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Luann, 7/14/09

You might think that being a big-shot semi-professional comics-mocking blogger is all fun and games, but I suffer for my art, and for you, my faithful audience. If you doubt the extent to my suffering, consider this: while most of you probably read today’s Luann and allowed an icy shiver to travel the length of your spine for a moment before moving on to something that didn’t make you doubt the existence of a loving God, I’ve spent most of today trying to figure out something to say about it, because, despite my previous declaration of disgust on this point, I sort of feel obliged to do so. Here’s the best I could come up with: I dearly hope that Brad and Toni are unable to back away from the implications of their cut-rate ham-handed “suggestive” dialogue and end up screwing right there on the sidewalk, at which point they’ll be arrested for public lewdness, thrown in jail, and murdered by revenge-minded but dimwitted criminals who can’t distinguish between firefighters and police officers. Next, a similar sequence of events polishes off Luann and Gunther, Tiffany and Quill, and most of the rest of the cast, with the strip being refocused on the adventures of Puddles the dog and, oh, let’s say Knute.

Beetle Bailey, 7/14/09

By comparison with the above, it’s been a joy to contemplate the pink tubelike form of naked General Halftrack. Ha ha, the general doesn’t like it when the doctor puts skin cream on his anus!

Judge Parker, 7/14/09

Long-time faithful readers of Judge Parker and this blog will remember that Randy’s ascendence to the position of Judge-Dictator of Parkerville, USA, began three years ago with an election race against the sleazy Reggie Black, whose main campaign strategy was to imply that Randy was gay. Randy emerged victorious, of course, by focusing on the issues, specifically on the issues that Reggie’s wife Celeste had with alcohol and rage. Anyway, poor Reggie, wherever he is, would probably love to have heard Randy admit that he doesn’t have any lady friends. Presumably, having learned well from his sensei Sam Driver, Randy has taken April to this romantic spot so that he can gaze wistfully out over the vista, with April eventually attempting to force his nose into her cleavage, to no avail.

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Family Circus, 6/16/09

The Family Circus isn’t just a beloved refrigerator decoration for old people everywhere; it’s also an elaborate long-running narrative experiment, challenging our notions of hard and fast divisions between “reality” and “fiction.” The Family Circus family has a very strong resemblance to the real-life family of Bil and Thelma Keane; the parents are modeled very closely on them, and the kids are as well, though not as closely as you might think — there are actually five real-life Keane kids, and the only daughter, whose childhood nickname was Dolly, is in real life older than the Billy analogue, whose real name is Glen. The strip father’s job is also supposed to be a cartoonist; you do see him sometimes working in a home studio, but he also appears to leave for some kind of office job during the day. Then there’s strips like this one, where pretend-Billy takes over for pretend-Daddy in the comics drawing business, which implies that the comic is actually produced by one of its own characters, like a snake vomiting up its own tail, even though the actual end result has traditionally been drawn by real Bil and not real Glen. Add into the madness the fact that for some time the real artist of the strip has been the real Jeff, though there is the fiction (see what I did there?) that Bil is still doing it; real Jeff looks remarkably like pretend-Jeffy and yet seems determined to portray pretend-jeffy as a moron whenever possible.

Try to keep all this in mind and you’ll be left with a serious headache when trying to figure out who might be responsible for today’s panel on the several different layers of fiction, metafiction, and reality that it simultaneously occupies. And that’s too bad, because, when you cut through all that, the content of today’s panel is pretty delightful, containing at is does the pretend-Keane parents (or the pretend-pretened-Keane parents) getting into a screaming fight because LOOK AT ALL THESE FUCKING BILLS and WHY DON’T YOU GET A REAL JOB and MY MOTHER SAID NOT TO MARRY YOU and so on. Of course, the real Keanes never had arguments like this, because of those aforementioned old people and their insatiable lust for Family Circus-branded merchandise. But nobody wants to put a crudely drawn panel of Mommy and Daddy lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills on their refrigerator.

Luann, 6/16/09

The punchline of this strip would be kind of cute if Brad did in fact have any other friends, but as it is it’s just kind of depressing.

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Luann, 6/9/09

Say, did somebody mention “view[ing] Luann’s treatment of human sexuality with mingled fascination and horror”? Oh, yeah, I did! Well, today’s strip offers an insight into the origins of the squick that hangs over this feature like a squirm-inducing black cloud by proposing a typical fair as some sort of carny-staffed aphrodisiac. Let’s go over each item presented as potentially arousing in turn, shall we?

• The smells: A heady melange of fryer grease, unwashed barnyard animal, sweaty humans, feces from said animals, and barf from said humans.
• The food: Dripping in grease and inappropriately deep fried.
• The rides: “Wait, has this thing been inspected by anybody? I don’t like that grinding noise it’s making, and I don’t think the door is shutting all the way … also, it’s hard to grip onto the handlebar, because somebody appears to have puked on it.”
• The animals: Sheep, pigs, and cows, all trotted out of their barns so they can be inspected by those who plan to kill and butcher them!

In other words, the “whole hot, earthy, exciting atmosphere” is a tremendous boner-killer for any right-thinking person. I’m frankly amazed that the Tilt-a-Whirl upchuck incident didn’t just turn Mr. DeGroot on further.

Mark Trail, 6/9/09

There is absolutely no strip on the comics page today that can deliver the laughs like Mark Trail. I certainly hope that the Williams Chemical Company is an enormous publicly traded multinational corporation, and that Mark spends a baffling day being shuffled between the plant manager, the operations manager, the CEO, the COO, the chief environmental officer, the chief quality officer, the chairman of the board, and the heads of the major stockholder factions before becoming frustrated and just punching out postindustrial capitalism itself.

Apartment 3-G, 6/9/09

“Wait … Eric is such a nobody that this newscaster can’t even remember his name without reading it off a sheet of paper? GASP! I must break off the engagement at once!”

Family Circus, 6/9/09

Well, Jeffy, it looks like you’re going to have to take some of that stuff out of your suitcase before you leave! Don’t worry, I’m sure that the other children at the orphanage will be happy to share their toys and clothes with you!

Funky Winkerbean, 6/9/09

“HA HA HA HA HA! Get it! I took what you said, but then reversed it! HA HA HA HA HA! Hey, wait a minute, are your pants unbuttoned?”

Panel from Spider-Man, 6/9/09

Meanwhile, over in Spider-Man, Wolverine is posing for his yearbook photo.