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Apartment 3-G, 8/12/10

Well, it looks like I Dressed In The Dark has a little-known sister show, called I Allowed My Hair To Grow In Its Natural Color In The Dark, And Also During When It Was Light Out. I’m not sure where this little scene is supposed to be playing out — I suppose it’s on the IDITD set, and the Monocolored Creepy Staring Background Guy, of the sort well known in this strip, is one of the grips or something. Still, it’s weird that the cameras aren’t rolling, as this sort of moment — Kat’s eyebrow arched cruelly, Lu Ann goggle-eyed with terror — is pretty much what reality TV is for.

Mary Worth, 8/12/10

Oh, look, Mike’s dad exists after all! I was beginning to suspect that perhaps he had died years ago, and Fred was keeping his mouldering corpse in his bedroom and cashing his Social Security checks. Actually, based on today’s strip, that might still be the case: the expressionless face, the shuffling walk, the tattered, colorless clothes, and Mike’s expression of sheer terror all point to Lonnie here actually being a zombie reanimated through dark magic.

Blondie, 8/12/10

The weirdest thing about Alexander’s outfit is that, with its bow tie and giant buttons, it’s sort of a less dignified version of Dagwood’s usual work outfit. But, as this strip demonstrates, dignity has never been particularly high on Dagwood’s priority list.

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There are days in the comics blogging business when I really know that I’ve made it. Today, for instance, I was one of surely only a few hundred people on the Universal Press Syndicate’s email distribution list chosen to receive a very important email with the following subject line:

AACK! After 34 Years, Cathy Comic Strip Bids Farewell

Read all about it here, assuming you enjoy reading interviews with Cathy Guisewite in PDF format, and who doesn’t, really.

Obviously, a long-running strip like Cathy can’t just go away without a big to-do. But with the strip’s formerly chronically single title character now married off, and the October 3 end date too close for her to finally poop out a baby, we have to ask ourselves what the bang of an ending will be. Since Cathy was a pioneer depiction of a working woman, we suggest that she get with the times: heartless layoff, followed by workplace spree killing, concluding with suicide by cop.

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Pluggers, 8/11/10

You have to give Pluggers a little bit of credit for coming up with a half-assed excuse to rerun panels (“Spotlight on readers who have nothing better to do than send in tons of Pluggers ideas!”); some cartoons just rerun strips in no-assed silence, which speaks to a certain lack of pride of craftsmanship. Anyway, as a professional comics-reader, it’s interesting to keep track of how my own immediate, visceral reaction to a panel can change from month to month. For instance, when this panel first ran back in May, I apparently was moved to write some weird diatribe about awkward sentence construction, Jewish stereotypes, and plugger sex. Whereas today, I just laughed a cynical laugh, because it’s obvious to me now that point is that pluggers are cheapskates who’ve never given anyone a tip in their lives, and plugger wife here dies a little inside every time they sneak out of the diner without leaving anything on the counter, and now Mr. Plugger is making a big joke about it. And certainly he’s not going to do anything nice for his wife, who just has to take care of him for free, without expecting any sort of reward, even emotional rewards, ha ha! You might want to keep an eye on those scissors, buddy.

Dick Tracy, 8/11/10

Considering the important social function served by the morgue in the corpse-lousy Dick Tracy universe, it’s no surprise that the building’s facade features enormous letters that presumably light up at night, so people know right away where they should be dumping the bodies.