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Panels from Apartment 3-G and One Big Happy, 10/14/04

Today we come back to our intermittent feature in which I talk about the cartoonist’s craft as if I know a damn thing about it. Mainly, I like the lines radiating off of the willful, dark-haired females in these two panels. Normally lines like these in the comics represent motion (or, in extreme cases, odor), but if that were true here, then these ladies would be vibrating like tuning forks with anxiety and/or manic energy. Actually, more than anything else, these remind me of the energy lines that shoot off of comic book heroes when they’re about to make use of some sort of extraordinary power. I guess when Ruthie starts emitting these waves, she’s about to unleash some supernaturally adorable malapropism. Meanwhile, Gabriella’s Gabriella-sense is no doubt triggered when Margo is about to get herself into some sort of trouble. It therefore is almost certainly going off all the time, which may explain why she always looks kind of constipated.

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One Big Happy, 9/19/04

One Big Happy is one of those strips that I can’t decide whether I like or not. Sometimes it’s really funny, generally when it depicts all too accurately adults pushed to the edge of their sanity by the irritating behavior of children. (One of these days the Playground Lady is going to snap, and it’ll be all over the 6 O’clock news, I tell ya.) This cartoon has some promise too, with the bizarre picture of the skating donkey, the very idea of an ice show version of Don Quixote for children, and (another of my favorites from the strip) one of Ruthie’s misplaced outraged rants. So therefore I’m very sad — no, let’s say disappointed — that the whole thing is a set-up for a Family Circus-style malapropism. You can get away with that sort of thing in a three-panel daily, but using an entire Sunday strip to lead into a pun as lame as this is just completely unacceptable.

I still think the donkey is funny, though. Ha ha, it’s a skating donkey! In a sombrero! And it’s really two people in a suit! Hoo boy.

By the way, going to the One Big Happy page at Comics.com gives a series of One Big Happy “classics” that are out of sync with what I get in my paper. Anyone know what the story is there?

This week’s alarming search terms: “blubberybastard” (from the Italian version of Google), the all-too-familiar “miss buxley nude” (from Yahoo!), and, most intriguingly, two separate searches from people trying to figure out what Snuffy Smith’s parents’ names are. I no more believe that there are two different people who independently want this information than I believe that the Family Circus Web server gets overwhelmed by traffic (which claim I encountered anew last night), but the referrer logs say that those searches came from two separate computers in two separate cities. Maybe there’s some kind of online scavenger hunt underway? Anyway, if they’re named anything other than “Maw” and “Paw,” I’ll eat my hat.