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Spider-Man, 6/11/10

Just as Spider-Man the character within the Spider-Man newspaper strip is a pathetic failure at whatever he attempts, so too is the Spider-Man strip itself! For instance, surely one of the whole purposes for its existence (somewhere on the list below “entertain millions of readers around the country,” something else it doesn’t do properly) is to help build awareness of and affection for the Spider-Man brand, along with the brands of other major characters and properties owned by Marvel and its corporate parent, Disney. Thus, you’d expect that the strip would be tasked to do its small part to add to the marketing blitz for the Iron Man sequel, the release date of which was presumably set months if not years in advance. But it turns out that on May 7, the day Iron Man 2 hit movie theaters nationwide, Peter was being wowed by his wife’s ability to operate a camera. No, the Spider-Man strip is only jumping into the game five weeks later, because doing anything better than a half-assed job at anything would be wholly incongruent with the strip’s general vibe of ineptitude.

Blondie, 6/11/10

I would argue that the less Blondie does to draw attention to the Bumsteads’ bizarre living-room layout, the better. Still, I suppose this strip — in which Dagwood, tired of staring numbly at a screen while his wife faces away from him, tries and fails to figure out a more amenable position for the two of them — is some kind of coded story about their fading sex life.

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Slylock Fox, 6/10/10

Ed Power of My Cage has frequently teased us with hints that someday we will learn what happened to all the humans and how his strip came to be populated entirely by anthropomorphic animals. But Slylock, with its more atomized narrative, just sort of takes the new biosphere as a given. Still, today’s Six Differences could be offering a glimpse at the precise moment when the dominance of H. Sapiens over the planet began to falter. A cheerful bird began to attack a gentleman’s newspaper; a freakishly huge spider terrified a nearby child; another bird sat on a rooftop, watching, waiting; and, before anyone could really understand the hows or whys, canines were in charge of law enforcement and Slick Smitty and his few remaining fellow humans were reduced to running petty scams in order to survive in the New Animal Order.

Archie, 6/10/10

What was the cause of humanity’s decline? Panel one of today’s Archie may have an answer. Can you explain what exactly is going on anatomically between Jughead’s feet and his head? Human civilization presumably collapsed either because of rampant genetic abnormalities or pervasive hallucinogenic use.

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Blondie, 6/9/10

Here is a 100 percent true story: When I was about 10 or so, my dad and I were driving through downtown Buffalo, and this car sort of cut us off, and my dad said, “Jeez, what’s up with this clown,” exactly the way you would in such a situation, and then I looked closer and saw that the car in question was being driven by an actual, literal clown, in full make-up and regalia and everything. His car was not unusually small, nor was he sharing it with dozens of other clowns. This was endlessly hilarious to me, and whenever I see clowns depicted in everyday life, I think of this incident, and it makes me laugh. Certainly it was much funnier than Blondie’s grim and off-putting attempt to wring surrealistic yuks out of a vicious clown assault.

Mark Trail, 6/9/10

You know who really, really likes working zoning disputes into his stories? Jack Elrod, author of Mark Trail! Now, it probably is true that land use regulations are a much more important part of rural life than we city slickers realize, but now all of the sudden a dramatic change in zoning laws is arising as a plot point in this unusually urban storyline. Thus, I must assume that Elrod is a member of the small, misunderstood community of zoning fetishists, or “zonies.” While he toils away on the outdoorsman strip he inherited from Ed Dodd, he’s always hoping that one day one of the alternative presses will pick up Fred Gorski, Zoning Board Co-Chair Of Destiny!, the erotic graphic novel he’s been tinkering with for years.

Apartment 3-G, 6/9/10

Uh, is it just me, or are those oven mitts really, really big? They look more like the freakishly oversized novelty hands you get at sporting events. Naturally, Tommie has cut off the protruding index finger, as neither she nor anyone else believes her to be “number one.”