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They’ll Do It Every Time, 8/2/06

Some might say that my incessant fawning over TDIET has left me without any kind of credibility when it comes to this feature. I’m just some sort of TDIET cheerleader! Well, today I’m here to tell you that it just isn’t so. See, today’s installment of this usually totally awesome panel undermines exactly what makes it totally awesome. Generally, the patented TDIET twist involves the same person or people or institution: it’s like, Titus notices shoddy work, but not the tip jar! or hospitals have too many bureaucrats and not enough health care providers! or the Pestleys insist that other people be clean, even though they’re messy! Today we’d have the perfect opportunity for that favorite TDIET theme, in which some happy, naive person believes that some aspect of life is basically good, only to be disabused of that notion in some shattering way — except that it only works if the person in the hospital is the same person watching the TV! Instead, our red-headed lady is going to go through life believing that doctors are great and attentive, and our poor patient has never had his hopes about medical care raised so as to be dashed in a narratively pleasing way. Presumably this discrepancy arises because the artist is too gentlemanly to draw an injured woman in a hospital gown, and too sexist to imagine that a man might watch soap operas.

Gil Thorp, 8/2/06

Say, have you ever wanted to see a comic strip where a little girl punches another little girl in the face? Well, today’s Gil Thorp is for you, my friend.

I thankfully don’t have any seven-to-ten year olds that I need to shuttle back and forth to gymnastics practice, so maybe somebody can tell me if gymnastics coaches actually wear form-fitting spandex leotards to work. And are sexy, sexy ladies.

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The good people at InstantSignsOnline.com will let you design your own custom license plate. Faithful reader rata2e received the following gift from her daughter, also a faithful reader:

Isn’t that nice? I love it when families come together to mock the comics.

(By the way, if your tastes run less towards novelty license plates and more towards, say, novelty intimate wear, you can get more “Roadside”-themed items at the Comics Curmudgeon store. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with making your own stuff, but I’m just sayin’ that that’s one place you can get it.)

Also, on the subject of obsessive comics blogs, someone who I believe to be faithful reader and sometime poster Pelagius (correct me if I’m wrong) has started a new obsessive comics blog: What’s so funny? Not golf. It’s dedicated to the numerous unfunny golf jokes that golf-mad comics writers force upon us. Good luck to you, blogger!

Also also, TDIET fans owe it to themselves to check out this hilarious and very, very filthy spoof from Tom McHenry.

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Crock, 7/18/06

If there was ever a time in the thirty-year history of Crock — a comic strip about a group of Western military men engaged in a seemingly unending mission somewhere in the Arab world — in which it ought to by right match up to the geopolitical moment, this is it. Unfortunately, and yet to the surprise of nobody, it hasn’t lived up to the challenge. One doesn’t expect Ph.D.-level theses on interactions between Western and Islamic culture, but one does expect someone identified as a “nomad” to look less like a parody of a cold-war era spy, complete with totally-inappropriate-for-the-desert all-black clothes, and more like, oh, I don’t know, a middle-eastern nomad. Surely a picture could be found in a book or magazine to serve as a guide. Interestingly, the artist may be somewhat embarrassed about this: in panel three, the nomad is forced almost completely out of the frame, giving up screen space to a lovely palm tree.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 7/18/06

Some of you commentors have reacted to this TDIET with disparaging comments along the lines of “What the hell is wrong with this guy” and “Nobody does this ever.” You people don’t understand that you’re seeing a master at the top of his game. Look at how he diagrams the entire joke for you along the right of the word balloon. In the hands of a lesser artist, revealing how the process works like this would be an open invitation to host of imitators, but even if you see all the individual pieces of the puzzle, you can never fit them together in that oh-so-special TDIET way. It’s like the time I saw Penn and Teller and they did a trick twice, the second time explaining what they were doing as they were doing it, and you still came away amazed. The “P.S.” at the end is just a little reminder that you that this, in fact, is how we roll in They’ll Do It Every Time. Oh yeah!

Marvin, 7/18/06

Ha, ha! You see, in the west, we’d use “sticks and stones,” but in the east, they’d use “bamboo and pebbles.” Because, see, they don’t have trees in China, just bamboo. Lots and lots of bamboo. And pebbles are … um … zen … oh, Christ, this strip is just totally appalling to me.