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Jumble, 8/6/10

Well, the climax of the Jumble’s three-day slide into degradation and sleaze is frankly a little anticlimactic. A couple of bluehairs scandalized by porn? Enh. I’d prefer a couple of bluehairs discussing their favorite smut stars, myself. Still, points for rendering the lascivious leer on the gentleman in the poster so evocatively in the small space allotted.

Shoe, 8/6/10

It saddens me sometimes when I discover that I have an emotional connection to minor characters in even the lamest strips I cover. For instance, that bird-man on the left is longtime strip feature Senator Batson D. Belfrey! He should only be used to make toothless jokes about politics, or (occasionally) toothless jokes about alcoholism and/or man-sluttery. It irks me to find him here setting up a Generic Shoe Gag, when there are dozens of interchangeable clip-art Generic Shoe Birds that could be used for this purpose. For shame, Shoe creative team, for shame!

Luann, 8/6/10

You know, this is the sort of strip that gets me emails like “OMG Luann today OMG!” All I can say is: are Brad and Toni still not smelling each other, or at least doing so off-screen? Then everything is just fine with me, thanks. The loving depiction of Knute’s sexy shoulder blades is just icing on the cake.

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Archie, 7/23/10

You know, I actually feel kind of bad for Archie, here; his facial expression in the third panel, though partly masked by terrifying clown makeup, really is sort of heartbreaking. Archie’s a nice guy! He only wants the best for Veronica, at least when he doesn’t want the best for Betty! Why won’t Mr. Lodge love him, or at least treat him with grudging affection? With all the mean things Mr. Lodge has said to Archie’s face, you’d think there wouldn’t be anything he could say behind his back that would make Archie so upset, but there he is, looking like the saddest clown in Riverdale.

Archie, you don’t want this heartless plutocrat’s love! Look, he’s currently smugly reading his own autobiography, Me! Not that he wrote it himself, mind you; he passed that duty off to one of his minions, which is why the author photo is actually of the money he used to pay the ghostwriter.

Shoe, 7/23/10

The Inappropriate Goggle Eyes of Horror are one of my most favorite visual tics in Shoe; these occur when a Shoe character encounters a typical lame Shoe punchline and reacts with a facial expression more appropriate for someone who just heard news about a fresh round of genocide. It’s common enough that it’s actually sort of remarkable when you don’t see it, as you don’t here. What is the distinction between punchlines that elicit goggle-eyed horror and those that do not? They all seem equally tepid. Is Shoe’s desperate alcoholism just such a well-known part of his personality that nobody bothers to react to it? Or is the Perfesser even more numb to life’s horror than usual today?

Crock, 7/23/10

Well, I guess this week’s evidence is that Crock is just going to hurl headfirst into horror and nightmare. If they’re going to go that route, I wish they’d do a little fact-checking. For instance, generally speaking germs are used in germ warfare rather than chemical warfare.

Mary Worth, 7/23/10

Oh, God, please let the Oedipal Complex be one of the Freudian theories Mary disputes. “Tell me about your mother. She and I are probably about the same age. Do I resemble her … physically?”

To avoid having this conversation, Dr. Mike has clearly chosen suicide. In panel one, his face twists in pain as he plunges that pencil he was playing with into his gut; in panel two, his expression goes slack as he finally finds peace.

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Herb and Jamaal, 6/28/10

Naïve idealist that I am, when I saw this cartoon I thought that Herb and Jamaal had finally returned to the “Herb’s barber is wracked with anxiety” plotline it had launched a year and half ago. But upon consulting my archives, I discovered that it “returned” to the plot only in the sense of just rerunning the strip. I suppose that certain avant-garde critics might consider a sort of eternal narrative repetition to be advancing a plotline in a sense, if the core message of that plotline is that all human existence is a series of sorrows that will recur over and over again.

Mary Worth, 6/28/10

A blind date in which one of the parties locks a death-grip onto the upper arm of the other immediately upon the first in-person meeting is either an awesome blind date or a terrifying blind date, depending on your predilections. Also, the way Jenna and Mike are pointing their heads in random not-at-each-other directions in panel two might seem to indicate that the phrase “blind date” should in this case be taken literally.

Judge Parker, 6/28/10

“Thank God you’re back in the good old US of A, Ned, home of the best burgers in the world! Excuse me a moment while I drench this one with enough tomato-flavored corn syrup to make it edible.”

Shoe, 6/28/10

Ha ha, it’s funny because his wife’s soul is being tormented with fire, in hell, because of her sins!