The Comics Curmudgeon

Main Menu

Social Media

Archive: Marvin

Comments are closed

Noxious Saturday

Post Content

Marvin, 11/11/17

Welp, just when I think Marvin can’t veer any further past “ha ha, it’s funny when babies make poopy” into straight-up scat fetishism, we get today’s strip. See, it’s funny because Marvin eats food, just straight up masticates and swallows it, and then his digestive system does its thing, leaching out all the nutrients and leaving behind a disgusting slurry of solid waste, which he extrudes out his anus — and, because he isn’t potty trained, all this feces just goes into his diaper, where he sits in it, until one of his parents decides to change him. It’s the circle of life! This is the punchline of a joke that runs in literal newspapers across the country.

Blondie, 11/11/17

On the other hand, today’s Blondie contains a minor miracle: a panel in which an old person’s mistaken idea of what a younger person might look like says “no prob” that somehow doesn’t lead to the protagonist seething with incandescent rage about the RUDENESS and CASUAL MANNER of the KIDS TODAY

Comments are closed

Monday’s for the dogs

Post Content

Slylock Fox, 11/6/17

I’m pretty sure this is the first ever case of Slylock adjudicating a human-on-human crime? Admittedly, he’s mostly intervening to stop a fellow canid from being falsely accused, because otherwise he’d probably be happy to let the hairless two-legs finish each other off in whatever walled ghettos the remnants our once-proud species have been forced to live in. Also, if you’re like me your first though on reading the solution was “Wait a minute, can foxes see red?” According to this website with some extremely 1999-era web design, they can’t, which totally makes sense in context here. “Wait, red jellybeans? I don’t even know what that means. Smitty, you’re under arrest.”

Marvin, 11/6/17

If you’re going to do a strip where sapient dogs and cats exist in a world pretty much like our own, you’re going to have to grapple with some narrative difficulties. For instance, the fact that cats have natural instincts to bury their waste that dogs don’t share has to be recast as cats being “allowed” to potty indoors in a way that dogs are not, despite the fact that they want to. After all, a dog that can think in complete sentences could figure out how to use a litter box, ha ha! Anyway, there are some ways around this difficulty, such as, just for example, not doing so many jokes that revolve around pissing and shitting, for the love of Christ, though I recognize that sadly that technique is unavailable to the Marvin creative team, who have to write poo poo and pee pee jokes constantly, possibly because they lost a bet or are under a curse.

Comments are closed

Cruel hump day

Post Content

Dennis the Menace, 10/25/17

There are no recurring adult characters in this strip other than George and Martha Wilson. Instead, we see an endless parade of one-off adult visitors to the Mitchell home, with the implication that Henry and Alice are desperately trying to normalize their lives by making friends more or less their own age, only for Dennis to alienate them by saying the darndest things — or, more often, repeating a darndest thing that one of his parents said behind their acquaintance’s back. If that’s starting to give you a picture of the real reason for the Mitchells’ stunted social life, consider today’s installment, where Alice, hungry to sup on human misery, has brought Dennis to some random new mother’s house, so he can make fun of her parenting skills just because her little kid does what little kids do. And sure, Dennis is kind of a dick about it, but whatever! He’s, what, five? Look at Alice in the background in the second panel, a subtle but cruel smile on her face. The menace doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Marvin, 10/25/17

Like many sassy cartoon characters, Marvin goes through life with a heavy lidded expression meant to convey detachment and ennui. In panel two, we learn what it takes to snap him into a state of alertness: the possibility of being prosecuted for war crimes.