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Shoe, 2/1/10

Say what you will about Funky Winkerbean, but at least it’s totally upfront with its non-stop cavalcade of misery. Some strips hide a core of intense gloom that occasionally peeks out from underneath the cheery front end of a gag-a-day strip. Take today’s Shoe, for instance. The Perfesser thought-balloons that “mama said there’d be days like this” as his morning alarm goes off. In other words, he’s already written the day off as terrible in his first few seconds of wakefulness. “Oh, look, I didn’t die painlessly in my sleep. Yep, it looks like it’s gonna be one of those days!”

It’s also possible that the alarm has been going off for hours now, and the Perfesser is simply unable to move close enough to the clock to turn it off, due to some combination of obesity and decrepitude.

Gil Thorp, 2/1/10

Like many an angry, aimless dropout of his generation, Steve Luhm uses sarcasm to get in little digs at his elders that they’re too irony-deficient to catch. “My dad taught me there’s honor in any job if you work at hard at it … even coaching! And you know what’s a good sign that someone’s a hard worker? When they just hand off part of their workload to some other random person at the first opportunity! Anyway, I’ll be sure to thank my dad for that pearl of wisdom.”

Judge Parker, 2/1/10

Speaking of sarcasm, the Judge Parker narration box’s is particularly transparent today. At breakfast, Sam is still talking about Neddy’s live-in boyfriend! Still! The guy just will not shut up about it! Come on, dude, move on into the 21st century with the rest of us, OK?

Curtis, 2/1/10

I admit to being charmed by the enormous unblinking eye on Michelle’s t-shirt today. Curtis’s romantic ardor must be intense indeed, as it would instill a major case of the heebie-jeebies in the soul of a lesser suitor.

Luann, 2/1/10

Wait, they wish they had more time together? Every time we see them in this God-damned strip, they’re endless hashing out the terms of their perfectly gross relationship. Admittedly, each panel featuring Brand and/or Toni is one that doesn’t feature Luann and/or Gunther, but one shouldn’t have to settle for the lesser evil. Why not just retool the strip around Knute, Puddles the dog, Shannon, and Mr. Fogarty, and do everyone a favor?

Mary Worth, 2/1/10

Dear young people everywhere: do not ask either of your parents why he or she cannot forget a past lover unless you want to hear things about his or her past sexytimes that will shake you to your core. Fortunately, Wilbur is such a negative nelly that he goes straight to the arguments while meaningfully adjusting his glasses, though this may only presage tomorrow’s vivid recounting of the mind-blowing post-argument make-up sex. The description will blow Dawn’s socks off, assuming that purple bands of gauze wrapped around the middle of one’s feet can be said to constitute “socks.”

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Apartment 3-G, 1/31/10

Margo has been largely absent from the A3G panels of late, privately mourning the death of her fiance in her own way (which way I assume involves equal parts cocaine and fisticuffs). While Sunday installments of this strip usually just consist of recaps of the previous week’s action, today we at least get a welcome Margo cameo. Her mind clouded by grief and/or drugs, she takes the opportunity to berate Tommie for no good reason, just screaming things at her that may or may not actually be responses to anything Tommie is actually saying.

Meanwhile, Professor Papagoras, realizing the implications of his sexy affair with a pill addict, contemplates two asprin and wonders if they’ll be a gateway to the hard stuff. Will he be on the street in a few weeks, desperately seeking a connection who can supply him with some black market Nuprin?

Mark Trail, 1/31/10

Mark extols the cleverness of the fisher without really dwelling on what its plans for that adorable old porcupine are now that it’s been flipped over on its back. The Wikipedia article on the subject assures us that stories that the fisher will “scoop out [the porcupine’s] belly like a ripe melon” are exaggerated; however, actually observed behavior, in which the fisher kills the porcupine over the course of half an hour by biting it on the face, is no less unsettling. Such a scene would be inappropriate for the Sunday funnies, though it might be amusing to depict Rusty watching on and weeping in terror at the end of the gruesome process.

Judge Parker, 1/31/10

Today’s Judge Parker is pretty much all about fucking! Sam, who lived in sin with Abbey for years before she made an honest man out of him, shows further hypocrisy by fulminating about Neddy’s sexual autonomy while crowing over Rocky and Godiva re-energizing their Hollywood sham marriage out in the guest house’s bed. Meanwhile, Randy Parker has arrived at April’s, for sex. Unfortunately, his disastrous new brush cut and ill-advised decision to pair a brown jacket with a black t-shirt may mitigate against this desired outcome; April is already openly fantasizing that he had decided not to show up.

Panels from Blondie, 1/31/10

Dagwood’s odd gait, with his unnaturally low shin-to-thigh ratio and his knees perpetually bent even in situations where normal people would stand upright, is one of this strip’s most striking artistic conventions. I believe it was a commentor on this blog who suggested that Mr. Dithers at some point had Dagwood’s hamstrings cut to limit his mobility and prevent him from fleeing his sinister employer. However, in this final panel, we see that his unusual leg structure may be an evolutionary adaptation that allows him to sleep comfortably on the family’s too-short couch.

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/31/10

The throwaway panels of today’s Snuffy Smith offer an explanation of the strange mixture of modern and archaic that defines the strip’s universe. At some point, perhaps several generations before the action began, the America we know was destroyed in some terrible cataclysm, possibly a nuclear war, leaving behind a ragtag, malnourished group of survivors attempting to rebuild their civilization, using their dim memory of the previous golden age as a guide. The disaster has also left its mark on the language these characters speak; just as the English language changed rapidly in the Middle Ages, when the ruling Norman aristocracy spoke French and English was used only by uneducated peasants, so too have these hardy survivors been too busy over the past decades rebuilding their smashed world to worry about the niceties of a bygone era’s grammatical rules. Thus, it’s not too surprising that the polity just beginning to arise in the aftermath of this destruction has the neologistic name of the “Newnited States”.

In unrelated news, the Smith (or “Smif,” in the new orthography) family gene pool is lousy with criminality.

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Herb and Jamaal, 1/30/10

Herb’s mother-in-law Eula is always depicted as argumentative and unpleasant, perhaps because she’s a stereotypical, lazily created mother-in-law character constantly haunted by intrusive thoughts of death and divine punishment. We already know that she attends a church that has a creepy obsession with the afterlife. In this strip, her thought-ballooning begins with a brief moment of justified self-esteem over her good health; but soon she’s distracted that by the realization that her contemporaries are dying at a rapid clip, followed by paranoia that her dead friends are laughing it up at the right hand of Our Lord over her eternal punishment in Hell. Cheery! Presumably she’s going to take this self-loathing out on Herb, for having the temerity to displace her in her daughter’s affections.

Mary Worth, 1/30/10

As is the case with a lot of modern art, I couldn’t tell you specifically what feelings the second panel of this Mary Worth is supposed to evoke, but I enjoy at a visceral level. If I may venture an interpretation: Dawn’s mind is so aflame with shock over Wilbur’s quick capitulation that she’s on the verge of tearing off her own head to rid herself of the confusion and anguish inside it. Wilbur’s eyes, meanwhile, tell the story of a man grimly determined to not force the issue, someone who fervently and implacably believes that, really, it just doesn’t matter.

Family Circus, 1/30/10

Ha ha, it looks like Jeffy has learned the concept of asking for forgiveness rather than permission! Unfortunately, he’s also about to learn why Mommy calls that blanket “the Smotherer.”