Post Content

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/13/08

I’ve been having a pretty good day so far, and coming home to find out that Rex kicked off today’s installment of his namesake comic strip by saying “Speaking of cruising…” just made it that much better. Even though the plot being expositioned up seems to involve less sex with anonymous 18-year-olds in the park and more yacht-related high society hijinks, I’m still pretty excited about it. Rex’s shifty-eyed look in the final panel would seem to indicate that he’s Lenore Foster’s connection for banned performance-enhancing drugs before each year’s regatta; of course, this calls into question which drugs might enhance yachting performance. Gin?

Curtis, 8/13/08

Oh, look, Ms. Honeystump’s emblackenation has spread to his classmate Venus!

If I may talk seriously for a moment: some readers have speculated that these mysterious racial shifts have been designed to accommodate editorial grumbles about the merest hint of miscegenation. Truly, I think you’re giving the comics coloring world far too much credit, in terms of thinking that weird things actually happen for reasons. The online versions of the King Features strips are not colored by the artists, nor do the artists offer guidance for same. The colorists can only use the internal context of the strip to help them make their choices. When you realize that they often ignore explicit in-strip cues to product howlers like this and this, well, do you really expect some sort of multi-week trans-strip consistency?

For Better Or For Worse, 8/13/08

“I’ve known you both for a long time. I’ve seen you guys through a lot of crazy circumstances. You know, like when you were transparently lusting after her even though you were married and passive-aggressively browbeating your wife into having a child she didn’t want! And when you were still married and propositioned her right after she was nearly raped! And when she moved back to Millborough specifically because she heard you were getting divorced, but continued to string along her boyfriend! I gotta say … this feels like it’s gonna work. I say that because I’m a terrible, terrible person.”

Crankshaft, 8/13/08

Oh, that Crankshaft! Trying to warm up to his new housemate, he offered to “take [her] on [his] favorite ride!” By which he almost certainly means his penis! Ha ha, I have to go lie down and weep now because I thought of that.

Post Content

Real comics coming shortly, but a couple of points of interest in a rare midweek metapost:

• I got interviewed by New Yorker cartoonist Zach Kanin for the New Yorker cartoon blog! Our discussion, which naturally came ’round to the soap opera strips, seems to have inspired Zach to do his own take on the genre.
• Speaking of soap strips, several locals have contacted me for my opinion on the latest comics purge in the Baltimore Sun, which has jettisoned those soaps that survived the previous purge (A3G, RMMD, and the Phantom) and compacted everything onto a single page. I long ago migrated completely to the Houston Chronicle for all my comics-reading needs, and now read the Sun only for its hard-hitting coverage of local public transit failures and fur-coat related mayoral scandals, but if I had a 40 handy I would pour a bit out on the curb in memory of the glorious Sun comics page that once was. When I first moved to Baltimore in 2002, the comics occupied two full, glorious pages, and the local paper’s collection served as my introduction to most of the soapers that I cover on this site. It’s pretty safe to say that if I had arrived in town just a couple of years later, when most had been jettisoned, this blog would not exist. Newspaper editors will tell you that monkeying with the comics pages gets a huge reaction from readers, and I’m baffled on why they can’t make some money off of that passion. Put the damn things in a separate insert and pump it full of more ads than a NASCAR race, but do something other than just cutting.

Post Content

Blondie, 8/12/08

Yes, Dagwood, whenever we see the lithe, toned bodies of male Olympic athletes at the top of their form, their muscles rippling, their torsos dripping with man-dew … well, who doesn’t think of “hot dogs?”

Dennis the Menace, 8/12/08

“Oh, and just so you know, I’m wearing one of those anachronistic union suits for no reason that anyone can fathom, and it’s unbuttoned in the back, obviously, so you’re pretty much guaranteed to see my ass.”

Gasoline Alley, 8/12/08

In a desperate bid to hold on to its share of the ever-shrinking comics page, Gasoline Alley has decided to woo readers by dishing up hillbilly T&A. All I can say is: better here than in Snuffy Smith.

Gil Thorp, 8/12/08

This is the moment where Gil realizes that he needs to stop giving out his cell phone number to his loser students and their lame-ass parents. I’m pretty sure that he’s flying the Thorp-Plane over to the Hughes residence in order to strafe it and put an end to these irritating phone calls once and for all.