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B.C., 1/24/06

Shoe, 1/24/06

The Lockhorns, 1/24/06

I love it when people write angry letters to the paper. I’m a connoisseur of ridiculously overblown outrage. My favorites, as you might imagine, are the people who complain about the comics, how they are full of sleaze like single mothers and gays and uppity Negroes and people who use the word “butt” and/or “Jesus Christ” (the latter irreverently) and won’t someone please think of the CHILDREN? It’s always the CHILDREN who must be protected, because, as we all know, the CHILDREN are the ones who read the comics pages.

Well, if I were a child, I would be less disturbed by gratuitous use of the word “butt” and more by authors who think that its funny to admit that you have no concept of how high tech devices work. If I were around 8, I’d just be puzzled that there was anyone out there who was so dense; if I were around 12, I would just feel disgust and contempt for such fogeys. I don’t mean to hate on those who are baffled by all our modern conveniences — I’m sure that fifty years from now all the kids with their skull-installed data ports will be mocking me — but today’s Shoe and B.C. just seem to exude a certain stubborn pride in not getting it. (Does Johnny Hart really think that the word “iPod” should appear in a different font from the rest of the sentence? Does he even know what one is, outside the context of those ads with the shadow people?) The Lockhorns, meanwhile, doesn’t even bother to engage with technology, and merely seems to believe that mother-in-law-joke + “e-” prefix designating technology of some kind = comedy gold.

Some comics actually do a good job of dealing with technology jokes. Dilbert and Fox Trot are obvious examples; and For Better or for Worse does a pretty good job of showing how Internet communication is a casual part of people’s lives (particularly young people’s lives). Even Cathy’s endless Irving-becomes-obsessed-with-some-gadget storylines ring true in terms of how some people go a little tech-crazy. Those plots still aren’t funny, mind you, but they don’t come off like they’re being pounded out by some gin-crazed 90-year-old on a aging Selectric typewriter, or shouted into one of those old-timey phones with a crank on the side.

Oh, and I couldn’t let this one by:

Words to live by, my friend. Words to live by.

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Shoe, 11/2/05

Hey, Shoe, FYI, Madame Butterfly was a character in a Puccini opera. She’s a fifteen-year-old Japanese girl who marries an American naval officer, is abandoned by him, and then kills herself due to shame. Her potential fortune-telling abilities are unexplored, though you’d think that she would have managed to avoid her unfortunate betrothal if she really did have the Second Sight.

Personally, I think Madame Zoo Doo is just trying to distract our attention from her name and its no doubt shameful origin, which possibly involves gibbon scat.

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Shoe, 10/24/05

Isn’t it enough, O current toilers over at Shoe central, that you have glommed onto the legacy of a successful comic strip and can pretty much blather on in a vaguely amusing fashion over two or three panels every day because if the strip were to get pulled, dozens of doddering Korean War veterans would write nasty leaders saying that they didn’t get strafed by the Red Chinese just so they could come home to a nation so ungrateful that it took their favorite comic out of the paper? Don’t you at least have the common courtesy to make the jokes in Shoe relate in some peripheral way to the characters and/or setting? Did you have no other way to offer up this lame-ass, heaving, flopping, stinking, sorry slab of non-humor than in the context of a completely nonsensical “letter to the editor” that no one would ever, ever write? Were you so bursting with anticipation on this joke that you felt you had to share it with all of us, those who fought honorably in Korea and those who did not? Were there no family barbecues where you could trot out this little number and let it die a deserved death? Were there no brothers in law or adorable towheaded nephews you could inflict it upon? Did it have to be this way? Have you no sense of decency, sirs, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?