Post Content

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?”

Post Content

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!

Post Content

So, today was the 75th anniversary of the beginning of Dick Tracy! Many of the strips distributed by the same syndicate offered their tributes today, which were for the most part significantly less wanktastic than Blondie’s endless anniversary hijinks. The awards for the two least seamless nods go to:

Gil Thorp, 10/4/06

Gil Thorp, which features a namecheck by a teenager who never reads the paper and wouldn’t read a 75-year-old comic strip if he did, and who was at most two years old when the most recent movie incarnation of the franchise came out; and…

Shoe, 10/4/06

Shoe, which features Detective Tracy’s severed head in a case behind Roz’s bar, with death’s grim rictus forcing him to feign amusement at this awful joke.

In non-Dick Tracy news:

Mary Worth, 10/4/06

Actually, it seems to me that in a single evening you corrected things quite nicely.

Seriously, I’m really beginning to believe that Mary and her crew are just going to talk themselves into a sense of guiltless satisfaction. If this is the beginning of the all-singing, all-dancing, all-sociopathic Mary Worth, then I’m going to just embrace it and run with it. I can’t wait to see what murderous crimes they’re going to escalate to next! “Yes, perhaps crucifying Mr. Jenkins in the Charterstone courtyard and leaving him to die over a period of days was a bit harsh, but he did tread on the flowerbed, and there is a sign warning against doing just that, so in a real sense, this is all his doing.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/4/06

Wow. So, it looks like June and Heather are on the verge of a full-on makeout session, with Rex watching from afar and thinking “ME LIKEY!” Could this strip get any more polymorpheously perverse — or divorced from its ostensible narrative content?

June seems pretty upset that Heather’s petty personal problems have ruined her vacation plans. I’m surprised Heather even bothers to bring up her mother’s feelings, which are clearly not as important as June’s, who had already picked out the kilt Rex was going to wear. All this clan stuff sounds promising to me, though; Heather’s English, if I remember right, so maybe we’ll get into some kind of Anglo-Scot hatred storyline that will baffle the vast majority of Americans for whom all “those people over there” are pretty much indistinguishable.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 10/4/06

YEAH, THAT’S JUST HOW IT IS! ‘CAUSE YOU STILL LOVE HER, BUT SHE LOATHES THE VERY SIGHT OF YOU! WHAT’RE YA GONNA DO? HAW HAW! Ah, whimsy.

UPDATE: So it turns out that “David Tarafa” is actually faithful reader and occasional commentor Lambnesiac, who is the first Curmudgeonite to be successfully TDIETed. And, uh, whose marriage is I’m sure much, much healthier than the Scadutotization would have you believe. Uh. Heh.