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Shoe, 3/24/07

A thing that I know I shouldn’t get worked up about and yet do is the presence of animals in comic strips where everyone is an anthropomorphized animal. I mean, Roz’s dog is on four legs and doesn’t have humanoid hands, so I guess he’s supposed to be a non-sentient being, and I suppose its species-ist of me to just lump animals all together in one class, but it creeps me out to see a bird who owns a dog. In a world where everybody’s an animal, a hotel with a “no pets” policy is kind of like a hotel with a “no slaves” policy.

Um, not that I’d be really all in favor of a hotel with a “Yes, we love slavery!” policy or anything.

I’m curious about why exactly Roz is checking into this hotel in the first place, since I don’t think I’ve ever seen her not behind the counter of her greasy-spoon treetop diner. Perhaps she’s gotten tired of shoveling food at ingrates and has burned it down for the insurance money.

Mark Trail, 3/24/07

There’s a lot of weird crap in Mark Trail that I accept without too much mental discomfort — Mark’s unsettling lack of affect, his repeated acts of vigilante justice that go unpunished, the giant animals with word balloons coming out of inappropriate places — but I have a really hard time accepting that Mark suddenly deduced Diver Dan’s entire nefarious scheme from a single tiny screw hook, mostly because Mark has shown repeatedly that he doesn’t have the brainpower that God gave a bowling ball. Cherry, meanwhile, seems kind of horrified by the very thought that Dan might still be alive. “HE’S DEAD, YOU HEAR ME? DEAD! I WANT HIM TO STAY DEAD! IF I SEE HIM ALIVE, I WILL DROWN HIM AGAIN!”

The Lockhorns, 3/24/07

I know the central schtick of the Lockhorns is that the title characters are intolerably cruel to one another by turns, but for some reason Leroy’s smugness and Loretta’s downcast expression are especially poignant to me today. Loretta’s unisex getup may not be as sexy as what the lady in the red dress has on, but at least she’s not wearing those crippling shoes. Mr. Cardigan-Turtleneck Combo is about to find that the gal he’s been chatting up is going to fall into his lap, literally.

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Slylock Fox, 3/19/07

Another day, another insanely dementedly wonderful Slylock Fox. While it’s usually the visuals that wow me in this strip, I have to admit that what I most love here is the phrase “transfer the brilliant mind of Slylock Fox to the soft innards of a ripe eggplant.” Not that the visuals aren’t awesome, of course: you’ve got Slylock’s usual sang-froid cracking just a little as he contemplates the purple prison that will soon entrap his very soul; you’ve got Max Mouse hiding out in what appears to be a mouse-sized coffin; you’ve got the slavering vulture, no doubt giddy in anticipation of feasting on Slylock’s empty husk; and, most poignantly, you’ve got the earlier results of the same fiendish procedure, languishing in a jar and, in what seems to me to be an insult added to injury, submerged in water.

Shoe, 3/19/07

Another sad example of the problems with working backwards from the punchline. Clearly this “joke” was thought up in advance, and the “healthcare plan” was shoehorned in later as a generic phrase that stands in for “Senator stuff.” Because honestly, while healthcare policy can cause a great deal of heated political debate, the only way his healthcare plan would actually cause havoc and pandemonium would be if it could boiled down to “free amphetamines for everybody.”

Marmaduke, 3/19/07

Ha ha! Marmaduke ate something that wasn’t edible, and now can’t pass it through his digestive tract! He’s ill and might die! Ha ha!

Normally I hate cartoons that depict animals in pain, but I might be willing to make an exception for Marmaduke.

Crankshaft, 3/19/07

Is it wrong of me want something terrible to happen to this child, whom Crankshaft is apparently throwing off of his bus onto the side of the road in the middle of nowhere? Perhaps if he gets kidnapped, just for a little while, before being found (unharmed, of course) in the trailer of some drifter on the outskirts of town, then Crankshaft will finally be seen as the monster that he is, with the ensuing media circus forcing him to leave town along with his resentful family.

Normally you get bumped off of an airplane because it’s full. By kicking this kid off of what appears to be an empty bus, Crankshaft earns extra asshole points. Not that he needs them.

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Apartment 3-G, 3/4/07

The final panel of Sunday’s Apartment 3-G — in which Margo, unfamiliar with normal human methods of showing emotion, does her best to illustrate adoration with closed eyes and pouty lips, while Eric recoils in disgust — is pretty much the best thing ever. It’s enough to almost make me ignore Katy’s blatant bit of pantomimed drug innuendo in the fifth panel. We’ll soon find that Eric is only capable of showing real tenderness to his blood relatives; he only chose Margo as a sexual partner because of her steely invulnerability to typical weaknesses like “feelings”, and thus he’s about to drop her like a hot potato.

Dennis the Menace, 3/4/07

Dennis’ level of menacing has hit a new low. By right, Dennis ought to be causing nightmares with malice aforethought, not suffering from them. But the last panel offers a clue to the lack of Menace: Dennis has clearly undergone some traumatic, Clockwork Orange-style de-menacing process. (The strip title in the first panel indicates that the techniques may have been derived from the CIA’s LSD-based mind control experiments from the 1960s.) Dennis knows that some essential bit of his soul has been killed, and he begs his father to reverse the procedure, or, failing that, to crack his skull open and be done with it.

Judge Parker, 3/4/07

Ah, wealthy suburban Americans, your wealthy suburban Americanism is showing! “Oh dear, my teenage daughter has a bag with several books in it; she can’t possibly take public transportation! I’ll call the butler, post-haste! This trip is totally helping her learn about life on her own.” Of course, like most of the 3.6 million people who choose to ride the Paris Metro every day rather than call for their manservant to come with the Bentley, Neddy and Abbey will inevitably be assaulted by punk rockers.

Incidentally, Neddy, they have these things called “backpacks” now that allow you to carry books more comfortably than that … whatever it is you have slung over your shoulder. Backpacks are even for sale in backwards, retail-starved cities like Paris.

Panels from Shoe, 3/4/07

The throwaway panels in Sunday’s Shoe brought me up short. Is that the bird version of Andy Warhol the Perfesser is talking to? So, if Andy Warhol were still alive today, he’d be doing public service announcements about the importance of staying in school? And he’d be a bird?

Also, this panel from Sunday’s Mark Trail was a little marvel of cruelty:

“Hey, kids! Did you know that the beach is covered with corpses? Rotting corpses?”