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Jumble, 1/19/11

Cartoonists: I understand that there are good reasons for drawing your characters with four fingers instead of five, mostly because in the limited space you have available drawing too many fingers risks having none of those fingers be really visible. But if you’re going to go down that road, you absolutely must not depict your four-fingered characters as making distinctive hand gestures that generally rely on the full complement of digits — like, say, the devil horns/rock-n-roll symbol — or else you risk giving the impression that your characters are freakish claw-handed mutants.

Wizard of Id, 1/19/11

Since I’m not a gazillion years old, I haven’t been reading the Wizard of Id since its inception, but based on its title I assume it originally focused on the Wizard, only to see the narrative drift to more interesting characters (this being the Wizard of Id, the definition of “interesting” is fairly restricted) like the King and Sir Rodney and Bung, the drunk whose name I’m ashamed to be able to summon up without much effort. Anyway, in the last few months the strip seems to be spending a bit more time with its title character, giving us some background on him and introducing him to a new generation. Unfortunately, these tales involve kidnapping and, one assumes, sexual assault.

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Beetle Bailey, 12/16/10

Good lord, this strip has presented few more nightmarish visions than today’s panel two (and this is a strip that earlier this week featured a disinterested Sarge feeding a bed full of blood-sucking parasites). I guess the point is that the soldiers have been eating so much pork that they’re pretending to turn into pigs (proving that Beetle Bailey is written for and possibly by eight-year-olds), but there’s something about the way they’re all throwing their heads back and closing their eyes making animalistic noises that implies to me an insular group that’s gone off the rails in a deeply creepy way. To avoid “cannibalism,” these self-proclaimed pigs will now spurn the smallish ham and fall upon their cook, tearing him limb from limb and consuming his flesh, oinking all the while.

The Jumble, 12/16/10

The Jumble is definitely one of those strips that I wish I could see as a larger-format image sometimes. Today, for instance, I am fascinated by the three hairs that constitute this horse racing guru’s combover. Rather than flopping greasily over his pate Wilbur Weston style, they hover over his head as if repulsed from his skin by a static charge, presumably barely being held in at the roots.

Mark Trail, 12/16/10

So here’s our villain Ben Smith, and, um, wow. In any visual storytelling medium, we’re supposed to get a read on a character via their appearance, but I have no idea what message the combination of bald, shaggy, mustache, cravat, open-collar dress shirt, and lime green v-neck sweater is supposed to signify. Is it supposed to be “gay” by way of “fussy fashionista”? Under normal circumstances of course one would not associate this outfit with “fashion” in any sense, but then again this is a strip in which Mark just throws an enormous brown jacket over his khaki jumpsuit and calls it “dressing up.”

Spider-Man, 12/16/10

Well, now that I see Spider-Man is planning on punching a dazed, unresisting Mole Man in the face, I guess I should apologize for calling him a coward.

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The Jumble, 12/4/10

Never mind the scrambled word game that I am as usual too dumb to even attempt to solve; I just spent some time squinting at the Bieber-coiffed kid on the left, trying to figure out what exactly it says on his shirt. “Butter”? “Glitter”? “Grifters”? “GBusters”? Let’s go with “GBusters.” It’s the hip new street slang for “Ghostbusters,” which is a movie that all the young kids are talking about these days.

Archie, 12/4/10

In panel three, we can see that by “social networking” Dilton means “Craigslist casual furry encounters.”