The Comics Curmudgeon

Main Menu

Social Media

Comment of the Week

Well, I must admit, I have never seen 'yikes' used in a cartoon that conveys so exactly and accurately the reader's impression of the panel in which it occurs. I mean, yikes.

—Chance
Comments are closed

Punching the Gordian knot

Post Content

Mark Trail, 9/12/08

Would it be OK if I just posted Mark Trail every day, with minimal comment, for as long as it continues to be this mind-blowingly hilarious? Today our hero proposes solving a local water crisis — part of an enormously complex issue involving the need to protect nature but also leave room for development, the tangled legislation around water rights, agricultural water requirements, climate change, and the competing demands on drinking water from dozens of different communities of varying sizes and political clout — by calling in a man whose main problem-solving algorithm consists of “Does it have a face I can punch?” and “Are there any intervening objects that would impede the trajectory of my fist?” Hijinks will almost certainly ensue.

Almost as funny is the continued presences of our friend the raccoon, who is attempting to get fresh with the little girl in the first panel. Raccoons are well known to be fearsomely intelligent carriers of parasites and disease who are unafraid of humans and are probably plotting our overthrow even as I type this. Last year when Amber and I went to Vancouver, we saw in Stanley Park an enormous raccoon that was hanging out just inches away from a baby sitting in a stroller, while a woman (presumably the baby’s mother) was standing six feet away taking lots of pictures of this supposedly adorable nature encounter. I’m not saying I wanted to see the raccoon grab the baby and drag him or her off into the underbrush, but, well, a valuable lesson would have been learned if that had happened. Since the little girl in Mark Trail isn’t real, though, I’m totally down with a raccoon-kidnapping subplot here.

Dick Tracy, 9/12/08

Dick Tracy’s mission in life is to kill and maim as many criminals, suspected criminals, innocent passers-by, and bleeding-heart libs as possible, so it’s no wonder why he’s so excited to see a version of himself that’s thirty feet high, imbued with superhuman strength, and impervious to bullets. Still, I think illustrating his massive tie-erection in the first panel is in somewhat poor taste.

Mary Worth, 9/12/08

“Ian’s going to think I’m an idiot for letting someone steal my identity and then use my money!”

“It happens to many types of people, I’m sure! Not just idiots, but morons, twits, fools, dummies, lame-brains, airheads…”

Comments are closed

Young Goodman Thorp

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 9/11/08

Thank goodness that the huge Satan-worshipping fire orgy that rings in Milford’s football season has now become an annual event. God only knows what exactly is burning in the background of panel one — probably the high school, or perhaps the entire neighborhood surrounding it — but I kind of love Gil standing on his makeshift platform exhorting his crazed minions to ever-higher levels of ecstatic bloodlust. You’ll note that at least one devotee of the flame is flashing some devil horns at the end of her jelly-braceleted arm, indicating her devotion to the archdemon Astaroth. The fact that Cully has been given temporal dominion over the football team is a sure sign of the carnage that will conclude the evening, as he fallaway slams the unwitting victims directly into the inferno, ensuring that the Dark Lord will smile on the Mudlarks this fall.

Mark Trail, 9/11/08

After much promise, the just concluded Kelly-versus-Cherry storyline rapidly declined into a total snoozefest, but I’m still holding out high hopes that we’ll get some action out of this modern day St. Francis, his adorable daughter, and their sinister raccoon familiar. So far our gentle baldy has cunningly used the passive voice to explain the plight of the thirsty, thirsty animals, noting only that the water is being “drained away.” Eventually, though, the little tyke will want to know who is doing the draining, and he’ll have to admit that it’s the humans, with their endless appetite for well-watered suburban lawns and Bed, Bath, and Beyond-bearing strip malls. Presumably the two of them will then silently watch the dehydrated beasts in panel two stumble around in the vicinity of their cabin for a bit; next, the raccoon will chitter menacingly, they’ll nod their heads in agreement, and the killing spree will begin.

Apartment 3-G, 9/11/08

Lu Ann is capable of such charming depths of self-deception that I was hoping she’d take her initial thought balloon to its logical conclusion. “Beer cans, wine bottles, and pizza boxes! It looks like a scene from a frat house movie. That’s it! Alan is allowing a major studio to use his apartment as a set for a frat house movie! It all makes sense now!” It would also explain the terrible state of the curtains; as any good set dresser knows, the stereotypical denizen of a frat house in a frat house movie is such a seething cauldron of homophobia that he would literally have a stroke if he attempted to contemplate window treatments.

Marmaduke, 9/11/08

I originally read this caption as “Why don’t you bury him in his own lawn chair?” Which you have to admit makes sense, as Marmaduke appears to be dead.

Comments are closed

Pizza joint OF THE GODS

Post Content

Funky Winkerbean, 9/10/08

The most ancient of the Greek gods, considered to be primordial and the ancestors of all the others, were Ouranos (the sky) and Gaia (the earth). They were married, but they quarreled, because Ouranos forced Gaia to keep their children (the Titans) chained up inside of her body. So she secretly freed one of her sons and had him castrate her husband with a flint sickle; one of his testicles landed in the sea, which resulted in the birth of Aphrodite.

These ancient myths, while disturbing and terrible, have an undeniable power and grandeur, which is distinctly lacking in this equally horrifying scene in which Les and Crazy banter awkwardly about children and sausage slicers.

Mark Trail, 9/10/08

Sign that I am a bad person number 279: I found it kind of amusing that this kindly dad dug a grave for a wild animal. Not that we actually see the grave-digging; is it possible that he forced his daughter to do it? “What’s happening, papa?” “It’s called death, sweetie, and it’s a perfect opportunity for you to learn a valuable life skill.”

Either way, it’s a bad precedent set; the landscape is way too green for me to buy his “drought” explanation. Will he bury all of the hundreds of animal corpses left by the experimental virus that has been accidentally released from the nearby secret government bioweaponry lab?

Apartment 3-G, 9/10/08

I love that Lu Ann, who apparently has the worst self-esteem in all of recorded history, is focusing on the skimpiness of this garment. Because if Alan were cheating on her with someone who wore chaste, high-collared shirts that she stripped off during a particularly sexual-tension-filled moment during their bible study meeting, that would be totally OK!