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Baby Blues, 12/21/21

Video is an illusion, a series of still images run in sequence so quickly that your brain can’t perceive them as individual pictures and instead smooths them together to create what appears to be movement. In animation, a smear is a trick that can heighten this sense of motion by using an individual frame that itself contains a blur or multiple still images of the moving figure. You can see some great examples here or follow this Twitter feed for more. The technique is also used in comics, sometimes to great effect! But sometimes it implies that a comic strip mom’s face is a nightmarish mass of writhing tentacles just barely contained by a protective mask, and by “protective” in this case, I don’t mean that the mask reduces transmission of the novel coronavirus, but rather that it holds back these awful and presumably slimy face-limbs from bursting out and squeezing the life out of us while we scream in terror.

Mary Worth, 12/21/21

I’m beginning to suspect that the larger point of this Mary Worth storyline is to tap into a near-universal situation: almost all of us have a loved one who is in a relationship with an obviously and objectively terrible person, and it interferes with our own friendship with them. Rather than trying to break them up, Mary implies, we should just accept that people come together for mysterious reasons of their own that we can’t understand. Which is a real cop out, considering that the reason Estelle and Wilbur got back together is because Mary told Estelle to take him back! It’s Mary Worth who’s responsible for your friend’s bad relationship decisions! Here, take this pitchfork and map to Charterstone.

Marvin, 12/21/21

There’s so much about Marvin the comic strip and Marvin the character I find objectionable, but at the top of the list, maybe even above the shitting, is when he gives the audience a smug, knowing look to accentuate some terrible punchline. “Eh?” he seems to asking us today? “Eh? Women be shopping? Sexism? Eh?”

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Dick Tracy, 12/20/21

I know I should be focusing on the fact that Blackjack, a member of Dick’s rogue gallery, owned a collection of Dick Tracy memorabilia and Dick promised to look after it when Blackjack went to prison (presumably because Dick sent him there), but it got stolen and Dick feels a genuine sense of personal failure over this, but I’m sorry, I’m very fixated on “that comes later.” Dick really cares about this stolen Dick Tracy collection business! “Sorry, Tess, you get a hug when you do a BETTER JOB scouring the DARK WEB for Blackjack’s stuff. I expect you to sleep on the couch tonight.”

Daddy Daze, 12/20/21

The Daddy Daze daddy is using all the Daddy Daze baby’s clothes for weird, upsetting art projects, and is also just letting the baby pee and poo into nonabsorbent plastic bubble wrap! I’m beginning to think that his divorce may have been too amiable and the Daddy Daze mommy should maybe reconsider their custody arrangements.

Mary Worth, 12/20/21

Mary, that is frankly a lot of words just to say “Damn, the sex must be incredible.”

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Mary Worth, 12/18/21

I may have said this before, but I feel like the new-model Mary Worth doesn’t have quite enough nose visible when she’s looking straight at the reader — or, as in this case, when she’s looking straight at the reader in Wilbur’s mind, which may indicate that he’s imagining her looking at him? Anyway, like I said, not enough nose. Like Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort. Maybe the fact that she’s appearing here in Wilbur’s imagination shows what he really thinks of her, ha ha! “Can’t wait to get on a cruise ship with my lady, who’s mine forever now, and abandon our pets to the meddling old biddy who browbeat her into getting back together with me! See ya, snake lady, I’m gonna have ocean sex!” Anyway, confidential to Estelle: international waters are a great place to murder somebody.

Crock, 12/18/21

A thing I enjoy doing sometimes is trying to figure out the chain of thought that produced a particularly lame or weird punchline in a comic. Like, today’s Crock: did this start off as a holiday-themed gag, like someone tried to think of what a guy named Kyle (?) would have for Christmas dinner and came up with “pigs’ feet in possum gravy”? Or did the food joke come first, and then the writer realized they needed to make this about Christmas because it was December 18th, so they wedged in “…for the holidays” at the end of the setup? Either way, I appreciate how truly depressed the legionnaire who doesn’t have any dialogue looks, both when he’s hanging up the wreath and when he’s just looking out at us in glum resignation that his lot in life is to be a silent reaction character in Crock.