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Blondie, 5/13/07

The saddest thing is that the central joke of this strip — that Blondie has been utterly charmed into an aroused frenzy by her pampering, and is eager to discovery what other surprises her husband has prepared for her, while Dagwood has one foot out the door as he’s planning to head out for a “men’s foursome” — is so in keeping with the well-established dynamic of the Bumstead marriage that I barely noticed it. The thing that really disturbed me is the heart that’s drifted up into Blondie’s word balloon in the final panel. I have no idea what it’s supposed to represent semantically. I suppose it could be “love” as a noun and term of endearment, rather than “love” as a verb, which it usually stands for — but then it ought to have a comma after it. Really, the fact that it’s sitting after a comma just makes it all the more anomalous to me. Mostly I’m worried that Dag and Blondie have ingested some kind of potent hallucinogen and now believe themselves to be conversing using abstract symbols rather than normal human speech.

Family Circus, 5/13/07

This strip is a subtle but powerful reminder of the strict laws of patriarchy that govern the Family Circus. Note that Dolly wonders who their mother would be if her parents hadn’t met, not who their father would be. On Mother’s Day, she assumes that her mother is just an interchangeable womb who could have been replaced by any number of other females from other times and places and their family would have remained pretty much the same.

I really enjoy the fact that all the other comics moms in Billy’s thought balloon are just sort of idly looking off into the distance, except for one. FBOFW’s Elly is looking straight at the eldest Keane boy in goggle-eyed horror, as if contemplating how excruciating it would have been to pass that enormous melonhead through her birth canal.

Doodles by Mac & Sack, 5/13/07

Someone’s kind of fixated on the idea of being crushed to death by a boa constrictor, and it makes me uncomfortable. I’m also disturbed the puffed-out cheeks of “the Doughboy” in the Doodle Zoo: they clearly indicate that he’s dying horribly as the smart-ass little koala cracks wise. I am kind of amused that the Doughboy seems to have lost his “Pillsbury” moniker at the last minute due to trademark infringement concerns, though it does bring to mind the notion of an American infantryman, having survived the hell of combat in the trenches against the Hun’s forces on the Western Front, being felled by an unexpected snake attack.

Panels from Dennis the Menace, 5/13/07

I’m not showing you the rest of this strip, because these panels perfectly set up the Dennis the Menace strip we’d all like to see, the one where Mr. Wilson murders Dennis with a pair of garden shears.

Panel from Mary Worth, 5/13/07

Since Vera’s so angry at Von, it’s ironic that she’s remembering him at the height of his glory: all decked out in his yellow suit, shirt, and facepaint, standing in front of that blue door, and disco dancing like nobody’s business.

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Archie, 5/12/07

Hey, Archie creative team, do you think I like making joke after joke about how your comic strip reads like it was written by a computer that almost understands the humor and emotions of biological life forms, but doesn’t quite? Well, I don’t, OK? So just stop writing jokes that sound like they were written by a computer, damn it. I mean … shiny … penny … Betty … glowing for some reason … WHAT THE HELL. CUT IT OUT.

It’s also possible that the lady in the third panel isn’t actually Betty, but some new one-off character named “Penny,” and that everyone looks alike in this strip and the only way to tell them apart is by their hair. In the interest of saying something nice: those are some sweet-ass pants on whoever that girl is in the third panel. (That’s sweet-ass pants, not sweet ass-pants. I mean, they may be sweet ass-pants, but we can’t see the back, so I’m not going to take a position on that.)

Judge Parker, 5/12/07

Roger has already been established as a villain because others have been talking smack about him before he arrived, plus he’s astoundingly hideous. But, you know, a less careful reader might assume that Rachel really had succumbed to dementia “these days” — she seemed pretty sharp the last time we saw her, but of course that was more than three months ago. Except that, as near as I can tell, those three months have covered less than 24 hours of strip time. DON’T THINK WE’RE NOT KEEPING TRACK, JUDGE PARKER OVERLORDS! Anyway, it looks like we’re in for a Very Special Elder Abuse storyline as Groves and Rachel are held captive by this evil refugee from the Allman Brothers Band.

As you may or may not know, Judge Parker and Rex Morgan, M.D., are both written by the same guy (Woody Wilson), and both are currently in the midst of storylines involving the dissipated, ungrateful sons of the rich attempting to protect their inheritance from ancillary family members. Wild speculation in the comments as to the motivation is encouraged.

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Apartment 3-G, 5/11/07

Sure, Gabriella is a cringe-inducing stereotype who babbles in a parody of Spanish that’s worse even than the Judge Parker punks’ French. She also nurtured the black, black soul of Margo in her womb for nine months. But if she manages to rescue Lu Ann where all others have failed, she’ll officially become one of the most together and interesting people in this strip, rivaling the “I’m a docent!” guy and leagues ahead of Tommie. She’s doing it with style and panache, too, saying a little prayer and then letting Satan himself know that she is on the side of good and that his infernal “locks” cannot keep her from her holy mission.

Family Circus, 5/11/07

For reasons I can’t explain, I am totally charmed by the fact that Jeffy and Dolly have thrown some pillows on the floor to relax on for their little chat, and that Jeffy is resting his chin in his hand while he contemplates the insane nonsense that his sister is spouting. If they were older, I’d say they were high (“Hey, is that old saying, like, ‘moth’ or, like, ‘moss’? And, like, what does it mean?”), but as it is they’re clearly just morons on pillows.

B.C., 5/11/07

So, for those of you not following the details: the B.C.s written before Johnny Hart’s death ended around the end of April, and for the next eight weeks or so we’ll be getting the Hart family’s favorite classic strips before we start in with the “new” strips assembled from old drawings and new jokes. The repeat strips have as near as I can tell all been from the last ten to fifteen years, which is kind of odd for a strip that had decades of storied history and a kind of terrible last ten to fifteen years.

Anyway, today’s repeat struck me as really familiar, which is an experience I have a lot, since I read newspaper comics obsessively and have a disturbingly good recall for them. If you squint at the copyright notice beneath the first panel, you’ll see that the date on this is 1996, but my memory of it was a lot fresher, so I went hunting through my archives and found this, from three months ago:

B.C., 2/5/07

Yeah. Um. The weird part is that it’s clearly not the same strip — the art is different and the wording of the punchline has been tweaked a bit. I do need to say that if you have to write a joke every day for years and years, you could actually plagiarize from yourself and not realize it — after all, if you thought it was funny once, you might think so again a few years later. Going through my archives, I’ve found that I’ve made the same joke, nearly word-for-word, in more than one post. Still and all, you’d think someone else would have noticed that and chosen not to run this rerun strip just now.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/11/07

Now, let’s cast aside our petty differences over Asian stereotypes and dumb names and unrealistic corporate governance procedure. I think we can all agree that panel three is the most awe-inspiringly beautiful depiction of a combover ever set to paper by an artist. Mary Worth team: you’ve been resting on your laurels long enough. The next time Wilbur needs a close-up, you’ve got to raise the bar.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 5/11/07

There’s much to love about today’s TDIET, including, but not limited to, “Doodleville,” “Dancing With Dorks,” “the urge to tear out her vocal cords,” Nurse Nulla using a conveniently placed stack of books as a leaning post, and “Nurse Nulla.” But I’d really like to direct your attention to the “thanx to” box. It’s as if someone held captive by substandard medical care sent a desperate message out to the only person who he knew could help: Al Scaduto.