Post Content

Beetle Bailey, 7/25/07

All day, people have been commenting in varying degrees of arousal about the hot, hot Miss Buxley action in today’s Beetle Bailey. All I can say is: why? The Walker oeurvre is one of the funny pages’ more stylized, and there are few less detailed or realistic looking “sexy” women in comics than General Halftrack’s oft-harassed secretary. Seriously, if this was all it took to get me worked up, I’d just draw a stick figure and slap some boobs on it and WHAM! Instant porn. Even the theoretically sexy frilly unmentionables are terribly botched, with Buxley’s brassiere seemingly wrapped around her robe, implying that either that the artist has little grasp of spatial relations and/or undergarment topography, or that she’s dressing quickly because she’s aware of the series of hidden cameras the general has stashed all over her apartment and wired up to the phone somehow.

The less said about whatever’s in her robe pocket, the better. Is it a hot glue gun? Or something more untoward There’s something about its crap-brown color that unsettles me.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/25/07

Now, Heather Avery — that’s a cartoon character whose sex appeal I can endorse. I don’t even care about those little droopy devil horn things on the front of her head, which indicate that she’s probably a succubus in addition to being a gold-digging nanny and stock-manipulating white-collar co-conspirator.

This whole encounter is more than a little porntastic. “Hugh … what is it? I’m getting dressed — and since I’m already in the process of removing my robe, surely it’s unrealistic to expect me to close it again now that it’s half-way open, since I’ll just be taking it off completely in a few minutes. Can’t it wait? The robe-closing, I mean.” Of course, since there’s no blood relation between the two of them and they’ve only met the previous day, there’s nothing untoward or incestuous about the prospect of them falling into each other’s arms for comfort in the wake of their great loss — or at least there wouldn’t be if they didn’t essentially look exactly alike. Even Von and Vera, Mary Worth’s creepy Flowers in the Attic pair, didn’t share this much of a resemblance. Of course, this has less bearing on any potential Heather-Hugh match-up and much more bearing on Milton’s now-revealed-to-be-deeply-disturbing attraction to Heather.

Dennis the Menace, 7/25/07

Lucky for Ruff the Mitchell’s floor is covered with a healthy layer of rotting organic matter! Of course, we can’t blame Alice for the unhygienic state of the house: Henry forces her to wear those killer stilettos at all times, so she can barely walk; I don’t know how you expect her to operate a vacuum cleaner.

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, 7/14/07

“I found the legendary Marg-Po idol in a monastery high in the mountains of Qinghai province, just like the old man at the museum said. The monks said that its mystical power was the only thing that could defeat Margo. It seems crazy, but I think it’s our only chance.”

Mary Worth, 7/14/07

Welcome to phone sex, Mary Worth-style. That means it’ll take a year and a half, will take place at impossible angles on hideously colored sheets, and everyone will lose interest about a quarter of the way into it.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/14/07

Man, I could just watch hungover Hugh stand absolutely still and blink very gingerly all day. It’s kind of hypnotic. The next three weeks of this strip could just be Hugh blinking as the storyline is advanced by word bubbles coming from off-panel. They could call it The Angriest Hungover Brit in the World.

Shoe, 7/14/07

Possibly the most depressing Shoe ever. I think they’re finally figuring out that if they’re going to have Roz responding to punchlines with huge-eyed horror, they need to make those punchlines truly horrifying.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 7/14/07

Wow, Hekkie held one set of attitudes as a child, but decades later as an adult holds a different set of attitudes entirely on a number of subjects!

That … that is something they’ll do every time, actually.

Boring technical update: Apologies to everyone whose comments were eaten by the new spam filter over the past few days. I know it’s really frustrating, but believe me when I say it’s also been really frustrating for me to try to figure out how and why it’s happening and how to fix it. I switched back the other filter program; hopefully it won’t cause the site to grind to a halt again or start eating comments like it was doing last week. (For those of you who are computer nerds: I had switched from Spam Karma 2 to Akismet and now back to SK2. If you have any words of advice, I will appreciate them.)

On thing that will definitely increase your chances of getting caught in any kind of spam filter is adding a bunch of links to your post. So, I’d advise you not to do that.