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Apartment 3-G, 9/18/06

OK, look at the swivel lines in panel three, and compare to Margo’s head position in panel two. Either Margo briefly looked away from Lu Ann, then swung her head back to look at her in a classic doubletake that I feel very cheated for being denied (maybe she indignantly sprayed her coffee across the room at the same time?) or her head has spun completely around on its axis, Exorcist-style. Hell hath no fury like a Hat Man lover scorned!

Also: a stripey purple V-neck under a mauve vest is “dressing up” now? I sure didn’t get that memo.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 9/18/06

I love the fact that the patented TDIET-style outrage is being wielded entirely on the side of the couple who shuns personal interaction in favor of the warm, numbing glow of the television set. “Didjaevernotice: People invite you over to spend some quality time with ya … and insist on talking to you while the TV is on! Wha-a-a-a?”

Popeye, 9/18/06

I know I don’t talk about Popeye very much, but you should be kept appraised of the fact that it’s completely demented. There’s been this long, meandering “generation gap” storyline involving Sweetpea insisting that adults don’t understand him (don’t trust anyone over seven, man!), which, other than the fact that Sweetpea can apparently talk, didn’t faze me too much. But then he ran away from home, and Popeye was disconsolate, and Olive Oyl made a fake Sweetpea doll too fool Popeye and it worked. Today’s deranged strip pretty much speaks for itself in terms of how far around the bend this feature has gone, sort of the way a crazy homeless guy who’s constantly raving about OJ and the CIA and killer monkeys speaks for himself.

Hi and Lois, 9/18/06

My wife says that the joke here is that the baby doesn’t understand irony, but I don’t think that’s possible, because Hi and Lois doesn’t understand irony either.

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Popeye, 6/4/06

So as I have mentioned, I’ve been reading Popeye lately. The daily comic is pretty bizarre, though admittedly no more bizarre than any other iteration of the whole Popeye mythos, if you think about it. Anyway, one of the things in the Popeye comic that’s new to me is the presence of Popeye’s parents. Popeye’s father (or “Pappy”) is blatantly just Popeye with a beard; more disturbing is the fact that Popeye’s mother is blatantly just Popeye in drag. And not very convincing drag at that. Don’t their corncob pipes knock into each other when they make out?

Mark Trail, 6/4/06

We all knew that last Sunday’s Mark Trail totally awesome crab installment would be hard to live up to, but it looks like everybody’s favorite naturalist didn’t even bother trying, serving up an extra-lame installment of licorice, for Christ’s sake. Not even the vague possibility that Mark might accidentally spook the bear in the bottom left panel and get mauled perks this thing up. However, faithful reader Dave Horlick writes to point out the hilarious message at bottom right: “More information on licorice can be found on the Internet”. You know, the Internet. In general. Somewhere. Personally, I think messages like this should appear on all comics. (Apartment 3-G: “More information on proper use of quotation marks can be found on the Internet.” The Phantom: “More information on fetish gear can be found on the Internet.”)

After a few minutes of staring at this message in dumb fascination, though, I realized something very important about it: unlike the rest of the text in this comic, it’s not in Jack Elrod’s handwriting. I think it’s pretty clear that ol’ Jack orignally wrote something there that the syndicate didn’t want you to see. My theory is that the text box contained instructions on using licorice to get high. Or maybe a shout-out to Elrod’s homies in prison.

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Dick Tracy, 2/16/06

Popeye, 2/16/06

I recently made the drunken boast that I would start reading a slew of new comics, and today I’ve finally made good on that promise. I expected that it would take me a few days or weeks to get into the swing of things, but even on this first flush I am stunned by Popeye and Dick Tracy, to wit: Popeye and Dick Tracy still exist? Holy crap. I would not be more surprised if I found out that some kind of bastardized Krazy Kat was being churned out by George Herriman’s great-nephew and appearing in a few suburban dailies.

Both of these strips jumped out at me because they seem to be going out of their way to say “Look! We were written just last week, certainly not during the Harding administration! Really!” Dick Tracy, for instance, features an quite lovely picture of one of those new-fangled eco-friendly wind turbines, in flames and tumbling to the ground. Is this strip now focused on the battle for freedom against American’s addiction to oil? The presence of the “evil Oily” would certainly seem to point in that direction. Perhaps we’ll see the Halliburton board of directors armed with Tommy Guns in a future installment.

Popeye, on the other hand, seems to have fallen into a trap I noted earlier: making jokes about technology that nobody involved in the strip actually has a grasp on. Does Olive Oil’s mangled sentence in panel one mean that she’s putting her picture on a Web dating site? Olive Oil? Web dating site? That’s a very disturbing thought to try to get my head around, so disturbing that I’m going to stop … right now. Still, I like the wordless third panel: Olive stalking off hunched over, knuckles dragging gorilla-style, fuming furiously, while a clueless, black-eyed Wimpy can only wordlessly wonder “?” (Twice!)