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They’ll Do It Every Time, 10/28/06

TDIET exists to give whiny, petulant voice to the sort-of-but-not-really voiceless, and thus I always assume that whatever character is best expressing that classic look of quizzical put-upon-ness is meant to stand in for whoever sent the idea in to Mr. Scaduto in the first place. Today’s episode is an elaborate fantasy in which helpful teenagers are constantly thwarted in their attempts to pull their weight in the household; thus, we can only assume that “A. White” is the helpful baseball-cap flipping, vest-wearing cool cat. The idea that a teenager might be a regular TDIET reader is truly horrifying, however. Please, please tell me that, like David Tarafa, A. White is a plucky young Curmudgeon reader. PLease?

Another possibility is that A. White is actually the silent but clearly horror-stricken mother in this scenario. She’s too terrified to stand up to her obviously rage-filled hubby on her kid’s behalf in person, so she’s hoping that his favorite cartoon feature in the Boston Herald will show him the error of his control-freakish ways.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith and Mark Trail, 10/28/06

“Yeah, Andy, we’ve got to find Molly! And by ‘we,’ I mean ‘you.’ Go find our friend! I’ll be here with the gun … you know, if you need me … or whatever.” This strip just further illustrates that there isn’t a single featherless biped in Mark Trail who’s worth a damn. I hope that after Andy and Molly take care of the brothers -ake, they turn on Mark and his friends, and then rule over Lost Forest like the King and Queen of the Beasts that they are.

I offer this Snuffy Smith for comparison, to illustrate how Mark Trail is hopefully going to play out in a few days. That “Grr!!” coming out of the bear is meant to be menacing, but comes out just sort of cute and Molly-like.

The Phantom, 10/28/06

The Ghost Who Walks Very Uncomfortably In His Tight, Tight Pants is offering a lovely ass shot in the first panel (this one’s for you, bootsybrooks!), but I’m more looking forward to next week’s thrilling factory tour! “And in here is the break room … you can see we just got a new refrigerator … now down here is the factor floor, and here’s the conveyor belt … an interesting thing about this model is that it was first designed to accommodate a five-foot-wide belt, but they’ve been able to expand it to accommodate our shipping containers, which have had to get bigger because of changing packaging regulations…”

Judge Parker, 10/28/06

God damn it, is this strip going to be about not making assumptions about people based on first appearances, and about how people who seem very different might have a lot in common, and could even become good friends? Because that’s going to blow.

For Better Or For Worse, 10/28/06

Oh, 4Evah and Eva’s public humiliation is going to be delicious.

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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.

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They’ll Do It Every Time, 9/26/06

The main gripe in today’s TDIET is ludicrously pointless (contractors sometimes overextend themselves and take longer to finish things than you think they will oh no oh no whatever shall we do) but I’m intrigued by one of the comments from the peanut gallery at the right of the frame: “Those are the same two guys who built the pyramids.” What on earth is this supposed to mean? That they’re immortal and unimaginably old? That they’re sinister Egyptians? That the pyramids, like this Long Island in-law addition, were vast projects that took years to complete and were intended to house mummified corpses?

I was going to rely on my ancient history master’s degree and, more importantly, my repeated viewings of the Ten Commandments to work out a riff about how the pyramids were actually built by tens of thousands of slaves who could just be whipped into submission if they tried anything funny like this, but I decided to quickly check the relevant Wikipedia article, which, since it’s written by thousands of know-it-alls with lots of free time, cannot be wrong, and I found out the following:

Two major theories surround the construction of the pyramids of Egypt. The first theory, suggested by the Greeks, posits that slaves were forced to work until the pyramid was done. A more widely accepted theory in the modern era, however, suggests that the Great Pyramids of Egypt were built by hundreds of skilled workers who camped near the pyramids and worked for a salary or as a form of paying taxes until the construction was completed.

Soooo, um, no whippings, I guess. Still and all, I imagine that none of these skilled workers ever lipped off to pharaoh about how the Tyrians wanted some Ba’al temples built, and the Nubians have this irrigation system they need overhauled, so they’d be back in a few days. But I don’t think we should lose sight of the larger picture here, which is: the little kid is making cracks about the pyramids, what the hell.

Judge Parker, 9/26/06

I continue to enjoy new artist Eduardo Barreto’s work on Judge Parker, but I also wish he’d pick a lettering style and stick with it. This one is an improvement over the previous font, though the fact that it seems to all be in italics makes it looks like everybody is shouting all the time. Which, who knows, maybe they are. All the dialogue seems to end in exclamation points, anyway.

Katherine Harris Parker may have gathered 1,500 signatures, but she managed to obliquelly bring up once more what appears to be Randy Parker’s Achilles’ heel in the bizarro-world that is Judge Parker: his unmarried status. At least Reggie Black has a wife, you … you … not-the-marrying-kind-if-you-know-what-I-mean-nudge-nudge-wink-wink! In real life, of course Randy’s family situation and sexuality would be irrelevant in his bid for the bench, but he would be unable to project the gravitas needed to be judge because everyone would be snickering about his being named “Randy.”

Hi and Lois, 9/26/06

For the record, the most recent changes to the MPAA rating system were the introduction of the PG-13 rating in 1984 and the changing of the X rating to NC-17 in 1990. OH MY GOD STOP THE WORLD I WANT TO GET OFF!