Post Content

Judge Parker, 5/25/12

It’s nice to know that I can do my best to come up with a ludicrously favorable plot outcome for a Judge Parker hero and still undershoot things. See, I thought that Avery Blackstone would sign off on Sam’s unduly generous and hastily written contract proposals only after Sam proved his fly-fishing prowess, when in fact Avery is so eager to spend some dude time with Sam that he’s willing to just skip the hard-hitting negotiations that are the entirety of his job duties. Presumably, once the two of them head down to a trout-filled brook, one of their flies will snag on the handle of a suitcase half-buried in the stream bed. They’ll pull it out and open it, find millions of dollars in bundled hundreds, and laugh and laugh and laugh.

Mark Trail, 5/25/12

“Plus, I suppose, emotionally devastated, world falling apart, blah blah blah. I don’t know her very well, so I can’t say for sure that she has basic human emotions.”

Mary Worth, 5/25/12

“But wait, Dawn, I wanted to show you my latest invention — half ham sandwich, half Pop-Tart. I call it a Meat-Tart! Instead of frosting, it has mayonnaise!”

Ziggy, 5/25/12

In the post-apocalyptic future, the dwindling supplies of food are under the control of warlords and their gangs, and these thugs won’t accept the dead government’s fiat money in payment. They’ll only take payment in ammo and sex, and Ziggy is out of luck on both counts.

Six Chix, 5/25/12

The American judicial system’s hidden crisis: horny old ladies.

Post Content

Blondie, 5/22/12

We here at the Comics Curmudgeon spend a lot of time ragging on long-running legacy strips, which decades ago ceased to be the work of an artist/visionary and are instead staffed by hired guns in the employ of the intellectual property owners. But we don’t say enough about the advantages of this kind of working environment! Let’s say that, back in the summer of 2006, you come up with a funny joke — ha ha, did you know that the youth of today will pay good money for pants that are already torn up? mercy! — only to discover that lots and lots and lots and lots of your fellow cartoonists had the same idea! So you’d probably chuck it and try to come up with something else, if you were just working on your own. But if you were a cog in some legacy comic’s great machine, you’d have an advantage over your lone wolf competitors because you’d have access to what sociologists call “institutional memory.” You’d just file the joke idea away in the company Outlook calendar, and set an alarm for when everyone’s long forgotten about haha-torn-jeans jokes. Five years should do it, right? Let’s call it a shade short of six, just to be safe. Come 2012, whoever’s got your job (lord knows it won’t be you) will see the alert pop up and have the day’s strip already half written.

Six Chix, 5/22/12

Huh, against all expectations the puzzling tale of the two young birds that had sex and then had baby birds is continuing, and continuing to be puzzling! “I like the cute young guys, but this time I went to far, in that I had sex with a cute young guy and then had children, ugh.”

Dennis the Menace, 5/22/12

“Mostly I’ve just been in here watching TV, so I guess there really aren’t that many details to fill in. Hey, since you’re up, would mind wiping up the drool-puddle I’m leaving on the ottoman?”

Spider-Man, 5/22/12

Don’t worry, comic-book action fans, the current Spider-Man plot isn’t just going to be about how Peter Parker feels sexually threatened when his wife talks to handsome men! It’s also about how he feels inadequate when he talks to other superheroes.

Post Content

Hagar the Horrible, 5/1/12

You know, I’ve been reading Hagar the Horrible for most of my literate life, and like most people, I had always assumed that the recurring strips where Hagar and Lucky Eddie crack wise on a tiny desert island just served as a place for desert-island gags rejected by the New Yorker. It’s only at this moment — as Hagar wistfully thinks about his wife, who’s thousands of miles away, who has no idea where he is, who he’ll probably never see again — that it occurred to me to try to fit these scenes into the larger narrative of the strip. Now that this conceptual shift has taken place, here’s my first question: what happened to the rest of the crew? Did Hagar and Eddie eat them?

Six Chix, 5/1/12

When I first scanned this strip I thought it was some miracle of life nonsense, but seeing the exhausted expression on momma bird and the frankly terrified look on papa bird, my guess is the real point is that spring made these birds horny and so they had some bird-sex and forgot to use birth control. Or should that be … BIRDTH CONTROL?? Because they’re birds, you see! Ha ha! Anyway, long story short, they have a bunch of children they don’t want now.

Spider-Man, 5/1/12

Oh, man, I don’t know why I’m surprised, but MJ’s supposedly funny play is terrible. Unless maybe the quote marks around all the dialogue indicate that the cast is in on the joke about how terrible the play is, and are playing the entire thing for meta-comedic laughs at the meta-awfulness of it all? That sounds like something that would play in Brooklyn rather than on Broadway, and anyway it’s been repeatedly demonstrated that nobody in the Spider-Man newspaper strip is even a tiny bit self-aware, because if they were they would immediately stalk away in disgust.

Mark Trail, 5/1/12

Just wanted to keep you up to date with the Mark Trail action. Today’s action: a bad guy lets loose with a WHAT TH’, which is always awesome. Also, apparently Andy’s kill switch is hard to turn off! Man, look at that slavering maw in panel two! He’s got a taste for human flesh now!

Funky Winkerbean, 5/1/12

“He used to joke about it, but it’s not a joke anymore. It’s completely true! My father can’t feel any human emotion or grasp ordinary, everyday experience unless it’s mediated through a recording device of some kind. In this way, he has become the archetype of a 21st century human being.”

Beetle Bailey, 5/1/12

Hey, remember back in the ’90s when Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC made a big deal about sending General Halftrack to sensitivity training, because of his constant, actionable sexual harassment of his secretary? Well, it didn’t take