Post Content

Herb and Jamaal, 6/28/10

Naïve idealist that I am, when I saw this cartoon I thought that Herb and Jamaal had finally returned to the “Herb’s barber is wracked with anxiety” plotline it had launched a year and half ago. But upon consulting my archives, I discovered that it “returned” to the plot only in the sense of just rerunning the strip. I suppose that certain avant-garde critics might consider a sort of eternal narrative repetition to be advancing a plotline in a sense, if the core message of that plotline is that all human existence is a series of sorrows that will recur over and over again.

Mary Worth, 6/28/10

A blind date in which one of the parties locks a death-grip onto the upper arm of the other immediately upon the first in-person meeting is either an awesome blind date or a terrifying blind date, depending on your predilections. Also, the way Jenna and Mike are pointing their heads in random not-at-each-other directions in panel two might seem to indicate that the phrase “blind date” should in this case be taken literally.

Judge Parker, 6/28/10

“Thank God you’re back in the good old US of A, Ned, home of the best burgers in the world! Excuse me a moment while I drench this one with enough tomato-flavored corn syrup to make it edible.”

Shoe, 6/28/10

Ha ha, it’s funny because his wife’s soul is being tormented with fire, in hell, because of her sins!

Post Content

Apartment 3-G, 6/27/10

Oh my goodness, are Kat and Kitty the mother-daughter hosts of I Dressed In The Dark, the awesomely named reality TV show that Tommie sort of tried out for last year and which we haven’t heard about since? This would be fantastic for any number of reasons, but here are my top two:

• It would mean that Tommie’s big success in off-Broadway musicianship has apparently been a scam orchestrated to get her into this theater so she can be humiliated on national television, and has had nothing to do with her singing talents, which are presumably negligible; and
• She’s about to be lectured on couture by Kat, who appears to be wearing the same kind of ultra-starched white dress shirt, buttoned all the way to the very top, to which Tommie is partial, and by Kitty, who is sporting a hideous black v-neck/suspenders combo.

Panel from Mark Trail, 6/27/10

Am I a terrible urban elitist because I giggled at the thought of poor Rusty and Mark referring to the rather mundane sight of birds flying overhead as a “great experience?” I mean, if you don’t have the Internet, or television, or books, or humans outside of your household to entertain you, then, sure, yeah, I guess you need to go out and look at the sky for entertainment. I still mock, though.

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 6/26/10

Ought I apologize to you for keeping you criminally out of the loop on happenings in Gil Thorp? Perhaps! (I’m not going to say that I yearn for the day when a lack of basic knowledge of the current Gil Thorp storyline is an offense punishable by a fine and/or imprisonment, but I’m not going to say I don’t yearn for it either.) Anyway, long story short, Milford sports teams continue to play in the final week of June, long after virtually every school in the country has knocked off for summer vacation, and alt-country sensation/fiery pitcher Slim Chance has made a video for his band, which he’s uploaded to YouTube. And now, in a moment that will change both Slim’s life and the face of popular music forever, some chinbearded dude in Chicago is presumably forwarding said amateur YouTube video to some other dude named “Geoff,” because that, apparently, is how the music industry works, in 2010, chinbearded dudes in hipster glasses just stone cold forwarding YouTube clips to each other, all day, every day.

Herb and Jamaal, 6/26/10

Herb desperately hopes for some unimportant daily minutia to distract his friend from his own thoughts, because those thoughts, as is customary for characters in this strip, inevitably turn to death.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/26/10

You know, I can get away with running gags like “Marmaduke is a demon-beast who eats children and torments his supposed ‘owner,’ who is Hitler,” because I can be pretty sure that, no matter how close the subtext is to the surface, the strip will never actually show a child sliding down the dog’s gullet, or depict Phil giving a rousing speech exhorting the invasion of Poland. But trying to make up exaggerated versions of Funky Winkerbean’s next ultra-gloomy plot twist is a more dangerous game. I swear to you that my Friday proposal that Funky is dead and doesn’t know it was meant entirely in jest, but now … I’m not so sure. Either he really is already a specter, or, as the now-classic YouTube montage “No Signal” teaches us, he’s about to be murdered by an ax-wielding maniac.

Oh, and have we been a little short on Rusty-horror lately?

Panel from Mark Trail, 6/26/10

Rusty does not weep saline tears as the humans do; instead, when sad or overjoyed, he cries tears of melting flesh.