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Hi and Lois, 5/11/08

Yes, happy mother’s day, Lois! I’m glad to see that you’re spending it crushing any ambitions your girl-children might hold of having kids and having some other identity for themselves when they grow up. After all, everyone knows that nobody could possibly be a princess, rock star, poet, or CEO while also being a mother. Why, that’s pure madness, I tell you, pure madness!

I do have to give Lois points for having rock star fantasies that involve a gig at CBGB — and since she’s probably in the 40-45 range, this is even vaguely appropriate, chronologically. The beatnik poet look, not so much. I’m also curious as to where Chip is during this celebration. Because he’s an aspiring musician himself, it may be too painful for him to hear once again how her band had to break up after she got knocked up with him by some corporate tool she met one night after a show.

Shoe, 5/11/08

HOLY CRAP THEY’RE FLYING! I complain a lot that the bird-ness of the birds in Shoe is not exploited often enough, so it’s somewhat gratifying to see Shoe and the Perfesser swooping through the sky in living color. But since all the offices and homes and restaurants we see the Shoe characters hanging out in are on tree branches, it makes the sprawly suburban landscape that they’re navigating over somewhat disconcerting. I’d like to see them walk into one of the strip malls below them and order lunch, only to be met with uncomprehending stares and/or shrieks of terror.

Another strange anomaly thrown into sharp relief in the air: the Perfesser wears clothes — a shirt and shoes, at least — while Shoe is naked as whatever kind of bird he’s supposed to be. This brings a whole new level of discomfort to his drunken advances on barflies that we’re occasionally forced to endure.

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The Phantom, 4/11/08

As was no doubt easily predictable, I lost interest in the current Phantom storyline rather quickly after all the hilarious Jungle Patrol! catchphrases petered out. (Not that you shouldn’t be stocking up on Jungle Patrol-themed merchandise, mind you.) Basically, our lady cop and waitress have been attempting to capture a notorious arms dealer in an attempt to prove their mettle to the male chauvinist pigs who run the Jungle Patrol; throughout the process, the Ghost Who Is Helpful has been surreptitiously doing much of the heavy lifting in the bad-guy-neutralization department. Some might think that this is unfair affirmative action on the Big Purple Guy’s part to try to get some ladies into his elite law-enforcement outfit, but since everyone in The Phantom other than the Phantom is generally pretty incompetent, I’m guessing that secret help from the Unknown Commander is par for the course on Jungle Patrol missions.

In today’s final panel, though, we learn that these ladies may be a little bloodthirsty even by Jungle Patrol standards. Sure, it’s reasonable for them to return fire, but it does seem like they were just waiting for the chance, doesn’t it? Usually the Phantom lets the baddies off with a little chin music and a Skull Mark™ as a reminder to stay on the straight and narrow, but our Swiss death merchant here looks like he’ll be as full of holes as his nation’s namesake cheese in short order.

Speaking of gunplay, while our lady cop has obviously been through weapons training, when did the waitress learn to fire off handgun rounds with such steely precision? I would have liked to have seen a Rocky-style montage sequence in which she learned the various deadly arts.

Shoe, 4/11/08

“That, plus the transceiver I attached to the bottom of your car in the parking lot, means that we’ll be seein’ a lot of each other! Haw haw!”

Since the earliest days of this blog, I have made it clear that I cannot abide the “sexy” lady birds in this strip. I dunno, there’s something about the combination of beaks and feathers with some distinctly, er, mammalian characteristics that just utterly squicks me out. The attention that’s been lavished on the glimpse we get of this barfly’s lower back isn’t helping me, either.

Spider-Man, 4/11/08

Hey, look, Simon Krandis keeps a fistful of wadded up bribe money in his tuxedo jacket at all times. The man would have made a swell governor!

The final panel is simultaneously the most hilarious and the most fetishistically unsettling image the Spider-Man newspaper strip has produced in the last three years.

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Shoe, 4/6/08

And this week’s award for the most egregious waste of Sunday comic space goes to … today’s Shoe! In fact, this Sunday strip contains two separate bits that would make perfectly serviceable daily strips (and since this is Shoe, by “perfectly serviceable” I mean “composed of mildly joke-like material”). Panels two and three in the first row and panels one and three of the bottom row are self-contained and even mildly funny. Panel two of the bottom row at least contains the mildly amusing sign “If All Else Fails Sawbones”. The middle row, in contrast, contains no jokes, no setups for jokes, and no cute details worth looking at. They are a slap in the face of everyone who ever aspires to occupy one of the precious square inches of the comics page, because they basically say, “Ha ha! We’re Shoe, we’re never going away, and we don’t have to care.”

Crankshaft, 4/6/08

Today’s Crankshaft similarly crams multiple jokes into a single strip, but at least they all get to the heart of the feature’s archetypical concerns:

• Joke one, panels one and two: Crankshaft is disgusted by modern life.
• Joke two, panels three and four: Someone treated Crankshaft with disregard, probably because he’s old and/or unpleasant.
• Joke three, panels five and six: Crankshaft is old and sick, and probably dying.

Slylock Fox, 4/6/08

Wow, eBay scams? That doesn’t really strike me as Count Weirdly’s style. Usually he likes to harass his victims in person, presumably so he can giggle with girlish glee at their annoyance. The saddest thing about today’s strip is not that Slylock’s constant harassment has forced the poor Count to turn to cybercrime to get his kicks, but that this is the first time we’ve seen what appears to be Countess Weirdly, or maybe his mistress, or sister — or, anyway, a She-Weirdly of some kind — and she’s leading Slylock arm-in-arm to the scene of the crime. “Yes, officer, here he is! Now lock him away so this castle and its army of freaky critters will be mine, all mine! MUHAHAHAHA! Wait, did I say that last part aloud?”

That beaver in the “which two scenes are alike” puzzle is the smuggest rodent I’ve ever seen in my life. Meanwhile, the one submitted to the “your drawing” feature looks like it’s at the tail end of some kind of weeks-long mescaline binge.