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Get Fuzzy, 5/22/06

This strip illustrates both why I love Get Fuzzy and why it’s hard to explain to those who don’t love Get Fuzzy why I love Get Fuzzy. The punchline is a pun, and like even the best of its ilk, is deeply groanworthy. But Bucky’s pun-setup dialogue in panel two is just hilarious to me. I love the rhythm of the sentence: “Lemme tell ya, Pinky, if you don’t have a comfy place to sit, you can just walk right on by the ol’ Russian Lit section.” But if it doesn’t strike you as funny, then there’s no way to make you love it, I suppose.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/22/06

“Yeah, it’s June alright … she’s attached a gadget to my genitals that starts beeping whenever I’m sexually attracted to another man. Damn this stifling heterosexual facade!”

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Gasoline Alley, 5/19/06

If you weren’t paying attention (and you almost certainly weren’t), Gasoline Alley had a halfway exciting plotline going on a few months ago: Sheezix and Gertie were in a dark, scary forest, tangling with what they thought was an escaped psycho killer.

Then the supposed psycho killer turned out to be a cop, who was looking for the real psycho killer. Then he noticed that Sheezix’s driver’s license had expired, so Sheezix had to hire Gasoline Alley’s two horsedrawn hillbillies to tow his car home. Then he had to go get his driver’s license renewed, which meant that he had to get info from the Social Security Administration, which meant…

Well, what it really meant was that a storyline that contained suspense and action and the threat of violence was transformed by degrees into a storyline that involved an old man doing battle with surly government bureaucrats trying to get his paperwork in order.

Which brings up a question: Could this storyline be made even more boring? “More boring that the DMV?” you ask. “That’s a tall order!” Well, perhaps. But I’ve got some ideas!

• On his way out of the DMV, Sheezix has his pocket picked. Now he has to go through all the stuff he just went through to get his paperwork in order again, plus he has to go down to the police station to file a report with a bored desk jockey.
• On the street, Sheezix bumps into an old friend. “Hey, Sheezix, what’ve you been up to?” he asks. Sheezix proceeds to tell him, in great detail.
• Sheezix gets home to find that his wife is having the house repainted. “Don’t touch any of the walls until the paint dries!” she says. He sits down to watch and wait.
• Sheezix dies. His body is embalmed, placed into a coffin, and buried in the soil. Over the course of years, the wood of the coffin rots, and his corpse decays to its organic components, nurturing the soil. Some four billion years later, the Earth’s sun becomes a red giant, and the Earth is destroyed.

Also, in Rex Morgan, M.D., we learned that Dr. Troy likes clown art:

I don’t know what the hell this means, but it can’t possibly be good.

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Ah, a good trip up to the Big Apple this weekend! Among other momentous events, the dynamic teams behind the Comics Curmudgeon and Drink At Work finally met in the flesh. See the photos at the Drink At Work photo blog.

Mrs. C. and I also met up live and in person with Wendy McClure, responsible for that site making fun of those hilariously horrible 1970s recipe cards that you’ve probably seen, which is now available in expanded book form.

At no point in the weekend did a bit of Denglish result in anybody suddenly vibrating violently and emitting a creepy, mechanical laugh like an old-timey boardwalk mechanical fortune teller in some forgettable ’80s body-swapping comedy.

More Monday comics to come in a bit, but I wanted to point out some of Sunday’s more amorous features:

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/14/06

Rex and June have joined Michael and Deanna in the “our sick kid’s asleep, let’s screw” club.

Mark Trail, 5/14/06

Mark Trail, meanwhile, gets his sick thrills from watching birds go at it. Does this so-called “naturalist” have no shame?