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Beetle Bailey, 10/17/09

In the early days of this blog, I poured scorn on Sally Forth for accepting product placement money from progressive rock legends Rush. In the subsequent years, however, as the newspaper business has imploded and the comics industry upon which I have come to rely has been brought ever closer to extinction, I’ve rethought my position on nontraditional revenue-generating strategies. For instance, Beetle Bailey is both a hilarious comic that will provide a much-needed laugh over your morning coffee and a brand that is highly trusted by the coveted 55-to-80 demographic. So, when Sarge admits that his recurrent incontinence causes him to shun social situations or long trips into unfamiliar territories, that would have been a great time to open up a conversation with readers about Detrol, or Lyrinel XL, or, you know, whoever’s willing to pay more. Not only would this have been both lucrative for the holders of the intellectual property rights pertaining to Beetle Bailey and educational for consumers, it also would have replaced a baffling and distasteful punchline about Otto carrying his urine-soaked fire hydrant around with him.

Mark Trail, 10/17/09

Poachy McSideburns is proving himself the master of the at once obvious and profound question about Mark Trail. “How did he stay alive?” touched on matters both biological and philosophical; today’s “Is he a wild-life man?” gets right to the paradox at the heart of this strip. Mark is clean-cut, straight-arrow, not a hair out of place; yet he is more in tune with the natural world than he is with the experiences of those of us living in so-called “civilization.” Is he “man,” or is he “wild-life”? How does he reconcile these two different parts of his essence? We should all offer thanks to our yellow-shirted philosopher of the swamp, before he’s punched into submission.

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Pluggers, 10/14/09

Oh my goodness, it’s lucky for all of us that pluggers are honest, simple folk who don’t want to make a fuss and certainly don’t go out and “protest injustice” like some kind of God-damned hippie, because otherwise this news would cause every small-to-midsized town in Real America to go up in flames, consumed by riots that make the 1999 Seattle WTO protests look like a garden party. In fact, our spokesdog looks distinctly nervous, as if he’s going to read this communique as quickly as possible and then flee back inside Pluggers HQ so that he won’t be pelted by vegetables. Use the devil’s e-mail? What do you take us for, communists?

Ha ha, I kid! It’s well known that an elite segment of the plugger population has mastered 20th-century technology; now it appears we’ll be getting entries exclusively from these folks until this whole Post Office to-do is worked out. It will be an interesting anthropological study to see if we can detect any difference in the content of the submissions. For instance, will there be fewer cartoons about the difficulties of picking up AM radio broadcasts and more about how none of these newfangled Websites seem to work with Netscape Navigator 4?

(By the way, if the post office where your P.O. Box is closes down, can’t they just forward your mail to your new P.O. Box? Am … am I missing something?)

Mark Trail, 10/14/09

Hey, Sideburned Poacher Dude, I know it’s literally impossible for any character in Mark Trail to refrain from verbalizing his every thought, and I know it’s pretty shocking to see someone who you did an extremely half-assed job of killing still alive, but there’s no need to shout, OK? Mark and Bob are close enough to see your word balloons emerging from the bushes! It’s like you want to get punched in the face!

“HOW DID HE STAY ALIVE?” is now my new go-to exclamation of surprise at the unexpected appearance of my enemies, by the way. “God, look at him … breathing … digesting … refusing to die … how does he do it?”

Curtis, 10/14/09

You know, I give Curtis a lot of crap for being almost unbearably corny — as it has for the last two weeks, say, as Curtis’s dad has complained about someone stealing his delicious tuna-fish sandwich every day from the work fridge, and Curtis has plotted vengeance against those who would harm the Wilkins clan, stealthily replacing today’s sandwich with one made out of cat food. But by God, this strip has some craft. I have to admire the three panels of Curtis’s runaway panic manifesting itself physically — pupils dilating, sweatballs flying, and his finally his lunch attempting to escape his gullet with a mighty BLORK! as he desperately clutches his throat to prevent vomit from staining his beloved red sweatshirt. It made me laugh, even if nothing about the actual plot did.

Blondie, 10/14/09

Ha ha! It’s funny because Alexander’s “girlfriend” is a prostitute!

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Mark Trail, 10/5/09

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Mark Trail’s clan is part of a network of isolated, hard-working, rural-cabin-based families who don’t get many visitors. Our reluctant poachers actually have more than a passing similarity to his old friends who own Sneaky, except instead of harboring sinister raccoons they just have a cat — a heavily sedated or dead cat, if the limp, compliant way it’s just letting Cindy tote it about is any indication. Anyway, one wonders how they all stay in touch. They could swap rustic livin’ tips on the Internet, or at least they could if any of their rustic shacks were actually connected to municipal electric or phone lines.

There’s something distinctly unsettling about Mark’s quick transition from “Rusty has been complaining about my cooking” to “You’re a beautiful young lady, Cindy!” The best case scenario is that Mark is going to set her to rustling up some grub for his young ward, both as a way to get her accustomed to her womanly duties and to see if she’d make a suitable mate for the lad once they both reach the traditional Lost Forest marital age of 13. But more likely, part of the purpose of this camping trip is to teach Rusty that sometimes when you’re very hungry, you need to eat things that you wouldn’t eat otherwise, and Nature’s Way is to start with the smallest and most feeble. (You’ll notice that we haven’t seen Sassy in a while.)

Dennis the Menace, 10/5/09

Today’s Dennis the Menace offers an amusing set of metaphorical nesting Russian dolls when it comes to absolute and relative chronology. Henry Mitchell is the father of a child who, I’ve always assumed, is in the 6-8-year-old range; obviously there’s an extremely wide range of ages that Henry himself could be based on that, but if pressed, I would place him somewhere between 35 and 45, and probably at the lower end of that scale. So, yes, he’s safely in the generation that spawned the whole “cartoons for grownups” phenomenon, which really took off with the monster success of the Simpsons twenty years ago. Which in turn of course means that Dennis could not possibly remember a time when cartoons were, in fact, for kids.

And yet, Henry goes about his day wearing black pants and a white shirt and a bow tie most of the time, which marks him out as a Stereotypical ’50s Dad, which has him being born in, I dunno, 1920 or so. This makes him about 90 years old, or means that he’s watching the 1955 version of Aqua Teen Hunger Force or Family Guy or whatever (and note that one of the cartoon characters is himself sporting Henry’s trademark outfit) on the DuMont Network.

Apartment 3-G, 10/5/09

Make fun of Dr. P (side note: my new nickname for the Professor is “Dr. P”) all you want, but before I met my wonderful and charming wife, I had a certain attraction to women who were mean, bad, and/or crazy (see also my devotion to Margo Magee), so I can sort of see where he’s coming from here. Pill-addled? Possibly suicidal? Hinting at a troubled, mysterious past? Shouting into the phone at someone who is probably supposed to be bringing her more drugs? Sign me up!

Pluggers, 10/5/09

You know, this cartoon would be a lot less confusing if the sarcastic postal clerk weren’t himself capable of flight. “Sorry, we don’t deliver via carrier pigeon anymore. I mean, I’m a carrier pigeon myself, but … you know, union rules. Now they’ve got me behind this desk, and let me tell you, it’s a drag.”