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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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Spider-Man, 12/22/10

Oh, say, what’s going on in the unlikely romance between Aunt May and the Mole Man? Well, Spider-Man’s been trying to break it up, because he’s a sullen dick, but he also hasn’t been using any kind of interesting superpowers to do so, because he’s an incompetent feeb. After coming to the conclusion earlier this week that the Mole Man couldn’t be brought to justice for his New York City rampage because there’s no extradition treaty between the United States and Subterranea (no, really), Spider-Man is apparently trying this desperate gambit, apparently assuming that his aunt is old-fashioned enough to refuse to cohabitate with this freakish mutant without a marriage license and a church wedding.

Now, the legal argument here is patently spurious — as the unquestioned king of this gloomy underground realm, the Mole Man can presumably delegate the authority to solemnize marriages to whichever of his horrifying minions he chooses — but I do think Spidey’s smart to bring up the religious angle. Aunt May is, I imagine, a good churchgoer — Episcopalian, I’m guessing — whereas the Mole Man is the supreme God-emperor of a sunless cave kingdom of shuffling, sightless monsters. There are bound to be some value conflicts there, and they need to discuss that openly if their relationship is going to last.

Wizard of Id, 12/22/10

“C’mon,” they said. “Let’s do a Christmas-themed prison rape joke involving spiders,” they said. “It’ll be ‘edgy,'” they said. “It’s not like anybody reads the newspaper anymore, anyway,” they said.

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Crock, 10/27/10

Here is today’s Crock! It is about frolicking about in feces.

Wizard of Id, 10/27/10

Here is today’s Wizard of Id! It is about pretending to have terrible diarrhea, as a cover for plans for vandalism.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/27/10

Here is today’s Rex Morgan, M.D.! It’s about a cancerous prostate with its own Facebook fan page — oh, wait, I’m sorry, Pacebook fan page. This is actually the funniest thing on the comics page today (Rex’s gobsmacked facial expression in particular, as dumb social networking ephemera of all things finally shatters his sangfroid) but good lord I find cutesy fake product names distracting. Even Mary Worth, the squarest strip on the comics page, dares to say Facebook’s name aloud. What are you afraid of, Rex Morgan?