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Mark Trail, 3/22/11

As Mark’s sojourn on the Island Of Drug Dealing And Also No Razor Blades continues and his stubble begins to sprout forth from his unwilling cheeks, this strip must, in order to maintain its rigid grooming morality, offer up villains with ever more outrageous facial hair. This handlebar-mustached fellow is hilarious enough, but once Mark is sporting a full-on beard, he’ll no doubt encounter the island’s kingpin, who will resemble a young Chester A. Arthur.

Mary Worth, 3/22/11

You probably read yesterday’s Mary Worth and thought, “Gee, what could be more unsettling than grown woman Dawn Weston lounging around her pretty-princess bedroom and clutching her teddy bear like a little girl?” Well, today you get your answer: Dawn talking about how much she loves her dad while her teddy bear’s eyes suddenly pop open in arousal/terror.

Apartment 3-G, 3/22/11

“Flying in from Colorado?? We both know that no real place has ever been given such an outlandish name! To say nothing of the laughable proposition that a man might fly through the air like a bird.”

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Spider-Man, 3/21/11

I know this is a superhero comic, where heroes and villains typically engage in expository banter in mid-battle, and science is routinely ignored when not actively being laughed at. Still, everything about Morbius’s little soliloquy irritates me. I mean, the guy went through some quasi-scientific metamorphosis that made him an actual vampire (a “living vampire,” he calls himself, which, I can’t even deal with that right now) and apparently lightened his bones, but … he can’t fly? I mean, why stop short of flight? Too unrealistic? Or, worse, do the writers think they’re being somehow more accurate to bat anatomy and locomotion? Because, you know, bats really are the only mammals that actually fly. Morbius didn’t get his powers from experiments with flying squirrels, did he? I don’t know why I expect any such attention to detail from a strip that routinely describes spiders as insects, but it still galls me.

Hi and Lois, 3/21/11

Well, Trixie, it’s because your dad’s bowling has less to do with “bowling” and more with “not spending time with his family, because you’re all unbearable.” I’d make some joke about how Hi is having a secret affair, but it’s more likely he just goes to a bar and drinks in blessed silence for most of the evening.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/21/11

Man, that bird looks awfully pleased with itself. “Yeah, I totally crapped on that hillbilly lady’s head! I’m pretty cool.”

Ziggy, 3/21/11

Ziggy’s undereye bags really sell the joke here. Ha ha, Ziggy finds his poverty to be exhausting and emotionally taxing! That’s the joke, right?

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Crock, 3/20/11

One way to tell when something has been a well-understood facet of mainstream world culture for at least a year or so is that weird, fumbling, semi-coherent references to it start appearing in legacy comic strips. One thing I find interesting about both this reference to WikiLeaks and the one that appeared a a couple months ago in Marvin (beaten to the punch by Marvin! the shame!) is that the word in both cases is rendered in both small and capital letters, in contrast with the standard all-caps orthography. This just draws attention to the word in a sort of “Hey, look at us, bein’ topical!” sense, with a negative effect on the overall humorousness of the strip (though of course even without the typeface issues that, “humorousness” could only be detected with the most delicate scientific instruments). It’s as if the authors, barely understanding who or what a “WikiLeaks” might be, are convinced that the internal capitalization is crucial to the word’s totemic power and must be preserved at all costs, when in fact it’s just an irritating legacy that’s trickled down from late ’90s branding practices in the high tech industry.

Speaking of trickling down, though, while Crock lost to Marvin in the “making a stupid joke about WikiLeaks” race, at least Crock’s stupid joke isn’t about pissing oneself.

Panels from Crankshaft, 3/20/11

Ha ha, just another day in the Funkyverse! “I experienced a brief moment of triumph! But now the physical and emotional agony that is my life has come to the fore once again. You can’t win your way out of suffering!”