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Archive: Shoe

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What’s grosser than poop jokes? Marvin dares to find out

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Shoe, 10/28/10

No, my friend, your eyes do not fail you! That is a genuine URL medallion floating above Shoe’s head in panel two of Shoe, directing you to treetopstattler.com! One would assume that it was intended to be understood as having been affixed to the wall of the newsroom of the Treetops Tattler, the in-Shoe-universe newspaper for which most of the main characters toil, except that I think we’re also meant to understand that the Tattler newsroom is not a room as such but rather a bunch of office furniture balanced precariously on tree limbs, and thus does not actually have walls. Maybe the URL medallion is suspended from the branches that are obscured by Shoe’s word balloon? Anyway, treettopstattler.com just redirects you to the main Shoe site, which, in addition to Shoe strips, also features some fake Treetops Tattler news items that are mildly amusing. I mainly just want to praise the strip for recognizing that this “Internet” thing exists and perhaps should be taken advantage of in some way, which is an attitude largely foreign to the newspaper comics world.

In other word, the entire Tatter staff appears to have fallen asleep and, if I’m understanding the implication of Shoe’s statement, soiled themselves.

Marvin, 10/28/10

Ha ha, the erotic bond that once linked Marvin and his mother is now broken, maybe because he now recognizes how freakishly out of proportion her head is to her body, or maybe because HE IS A BABY AND SHE IS HIS MOTHER OH MY GOD THIS IS MONSTROUS.

Apartment 3-G, 10/28/10

“We both think you’re a boring lame-o!”

I find it interesting that both Tommie and Lu Ann are supposed to have distant and uninterested parents. This explains why both of them are drawn to Margo — both because she offers the combination of vague affection and soul-scraping disdain that they have come to associate with parental love, and because her own parental situation (lying, philandering dad; histrionic ethnic stereotype mom; pill-crazed, gun-toting stepmom) reminds them that, you know, you could do a lot worse than “distant and uninterested.”

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The rich get richer, the deer get kicked

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Mark Trail, 10/21/10

Some of my readers rushed to declare Friday’s Mark Trail, in which our hero leaps over a barbed-wire-topped fence to knock a rifle out of a senator’s hands, to be the greatest Mark Trail ever. Well, I hope you all feel a little sheepish now that you’ve seen today’s strip, a glorious single-panel tableau in which Future Governor Frank kicks a fawn in the butt while his stepdaughter, Mark, and the man whose political patronage he’s been so desperately seeking all look on in horror. We of course can’t declare this strip the best of all time — for, in a world that has brought forth such wondrousness, how can we put limits on the potential joys of the future? — but it sure is pretty great.

Shoe, 10/21/10

Something doesn’t seem right here: I thought that, in the Shoe world, Roz serves coffee and comfort food from a diner counter on a tree branch, whereas booze is dished out in smoky bars that do not appear to be tree-based structures. But this is mere nitpickery, I know! I should just enjoy the hilarious joke here, about how the strip’s main characters use their crippling alcoholism as an excuse for being cheapskates.

Luann, 10/21/10

So, yeah, I haven’t really been able to bring myself to comment on the “Brad and the gang deal with the serious problems of stalking and domestic violence with Three’s Company-worthy hijinks” plotline over the past few weeks. But then I got to today and saw Brad and TJ talking about ladies underwear, and I thought to myself, “No way in hell am I suffering through this alone.” SO HERE IT IS! LOOK AT IT! LOOK AT THEM TALKING ABOUT PANTIES!

Judge Parker, 10/21/10

Ha ha, it wouldn’t be a Judge Parker story if one of the already wealthy principals didn’t become even richer at the end of it. Sam plays golf with a guy for 10 minutes and sees him get killed? Boom! A $100,000 advance check for Judge Parker! Sam violates legal ethics willy-nilly to sort of half-assedly solve a mystery? Wham! A cool hundred large for him too! Now the hour or so he spent helping Jules set up an Excel spreadsheet will net him a third of what will no doubt turn out to be an insanely lucrative business. It’s a good thing his house is so big, because he’s going to need someplace to put his huge piles of stupid money.

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Sympathy for the Ziggy

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Ziggy, 9/15/10

Ziggy staring forlornly at the viewer and admitting that nobody likes or respects him, using language that was vaguely funny when deployed by Rodney Dangerfield 25 years ago, is nothing out of the ordinary. But I admit that my interest is piqued by the sour-looking man in the hat strolling behind our hapless misery-gnome. Was it an encounter with this sneering Babbitt that left Ziggy so forlorn? Did the bourgeois conformist glare at our hero and sneer “Put some pants on, freak,” before stalking off? Perhaps Ziggy’s sense of persecution has some basis in external reality after all.

Shoe, 9/15/10

Shoe seems to have abandoned his attempt to woo an uptight lady bird with Farah Fawcett hair and moved on to someone more his style: a busty, heavy-lidded fellow drunkard wearing something low-cut who likes to complain about things. “Dogs, am I right? Seriously, who do we have to blow to get some God-damned booze around here?”

Gil Thorp, 9/15/10

Oh, man, a whole year’s worth of boring and incomprehensible Gil Thorps is worth it if they’re necessary to frame the strip’s annual descent into fiery madness. This year’s ritual of cleansing flame features the newly elected co-captains placating the crazed torch-wielding mob by pledging to beat to death any Milford player who fails to adequately entertain the townsfolk.

Mary Worth, 9/15/10

“After all, the most important thing about my father is how he affected me, and since I cared about him less as a human being and more in terms of his failures to live up to some abstract ideal, once we made peace his continued presence in my life was frankly superfluous. His death was really more convenient than anything else. Am I right in assuming that this sensitive talk about my feelings is finishing the job of preparing you for sex with me that was started by the russet-colored meal I purchased for you and my orange suit/black shirt/wispy chest hair combo? I’ll bet I’m right! I’m a trained mental health practitioner!”