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Crock 6/5/07

I never thought I’d see the day when I’d say something nice about the art in Crock, but, well, when you get to 1,100+ posts on your damn comics blog, you end up in places you could never have imagined.

I kind of like the empty thought balloon over Grossie’s head in the second panel. (Yes, her name really is “Grossie,” and yes, she’s married to “Maggot.”) The execution is sub-par, but conceptually, I like it as an indicator that the thought balloonist is thinking something important for the narrative, but not something that you the reader is allowed to be privy to just yet. However, in this panel I am distracted from my brief feeling of artistic appreciation by the horror show that is Grossie’s mouth. It’s bad enough that it’s usually depicted as an black lipsticked bow that floats disconcertingly on the outside of her niqab; here it yawns open hideously, with the right corner stretching halfway down her chest to create an image out of a Dali-esque nightmare.

Hmm, so I guess I ended up not being very nice here after all.

Mark Trail, 6/5/07

Sure, we all love it when Mark Trail punches the fake beard off some ne’er-do-well, or when a badger the size of an Abrams tank appears with a word balloon coming out of its rectum, but I think we need to appreciate the lower-key installments of this strip as well. Today’s episode gives any Trailhead so many reasons to keep coming back. There’s Buzzard’s dialog, which ranges from the impossibly stilted (“I think this is the place I should be”) to the frankly ungrammatical (“It can’t be good, but as long as they pay me!”), and Buzzard’s tiny, Ted Forth-like hands, which seem so at odds with his bulky body (which is just poured into those overalls, by the way). Then in panel three, we’ve got Sam Hill, with her sexy eye makeup and sexy bangs and sexy cravat, practically throwing herself at poor, oblivious Mark as they head over to OPERATIONS WEATHER. Bliss, I tell you, pure bliss.

Shoe, 5/6/07

I’m kind of surprised the newspaper is bothering to review Roz’s diner. If I’m remembering correctly (and I might not be — despite appearances, I do try to minimize the time I spend thinking about Shoe), Roz’s is the only place you ever see the characters in this strip eating outside of their homes, and thus might be the only restaurant in Treetops. The review should just read “Roz’s: If you give them money, they will prepare food for you to eat.”

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Shoe, 5/23/07

There’s something I find deeply unsettling about the lovingly rendered paper coffee cups, complete with sippy lids and little cardboard sleeves, that Roz and her one-off-punchline-providing friend are drinking out of. Maybe it’s because Roz herself is the proprietor of an anachronistic diner in which coffee comes in two varieties — regular and decaf — and is decanted out of a clear glass coffeepot into porcelain mugs, and thus to see her drinking her venti half-caf americcino with steamed milk or whatever seems like a vision of treason. Maybe it’s because everything in this whole elaborate Starbucks-esque setting, with the standard-issue fixings bar in the background and round tables and such, is in fact, like everything else in Shoe, precariously perched on a tree limb, as the foliage in the background indicates.

Unfortunately, the fact that one-off-punchline-providing friend can describe with heavy-lidded indifference the gazes of those who yearn to slice her up and remake her to match their own vision does not, in fact, unsettle me. It’s far from the worst that can happen to you in Shoe. At least nobody is proposing to fry and eat her.

Archie, 5/23/07

See, here’s how you would do this strip: You have Mr. Flutesnoot fiddling around with Bunsen burners and test tubes and Erlenmeyer flasks and all sorts of science-y whatnots, and, because he’s a chemistry teacher, you assume that he’s conducting some kind of experiment, but — surprise! — he’s just making coffee! Ha ha, ’cause see, you can do it using a lot of the same equipment!

Or you could have Flutesnoot making coffee with an ordinary coffee-maker, and it would only serve as evidence that Mr. Weatherbee, who no doubt has an assistant to make his coffee for him, is an out-of-touch buffoon. Ha! Buffoon!

Or you could, you know, have all the relevant action obscured by the body of one your characters. Then it won’t make any damn sense at all. Be sure to lavish plenty of attention on the wrinkles around the armpits, though.

9 Chickweed Lane, 5/23/07

OK, so this has quickly gone back from “interesting” to “ever so tiresome,” but I’m glad somebody has finally noted that the ladies of 9 Chickweed Lane, sexy as they may be from the neck down, are a bunch of receding-chinned jawless freaks with monkey faces. If that somebody has to be a unicorn magically dropped into New York, then so be it. It needed to be said.

Mark Trail, 5/23/07

Hey, look, everyone! It’s “Buzzard”! Or, as I like to call him, “Overalled No-Neck Hillbilly Stereotype Stock Character #2”! You might remember ON-NHSSC#2 as the patriarch of the horrifying clan of backwoods petnappers from the winter of 2005-06. He’s wearing a hat now, and his stubble has disappeared, but it’s pretty obviously the same guy. The latter change is probably attributable to his last tangle with Mark, who as we all know can remove facial hair with the raw power of his wrath.

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Crankshaft, 5/21/07

Since a Crankshaft is a Funky Winkerbean sister strip, talk of death ought to make any character within earshot worry that they’re next in line for a demise that is both informative (to the reader) and agonizing (to the character … and, OK, also to the reader). The hilarious switcharoo in the final panel shows that the ’Shaft has not in fact worn his omnipresent baseball cap to yet another funeral, but is merely continuing his reign of terror over the cowed ladies of the Garden Club. To be honest I’ve never really understood his svengali-like hold over these innocent horticulture enthusiasts; there has to be some sort of cult-like angle to it. I wouldn’t be surprised if his next Garden Club speech starts very similarly to the one we see here, but ends instead at a table set with lots of little Dixie cups full of Kool-Aid.

Blondie, 5/21/07

Dagwood Bumstead — overeater, oversleeper, underachiever, tool moocher, intellectual soul mate to middle-schooler Elmo — has never been particularly troubled by shame. Thus his sudden look of mingled guilt and confusion in the final panel of this strip must indicate that his dream — with its “cherries the size of bowling balls” — got very, very weird indeed. Good taste, and our own peace of mind, must preclude us from contemplating the matter further.

Hi and Lois, 5/21/07

I’d blame this on another wacky coloring sweatshop mix-up, but the rug looks like this in black and white, too. There are only two reasons to have an inky black wall-to-wall carpet: to remind you of the dark abyss of Death that will one day open up and swallow your soul (and the Flagstons don’t seem like the type) or to absorb any and all liquids you might care to spill onto it without show visible stains. There’s a reason that they leave Trixie sitting in front of that window for 20 hours a day.

Mark Trail, 5/21/07

Oh, Mark, Mark, Mark. You’re so eager to impress your chesty little friend that you’ve blown the cover off of your journalistic M.O. “Take a boring story from three years ago that nobody remembers, replace a few paragraphs with updated information, and … ka-CHING! Another fat paycheck, plus a free trip away from my Stepford Wife and freaky gap-toothed big-headed not-son!”

I’m pretty sure that panel two offers the first look at a dangling mouse corpse with its head half-masticated to ever appear in the comics pages.