Post Content

Shoe and Get Fuzzy, 7/22/07

If you are a subscriber to the Baltimore Sun, you saw this precise constellation of quasipolitical comics when you opened your paper this morning. Both seem to be aimed at the same problem: making a relatively gentle joke about politics that isn’t actually political, and doesn’t result in dozens of angry letters to the editor. And, while usually I go on about just about everything at great length, the most important thing I can say here is that Get Fuzzy is funny, while Shoe isn’t. Shoe falls into the typical toothless trap of just saying “THE POLITICS AREN’T THEY ANNOYING?”, literally allowing the discussion to be replaced by meaningless placeholder syllables. Get Fuzzy works with established character traits — Bucky and Satchel’s party affiliations have been frequently noted, whereas I don’t believe Shoe and the Perfesser had political beliefs until they became necessary for this cartoon. Plus Get Fuzzy contains actual political jokes that are funny. I love the third-party punchline, but I love “Well, with the proper funding…” even more.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/22/07

“I can assure you, I am not without qualities! I have a certain height, for instance, as well as a certain breadth and depth! I occupy volume in space! I have a certain skin color, and wear clothing, and inhale air and breathe out carbon dioxide! I have quantities, too, if you’d care to hear about them!”

With his constant wavering between unbearable upper-class superciliousness and desperate, raw emotional need, I’m frankly shocked that Hugh has somehow managed to remain a bachelor to this point.

Marvin, 7/22/07

Marvin celebrated its 25th anniversary this past week with a series of painfully unfunny jokes about life in that long-lost age known as “1982.” (Dallas was on TV! Ronald Reagan was president! HA HA! STOP, YOU’RE KILLING ME!) Today, Marvin the baby appears on the set of the Tonight Show to exchange painfully unfunny jokes with Jay Leno. The fact that Jay Leno is, in fact, painfully unfunny in real life does lead one to wonder whether the lameness on display here is meant to be a brutally realistic exploration of what it would be like if a cartoon infant were on the Tonight Show. Frankly, I wish that they had carried on with the “life in 1982” conceit and done the interview with Johnny Carson, though presumably even after his death he has too much dignity to appear in Marvin.

Extremely creepy to me is the way that Jay Leno keeps his mouth shut throughout his unfunny dialog. The fact that Marvin keeps his own mouth shut and communicates with Jay (and, presumably, the viewers at home) telepathically via thought balloons for whatever reason doesn’t faze me at all, but seeing that lantern jaw firmly shut while the usual inane patter floats next to his head in a word balloon unsettles me a great deal. I do like the fact that Marvin’s bottle has been placed completely out of reach of his stubby arms, though.

Mary Worth, 7/22/07

I can totally understand why Dawn was so nervous to offer this revelation up to Drew. After all, it’s totally possible that the good doctor was only on going on this date with her so that he could synchronize his retrochronometer onto her current form and then go back in time five years to date her past her self — wouldn’t it be disappointing if he had gone through all that trouble only to return to the present in disgust? Thank God he’s only interested in dating the beautiful swan Dawn of the here and now. Look at the lovely visage in the final panel — the octogonal face, the bright orange roots. You can see why he wants to “get into the saddle” right away!

Slylock Fox, 7/22/07

OH COME ON, SLYLOCK! We’ve moved from ludicrous acts of deduction to petty attempts to come up with ways that that Cassandra might be committing crimes despite the absence of any evidence. “Do they both have ticket stubs? They might have just torn a single ticket in half! Did they pay for those tickets with cash? They might have stolen that cash from a bank, or an old lady, or an orphanage!” I think we all know why Slylock is harassing this poor woman while she’s trying to enjoy an innocent evening out at the movies with her bovine companion. I can’t wait for the inevitable strip where Slylock uses his infallible crime-fighting skills to avoid the process server with the restraining order.

Post Content

Apartment 3-G, 7/21/07

Love, Apartment 3-G-style: You’ve been waiting for months to make a move on your pretty, bland underling, so what better opportunity than her roommate’s possible brain damage? Just hand her the business card with your private number on it (the one that says “stud” instead of “brain doctor”), lean in close so she can get a good look at your bland, sandy good looks and your leer, and order her to call you by your first name. She may be leaning away from you at the exact angle that you’re leaning in, but you know she wants you.

Mary Worth, 7/21/07

Love, Mary Worth-style: You’ve never actually seen the Big Sleep, of course, but you’ve heard that in it 21-year-old Lauren Bacall seduced 47-year-old Humphrey Bogart in a restaurant with sexy horse talk, so try to babble artlessly about the noble equines in as blunt a matter as possible so that he knows you’re talking about screwing. Be sure to use inappropriate quotation marks (if we’re really talking about horses, doesn’t she long to actually, literally, get back into the saddle again?) that nobody can see, anyway. If that doesn’t work, hint darkly at your troubled past and push your hands together and pray for pity sex — since that’s the only kind of sex you feel that you deserve, what with the self-loathing.

Gil Thorp, 7/21/07

Love, Gil Thorp-style: Teach a one-legged guy how to box. I know, it’s not romantic, but its nothing short of a gesture of true love to the readers. It’s like Gil and Coach Kaz are in some kind of competition to see who can have the most bizarre summer. Hopefully it will all end in mid-August in some kind of transcendent hallucinatory explosion of joy at Thorpstock, with braids and prostheses and punching, lots of punching.

Pluggers, 7/21/07

Everyone, with the possible exception of Marie Antoinette, is a plugger.

Post Content

The Lockhorns, 7/20/07

Normally, when the Lockhorns turns away from its wonderfully refined set of canonical jokes and attempts to inject an (almost always lame) reference to some aspect of contemporary pop culture, I’m strongly opposed. However, today’s gag has so many layers of perversion that I have to admit to being kind of charmed by it. I suppose it’s possible that Leroy simply sees adoption by a wealthy movie star as his ticket out of his failed marriage and soul-crushing job, and an opportunity to live in a huge mansion without having to work for it; it is a long shot, as Loretta notes, but he does appear to be about three feet tall, so maybe there’s a chance that he’ll be mistaken for a impoverished Belarusan orphan boy whose freakish, hairless appearance is a result of his parents living downwind from Chernobyl.

But since Angelina Jolie is generally summoned up in conventional discourse as a totemic sex goddess, and Leroy is sporting that crinkly smile that he usually gets when drunkenly flirting with statuesque blondes twice his height at parties, one has to assume there’s something more going on here. Does Leroy believe that Jolie’s “adoptions” are mere covers for her sexual appetites? Does he harbor some sort of infantilism fetish? More disturbing that the potential answers to either of these questions is the affectless way Loretta conveys this information to her dumbfounded friend. She’s so used to the bottomless well of numbness that is her marriage that it never occurs to her to leave or anything; the prospect that Leroy might take off for better prospects seems to fill her with neither joy nor despair. It’s just another thing that might happen.

Anyway, no other comics came close to this level of depraviy today, but a few tried.

Funky Winkerbean, 7/20/07

Dear God, please let “bedbugs” not be code for some intimate part of the human anatomy.

Mary Worth, 7/20/07

In a desperate attempt to avoid thinking about this dialog as anything other than a transparent but incredibly awkward lead-in to a proposition, I’m focusing on Dawn’s fork. Her tiny, tiny fork. Maybe she’s on a new diet plan that works on the theory that if you eat with miniscule utensils, you won’t be able to shovel as much food in your mouth. Dawn’s determined to look good naked when she “tries something new.” Damn it, that didn’t work.

Marmaduke, 7/20/07

He’s not so much “listening” as “figuring out the most efficient way to kill and eat you.” But whatever makes you feel better, lady.