of them are going to escape from said heavily armed hillbilly’s animal-napping compound. It’s that sort of devil-may-care attitude that will get him and Andy busted out in no time, or get him shot in the back of the head. Either way, it’ll make for some good readin’.

One Big Happy, 1/10/06

Ah, James, Ruthie’s white-trashy friend: you think you’re hardcore, with your squirty cheese and your squirty desert. But if you’re just balling up a glob of your squirty cheese and popping it in your mouth with a jaunty FTTT, you’re not hardcore, do you hear me? You’re not hardcore unless you squirt that squirty cheese directly into your mouth. I’ve done it, James. Have you? Huh? Are you hardcore, James? Huh? Are you?

Ahem. Apropos of nothing, I would like to direct the attention of all you Ted Forth haters to this post on yellowjkt’s blog. If you don’t come away with newfound respect for the Tedster, you are a lost cause.

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Kudzu, 12/14/05

The Lockhorns, 12/14/05

Ah, marriage! When it goes well, how sweet it is! How it fills both partners with joy and helps bring two souls together as one! And when it doesn’t … well, then it’s delicious fodder for laughs, laughs, laughs! As if the last few weeks of Mary Worth divorce drama hasn’t been enough to prove that, we’ve got not one but two marriage counselor strips today. This Lockhorns panel isn’t “funny” per se (unless we’re talking about the oblate spheroid that is Dr. Pullman’s head, which is funny, but not ha-ha funny), but at least it stays true to the strip’s overarchingly bleak tone and subject matter. Look at Loretta’s face. A lesser comic would have had her smirking triumphantly at the fact that she always gets the last word, or have her brow furrowed with rage that her foibles were being aired in a public forum. But the Lockhorns never feels a need to step back from the brink of the abyss, and so Loretta’s face is just one of numb depression: she and her husband can’t communicate, her marriage is killing her, and the overpriced, bald-headed sub-Freud across the desk isn’t going to say anything that’s going to fix it.

Similarly, today’s Kudzu is true to that feature’s usual M.O., which is to say that it’s perfectly happy to cast aside even its wafer-thin sense of internal cohesion in order to follow some half-assed joke idea to its not-funny conclusion. I mean, why are they … that is, what is it supposed to … or, why should we … oh, forget it, just forget it.

One thing I and millions of comics readers will never forget is this little gem from today’s Judge Parker:

Watch it, April, he’s just going to show you “the claw” later himself — and he hopes you’re going to like it!

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Not to horn in on the excellent schtick of Comics I Don’t Understand, but … there are three comics today that I just … don’t understand. Perhaps you all can help me.

The Lockhorns, 8/11/05

So this is no doubt another small, passive-aggressive skirmish in the Lockhorns’ long-running war over money. I suppose the point is that by putting the sign on his car (after no doubt stealing it from the battered pick-up truck of some hapless pizza merchant), Leroy is trying to put a stop to Loretta’s wild spending habits. In so doing, he’s throwing back in Loretta’s face one her chief complaints about him — his inability to support her in the lifestyle to which she’d like to become accustomed. What I don’t understand is his facial expression — in this strip, the crooked smile and mussed combover hairs are usually indicators of drunkenness. Maybe here it signifies the shameful bravado of his making a defiant act of aggression out of his low-earning status. There’s another fatal flaw in his plan, of course, which Loretta seems to have recognized. You’ve got to get out of the car sometime Leroy, and when you do, that paltry paycheck is hers.

Willy ‘n Ethel, 8/11/05

OK, so The Lockhorns I mostly got after thinking a little bit about it. This one, however, is a little more opaque. There’s a lot of content here — a potentially humor-rich environment in which some kind of joke might lurk — but such a point is difficult to suss out. Ethel’s punch-card of deceit is inherently amusing, of course, but I’ve tried coming at Willy’s response to it from a couple of different angles and none of them quite work. Is he saying that if she ran a pizza parlor and left town after filling up a punch card it would be bad for business? Or that if she were running a pizza parlor he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from lying and thus filling up the card? Or that giving away free pizzas to liars is an unpromising business model? You’ve won this round, Joe Martin … but the war’s not over yet, I promise you that.

Marmaduke, 8/11/05

Sometimes, I don’t get the joke. Sometimes, I’m pretty convinced that there’s no joke to get. Marmaduke’s going for a walk. He stops to look at a bug. His annoyed owner, longing for the comforts of his slippers and his easy chair, wants Marmaduke to hurry up and move along. That’s it. Where’s the joke? Where’s the humor? Well, aren’t you demanding! If you aren’t satisfied with vignettes like this, the little grace notes of living with a big dog, then you don’t deserve to enjoy Marmaduke.