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Shoe, 4/6/08

And this week’s award for the most egregious waste of Sunday comic space goes to … today’s Shoe! In fact, this Sunday strip contains two separate bits that would make perfectly serviceable daily strips (and since this is Shoe, by “perfectly serviceable” I mean “composed of mildly joke-like material”). Panels two and three in the first row and panels one and three of the bottom row are self-contained and even mildly funny. Panel two of the bottom row at least contains the mildly amusing sign “If All Else Fails Sawbones”. The middle row, in contrast, contains no jokes, no setups for jokes, and no cute details worth looking at. They are a slap in the face of everyone who ever aspires to occupy one of the precious square inches of the comics page, because they basically say, “Ha ha! We’re Shoe, we’re never going away, and we don’t have to care.”

Crankshaft, 4/6/08

Today’s Crankshaft similarly crams multiple jokes into a single strip, but at least they all get to the heart of the feature’s archetypical concerns:

• Joke one, panels one and two: Crankshaft is disgusted by modern life.
• Joke two, panels three and four: Someone treated Crankshaft with disregard, probably because he’s old and/or unpleasant.
• Joke three, panels five and six: Crankshaft is old and sick, and probably dying.

Slylock Fox, 4/6/08

Wow, eBay scams? That doesn’t really strike me as Count Weirdly’s style. Usually he likes to harass his victims in person, presumably so he can giggle with girlish glee at their annoyance. The saddest thing about today’s strip is not that Slylock’s constant harassment has forced the poor Count to turn to cybercrime to get his kicks, but that this is the first time we’ve seen what appears to be Countess Weirdly, or maybe his mistress, or sister — or, anyway, a She-Weirdly of some kind — and she’s leading Slylock arm-in-arm to the scene of the crime. “Yes, officer, here he is! Now lock him away so this castle and its army of freaky critters will be mine, all mine! MUHAHAHAHA! Wait, did I say that last part aloud?”

That beaver in the “which two scenes are alike” puzzle is the smuggest rodent I’ve ever seen in my life. Meanwhile, the one submitted to the “your drawing” feature looks like it’s at the tail end of some kind of weeks-long mescaline binge.

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Gil Thorp, 3/24/08

Hooray, the A-Train and his moppet siblings won’t be whisked off to some Dickensian workhouse by Social Services after all! And it’s all thanks to local drunkard Marty Moon, who shook off his unwavering hatred of Milford athletics to heroically perpetrate fraud against the government agency that protects our children from situations just like this. I hope he didn’t smell too much like tequila and those pine-scented car air fresheners that he uses to try to cover up the tequila smell!

I’m a regular Gil Thorp reader, and I too don’t know why Marty Moon might owe Andrew a favor. It’s possible that I missed it in the strip’s usual frenzied storytelling, but I think the key is in Maureen (or whoever)’s rather precise formulation in panel three: not “He owed Andrew a favor” but “I told him he owed Andrew a favor!” Marty probably assumed that he would once again have to follow up on boasts he made during an alcohol-fueled blackout.

Mark Trail, 3/24/08

So, we already knew that the winner of Woods and Wildlife’s Win A Free Puppy From Mark Trail Wearing A Suit contest was “sick,” but we didn’t know that she was suffering from a broken heart (or, as the DSM-IV refers to it, “296.2x: Major Depressive Disorder, Single Episode”) due to her parents’ divorce. Fortunately, she’ll soon be getting just the cure for that: individual and family counseling under the care of a licensed therapist who specializes in working with children a free puppy! She will frolic and play with him all day, and name him “Zoloft.”

Actually, little Madeline has been lying there like that unmoving for the entire duration Mark’s conversation with her mother; her mom, not a trained medical professional, may have mistaken death for sadness (a common error). That would be something that not even a free puppy could cure, but maybe Mark could leave the puppy with Madeline’s mom to cheer her up a little.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/24/08

No matter what the medical crisis or the task force, Rex always volunteers to check out the high school locker rooms first. You can never be too careful!

Slylock Fox, 3/24/08

SCANDAL! Today, we learn that Slylock only maintains his reputation as the greatest detective on the force by reckless use of home-brewed and experimental performance-enhancing drugs. Is this the lesson we want to give our children: that if you want to be the smartest, you’ve got hit the books — and the needle?

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Slylock Fox, 3/23/08

So many good things are going on in Sunday’s Slylock Fox! First of all, it features my new favorite anti-hero Reeky Rat, trying to move up the social ladder but so ignorant that he thinks that stealing a nice suit will make him respectable automatically. As usual for Sunday, the solution to the mystery is too small for me to read; I’m guessing it’s supposed to be something about how the suit would be wet if Reeky had worn it in from outside, but really, the tip-off that he’s lying about it being his suit is that Reeky Rat doesn’t own any God-damned suits. His wardrobe consists entirely of stained t-shirts he shoplifted from the Goodwill.

Also charming are the plight of the Six Differences duck, trapped in the paws of a sleeping bear; a trumpet-playing rabbit thinks that startling the bear awake will free his feathered friend, but it will likely just get both of them eaten. Speaking of ducks, “how to draw” teaches the youth of today to draw a duck in a bucket, because really, why not? I can see that being an important part of any graphic novel you have planned. And, finally, it looks like our unfortunate baseball player is about to be eaten alive by birds in part of the worldwide animal revolt we’ve already seen brewing.

Panel from Judge Parker, 3/23/08

I just wanted to point out to everyone the extent to which Judge Parker is the King Of Not Moving Things Along: Biff Dickens buzzed the horses yesterday? Yesterday was sometime around Thanksgiving. And this is positively breakneck speed for this feature.

Panels from Mary Worth, 3/23/08

Mary’s big flashback continues to be lame and anticlimactic, but this pair of throwaway panels pretty much epitomizes the strip: a baffling and dubious traditional proverb from a random country, and then Mary talking over whatever her interlocutor was trying to get in edgewise to move the conversation back to her.