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Apartment 3-G, 7/29/07

For shame, Margo Magee! I seem to remember that a certain young brunette was very pleased to received all sorts of aesthetically unsettling knickknacks from total strangers celebrating her liberation from white slavery. So don’t begrudge the brain-damaged girl her moment in the sun, OK?

Unless Eric’s note features magical talking handwriting, Tommie doesn’t know what it is that has Margo so excited, but we can all still join her in a hearty “Where?!” Eric said “dinner at my place tomorrow night”, Margo. Either she’s planning on spending a full 24 hours primping for their reunion, or she’s going to burst into his apartment early and catch him in the arms of his sister-in-law. Either way, it’ll make for four to six weeks of good fun.

Shoe, 7/29/07

I’m really starting to worry about Shoe. As I’ve noted, the strip suddenly seems fixated on wasted lives and impending death. Today, as if five consecutive panels of a sobbing, emotionally distraught Perfesser weren’t enough, in the first panel we actually get to see Gilmore the Goldfish’s last moment on earth, his heavy-lidded eyes solemn with the sudden realization that for him, the veil separating this world from the next was about to part and he would forever transcend to the beyond. Then, for good measure, we’re shown his corpse. Bizarrely, the whole thing is capped off with a nonsensical joke. It’s as if Roz is telling us that the only way we can escape the crushing pain that comes with the knowledge of our own mortality is by taking refuge in the deliberate nonsense of Dada.

Funky Winkerbean, 7/29/07

The Moment We’ve All Been Waiting For is here, more or less, though surely Darrin will spend weeks moping aimlessly with the knowledge that his birth mother is dying of cancer before he actually works up the nerve to talk to her. I mostly wanted to point out his look of stunned horror as his face looms above the “BEAN” in Winkerbean in the first panel. It really nicely encapsulates the mood of the strip, though it does leave us wondering about his mouth — a perfect O of shock, or a grimace of emotional distress?

Finally, today’s Mary Worth is too horrible for me to contemplate, but I did want to share this pic from faithful reader Dan, who offers it as proof that tiny, tiny horses like the ones Drew and Dawn are riding do exist — in Mongolia!

This frankly opens up a number of wonderful possibilities. Are Drew and Dawn training in the art of nomad horsemanship? Will they join a fearsome horde of warriors, swooping down upon the settled folk, burning their homes, stealing their gold, and leaving piles of bones in their wake? Will Charterstone be their first target? Please?

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Gil Thorp, 7/24/07

My mom is retiring in the fall after thirty years as a teacher, and I have to imagine that, if one of her erstwhile students had shown up on a hot day in July and said, “Hey, remember me, the kid who accidentally chopped off his own leg with a chainsaw last fall? Could I hang around the school this summer and maybe you can teach me stuff? My dad will buy you supplies!”, her reaction would be — well, not rude, since she’s not a rude person, but firm, and negative. In fact, she didn’t spend her summers hanging around the school at all, possibly to avoid just such an awkward confrontation, though more likely because she has a life, unlike Gil Thorp, apparently.

I’m pleased to see that Coach Kaz has chosen to take time out from his exciting summer to brave the horrifying stench that lingers in Milford High’s gym and hang out with this cavalcade of losers. Mostly I’m hoping that he’s going to teach Bill Ritter that if you believe in yourself enough, you can punch a dude right in the hypothalamus no matter how many legs you have. But Coach Thorp is lucky to have someone else around right now, too, because he’s obviously rapidly deflating. In panel two, he and Coach Kaz both look like ’roided out He-Man extras, threatening to burst right out of those cotton t-shirts with their manly chesteses. But in panel three, slouchy, scrawny Gil looks more like the guy from the famous Charles Atlas sand-kicked-in-his-face ads before dynamic tension worked its magic. Even his flattop is kind of droopy.

Mary Worth, 7/24/07

Good God, what kind of world do we live in where the action in Gil Thorp stays with the same two characters in the same room for three consecutive panels, while the Mary Worth chronology leaps forward “several weeks” willy-nilly? I suppose we’re going to find out that Dawn has been sneaking off to the horse stables to “ride” with Drew for the past few weeks under the pretext of studying. Since it makes absolutely no sense to conceal this fact from her father, we’re just going to have to accept that “horseback riding” in Mary Worth should always be understood to mean “illicit sex.”

