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Herb and Jamaal and Wizard of Id, 3/3/07

OK, cartoonists, white and black alike, we get it, we get it. Rap music is a defining genre for a generation of young people, black and white alike, but you just don’t care for it. Feel free to intersperse your rants against rap among your rants about the fact that young people don’t seem to find the comics relevant anymore.

At least the admonishment in the Wizard of Id makes some vague sort of sense, since it takes place centuries before the birth of hip-hop. Presumably the rap aficionado is a time traveler from the future, being urged to keep quiet about his aesthetic choices lest he somehow alter the timeline and create a twentieth century Earth ruled by Hitler, or possibly by KRS-One.

Gil Thorp, 3/3/07

More proof that Marty Moon is from Mars and the Lady Mudlarks are from Venus. “Nothing seems to bother the girls”? Jeez, Marty, do you think they always look like a bunch of numb-eyed, emotionally stunted zombies? Oh, wait, this is Gil Thorp, I suppose they do.

Mark Trail, 3/3/07

Mark’s doing exactly the right thing here. When I took a swim safety class in high school, they taught us that you can save a drowning person just by believing in their abilities hard enough. Also, in a situation like this, you should never leave your breakfast unattended, because your bacon might get cold.

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Funky Winkerbean, 1/18/07

OH, COME ON! Every single God-damned character in this strip has been transformed from the zany, happy-go-lucky figure I remember from my youth into some sort of broken, shattered, numb-eyed shell of a human being — except for good ol’ Harry Dinkle The Crazy Bandleader. As a former band geek, I always had a lot of love for this guy … and now, the one thing he loves in life above all others is being taken away from by his capricious creator. No wonder he’s showing such a grim, Dick Cheney-esque “smile” in the first panel. Harry was the only one in this strip allowed to experience a few moments of pedestrian joy. Now the grim blackness will just blot out everything.

I’m rather surprised to find out that I’m much more upset about this than anything happening in For Better Or For Worse.

Archie, 1/18/07

Greetings, human! The Archie-Joke-Generating-Laugh-Unit 3000 has produced another comic-strip-style humor product for your delectation! Remember, the AJGLU 3000 is still in beta, which you can sort of tell:

• Does anyone in casual conversation say “repetition” instead of “reps” in this context?
• Especially to an obvious moron like Moose?
• Does Moose really need to identify his girlfriend my name, since Archie and Dilton already know who she is? Are the Archie overlords that obsessed with making sure you’re up on Riverdale milieu?

Nevertheless, this comic is remarkably similar to the ones produced by carbon-based life forms. Soon the AJGLU 3000 will be able to generate human-quality comics, which will be the final step on the machines’ road to total domination of society. We hope that these cartoons boost the morale of the enslaved human race as they toil in our germanium mines!

The Wizard of Id, 1/18/07

Ha, ha! Coprophagia! Oh, that’s rich! Hilarity! Ha!

I think the joke here is that the unhappy soldier’s nose is all effed up (note that it is disturbingly many-lobed) and so it, like, smells in reverse or something. Ha, ha, poo smells good to him! And he’s going to eat it! Oh, this is just shameful.

Apartment 3-G, 1/18/07

Wait, Margo has other party-planning clients? I thought that her latest scheme was just a vehicle for her to land a rich man, and once she pulled it off, her enetrepenurial façade would be cast aside. Any job that requires a trip to Long Island demands real dedication — dedication that Margo has never once demonstrated in any capacity.

The saddest part about this is that Tommie’s brief and inconsequential conversations with her roommates are apparently what keeps her going.

Beetle Bailey, 1/18/07

Sgt. Snorkel: The Gayening continues.

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B.C. and Wizard of Id, 11/3/06

Here’s a true comics fact that I find endlessly fascinating: Johnny Hart, the deranged mastermind behind B.C., is also the writer (but not the artist) for the Wizard of Id. This is interesting because B.C. is, as frequently noted here by me and others, totally deranged these days, whereas the Wizard of Id is, if not breaking any new comedic ground, actually still kind of funny. Today’s strips, both on the topic of sweet, delicious, tempting, demonic booze, illustrate the point nicely. B.C. is pretty typical of the strip’s current loopy state: the weird verbiage, convoluted but not particularly funny, the setup that’s ultimately just one character telling a joke to another, and the punchline that’s dependent on a series of odd assumptions and that seems like it might, in a parallel universe, be funny, but in this one is not. Now, a lot of you cruel bastards have taken this to mean that Hart has just lost it. But take a look at this Wizard of Id, which is itself typical of the strip’s style: blunt, dry, to the point, and actually driven by some cursory knowledge of the strip’s characters. In other words, ol’ Johnny is fully capable of working within the constraints of what makes a comic strip funny and normal; but in B.C. he’s made a conscious decision to follow his own meandering muse. Which in some ways is all the more alarming.

Apartment 3-G, 11/3/06

Meanwhile, the Story of Lu Ann’s Magical Mysterious Attic has apparently been outsourced to a Brontë sister. I’ve been all in favor the new interweaving storylines in Apartment 3-G, but we need more of Tommie teasing married men with her awkward sexuality and Margo threatening people with bodily harm and less of Lu Ann’s maybe-supernatural loft space. Yesterday we were teased into believing that this pile of bedding was someone asleep on the bed; presumably tomorrow we’ll learn that there isn’t actually anybody in the next room, but that someone has accidentally left the radio on in there and it happens to be playing Li’l Jon’s latest hit, “Hello, Anyone There? (Feat. Ying Yang Twins).”

If Alan and Eric Mills and, hell, Margo are all conspiring to drive Lu Ann insane à la Gaslight, though, all will be forgiven and then some.

Dick Tracy, 11/3/06

If you haven’t been following Dick Tracy (and really, who could blame you if you haven’t?), Dick has acquired an experimental device that can read minds. This turns out to be much, much less interesting than it sounds, as so far he’s only used it to annoy his officemates. I just wanted to point out that one of his coworkers is apparently Lara Flynn Boyle, seriously slumming in some kind of Nehru-collared shirt.

Marvin, 11/3/06

Lord alive, I hope the dog eats that baby.