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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?”

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Shoe, 2/23/07

To me, the tropes in Shoe range from the mildly amusing (“the Perfesser has trouble with deadlines”) to the bland (“Skyler doesn’t know the answer to a test question, so he comes up with an ‘amusing’ response”) to the irksome (“Shoe is hounded by his ex-wives for money”). However, there are few I find more more outright distasteful than “the obese older male birds hit on ‘sexy’ fortysomething birds who look like they have been used hard by life.” And few strips in that genre have been as unpleasant as today’s, in which the Perfesser drunkenly attempts to initiate sexual relationship with a barfly, only to be repulsed to discover that she’s even more intoxicated than he is. So, um, congratulations, Shoe, on bringing me to this new level of ick. Don’t feel any obligation to top yourself in the future or anything.

Apartment 3-G, 2/23/07

So the Apartment 3-G creative team had done a decent job depicting Albert Pinkham Ryder’s face, though his ghost is dressed rather nattily for someone who spent the latter part of his live a shut-in. But considering that most of Ryder’s work consisted of dark, moody landscapes that presaged modernism, I question whether he would go through the trouble of coming back from the dead just to help Lu Ann paint her bright, faux-Victorian botanical still lives on white backgrounds. I suppose he doesn’t really get to pick the tastes of the artists he inhabits. Being dead must be even worse than I thought.

Kudzu, 2/23/07

Most of the time, Kudzu’s hateful “modern bible translation” bits involve slang that’s at least five years out of date, which allows me to feel young and scornful. But I had to goggle at today’s strip for a good five minutes before I figured out that “friend” as a verb is probably supposed to mean “to add as a friend on MySpace or Facebook or whatever those social networking hoo-hah sites are that I’m too old and cranky to use.” Sussing out the meaning was made even more difficult because the phrases in the Lord’s Prayer it replaces — “trespasses” and “trespass against” in the King James, “sins” and “sin against” in more modern translations — don’t correspond, like, at all. It’s just an attempt at slapping in a random neologism in place of a word that may be vaguely suitable for replacement because in the King James translation it’s kind of archaic and confusing. So, in conclusion, I hate it, and it should die.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/23/07

I usually look away when Funky Winkerbean hits its high points of horror, but I have to ask: does anyone else think that the black blob between Wally’s outstretched arms in panel three that doesn’t seem to be attached to anything is his head? Take that, Mrs. Wally! You think it’s so damn tough going through life with one arm? How about going through life with zero heads, huh? Game, set, and match!