Shoe, 7/24/07

Do you ever get the feeling that a cartoon is drawn by someone who’s working off of a script and who almost, but not quite, speaks English? Our random brunette says “I love mysteries!”, but with the little hearts floating over her head and the way she flings her body halfway up the counter, it seems more like she should be saying “I love your hot body!” or “I love crystal meth!” Because this is Shoe, the Perfesser manages to kill this puzzling but genuine enthusiasm with a terrible joke.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 7/24/07

As a work-at-home type, I can tell you that this is a pitfall of the home office lifestyle. That’s why I refuse to answer the phone or the doorbell, and frequently insist that my wife lie about my whereabouts as I labor feverishly in my office with the door barricaded. What puzzles me about the scenario depicted here, though, is the presence of two adult women in the Ragweed household. Is this some weird amalgamation of the modern world of the home office and the TDIET 1950s sensibility, where every male white-collar worker has a female secretary? Or is Ragweed a polygamist as well a freelancer?

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Shoe and Get Fuzzy, 7/22/07

If you are a subscriber to the Baltimore Sun, you saw this precise constellation of quasipolitical comics when you opened your paper this morning. Both seem to be aimed at the same problem: making a relatively gentle joke about politics that isn’t actually political, and doesn’t result in dozens of angry letters to the editor. And, while usually I go on about just about everything at great length, the most important thing I can say here is that Get Fuzzy is funny, while Shoe isn’t. Shoe falls into the typical toothless trap of just saying “THE POLITICS AREN’T THEY ANNOYING?”, literally allowing the discussion to be replaced by meaningless placeholder syllables. Get Fuzzy works with established character traits — Bucky and Satchel’s party affiliations have been frequently noted, whereas I don’t believe Shoe and the Perfesser had political beliefs until they became necessary for this cartoon. Plus Get Fuzzy contains actual political jokes that are funny. I love the third-party punchline, but I love “Well, with the proper funding…” even more.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/22/07

“I can assure you, I am not without qualities! I have a certain height, for instance, as well as a certain breadth and depth! I occupy volume in space! I have a certain skin color, and wear clothing, and inhale air and breathe out carbon dioxide! I have quantities, too, if you’d care to hear about them!”

With his constant wavering between unbearable upper-class superciliousness and desperate, raw emotional need, I’m frankly shocked that Hugh has somehow managed to remain a bachelor to this point.

Marvin, 7/22/07

Marvin celebrated its 25th anniversary this past week with a series of painfully unfunny jokes about life in that long-lost age known as “1982.” (Dallas was on TV! Ronald Reagan was president! HA HA! STOP, YOU’RE KILLING ME!) Today, Marvin the baby appears on the set of the Tonight Show to exchange painfully unfunny jokes with Jay Leno. The fact that Jay Leno is, in fact, painfully unfunny in real life does lead one to wonder whether the lameness on display here is meant to be a brutally realistic exploration of what it would be like if a cartoon infant were on the Tonight Show. Frankly, I wish that they had carried on with the “life in 1982” conceit and done the interview with Johnny Carson, though presumably even after his death he has too much dignity to appear in Marvin.

Extremely creepy to me is the way that Jay Leno keeps his mouth shut throughout his unfunny dialog. The fact that Marvin keeps his own mouth shut and communicates with Jay (and, presumably, the viewers at home) telepathically via thought balloons for whatever reason doesn’t faze me at all, but seeing that lantern jaw firmly shut while the usual inane patter floats next to his head in a word balloon unsettles me a great deal. I do like the fact that Marvin’s bottle has been placed completely out of reach of his stubby arms, though.

Mary Worth, 7/22/07

I can totally understand why Dawn was so nervous to offer this revelation up to Drew. After all, it’s totally possible that the good doctor was only on going on this date with her so that he could synchronize his retrochronometer onto her current form and then go back in time five years to date her past her self — wouldn’t it be disappointing if he had gone through all that trouble only to return to the present in disgust? Thank God he’s only interested in dating the beautiful swan Dawn of the here and now. Look at the lovely visage in the final panel — the octogonal face, the bright orange roots. You can see why he wants to “get into the saddle” right away!

Slylock Fox, 7/22/07

OH COME ON, SLYLOCK! We’ve moved from ludicrous acts of deduction to petty attempts to come up with ways that that Cassandra might be committing crimes despite the absence of any evidence. “Do they both have ticket stubs? They might have just torn a single ticket in half! Did they pay for those tickets with cash? They might have stolen that cash from a bank, or an old lady, or an orphanage!” I think we all know why Slylock is harassing this poor woman while she’s trying to enjoy an innocent evening out at the movies with her bovine companion. I can’t wait for the inevitable strip where Slylock uses his infallible crime-fighting skills to avoid the process server with the restraining order.