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Spider-Man, 3/31/07

You may have missed Friday’s thrilling Spider-Man, in which the fake Mrs. Spider-Man attempted to escape from the back seat of her captor’s car! So, thrill to this installment in which … she … is … put back into the car by her captor. This, combined with my rage earlier this week at similar non-developments, has brought about an epiphany: just about everything that happens in Spider-Man happens only to slow down the action of the strip. It’s all an endless delaying action, making the big payoff we’re going to get that much more exciting. I’ve been reading this feature daily for something like three years now, so I can tell you that said payoff had better be really good.

Panel three: Spidey, you got clocked by a brick and you’re just now wondering if this whole “spider-sense” thing isn’t a load of bunk?

Pluggers, 3/31/07

Just when you think that the whole “anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic animals uneasily sharing narrative space” scenario can’t get any more unsettling, you get today’s paean to involuntary sterilization. For obvious reasons, I try not to pay too close attention to the various family relationships among the horrifying bipedal beasts of Pluggers, so I can’t say for sure if the dog and the Chicken-Lady are kin or just acquaintances, but I think what really makes this panel disturbing is the look of mortal terror on the face of the li’l pup contrasted with heavy-lidded indifference of his feathered captor.

Would it make me an evil chardonnay-swilling elitist if I suggested that actual plugger litter control is a crude, hand-scrawled sign that reads “FREE PUPPIES,” which you put on a pole in the middle of your dog-feces-laden yard? What, it would? Oh, OK then, I won’t … what, I already said it? Damn it.

Beetle Bailey, 3/31/07

Wow, who knew that painting your own porch furniture was something that somehow lowered one’s prestige, and that, more generally, the elite of our military’s officer corps lives in a fishbowl in which every action that they and their spouses take is judged by neighbors and passersby? Who should be painting a general’s chairs? A crew of enemy combatants, on loan from Gitmo?

Family Circus, 3/31/07

“I’m helping her too, Jeffy! I’m masturbating to Internet pornography because I know that cleaning leaves her too tired to perform her marital duties. Oh, and let me borrow one of those shirts, while you’re handing them out.”

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For Better Or For Worse, 3/30/07

I’m not entirely sure what I would considered to be the best possible way for this storyline to play out; it probably would have involved April an’ Gerald having a frank discussion about their respective thoughts about sex and feelings for each other, informed by knowledge about contraception that they learned in school and from their parents. But you know what? This scenario — where they almost let their fifteen-year-old hormones get the better of them but then don’t get the chance, and almost got caught but don’t, with Elly and John none the wiser — works for me. Hopefully in the longer term it’s just another awkward adolescent moment that will be looked back on years later with fond amusement, and not not chapter one of April’s Descent Into Whoredom. Because if she wants to wear something trampy at Liz and Anthony’s wedding (and you know she will), it’d be harder with a bun in the oven.

Mark Trail, 3/30/07

How not to solve a mystery: Like all too many human beings, Mark has seen a little evidence, used that evidence to jump to a conclusion, and now goes into the world not in the spirit of genuine inquiry, but only looking for something that confirms what he already believes. I’d love to see him shown up. “Come on, Andy, let’s look over here in that nearest cove! Hmm, what have we here … some logs … some debris … Dan’s bloated, rotting corpse … dammit, where are the things that will confirm what I believe?”

Sally Forth, 3/30/07

Oh, come on now, we all know — whether we want to or not — that the Forths screw like minks, constantly. I mean, look at this. Or this. Or this. They probably really go nuts when Sally’s totally blotto, which is pretty much all the time. “Been a while” probably means “since lunch, when Ted drove over and we did it in the car out in the parking lot.”

The Wizard of Id, 3/30/07

Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a second:

1. The Wizard of Id is written by Johnny Hart.
2. Johnny Hart is a strict creationist, as indicated by his constant ridicule of Darwin in B.C.
3. The Wiz here implies that the King is descended from monkeys.
4. [HEAD EXPLODES]

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Baldo, 3/29/07

As part of my program of occasionally saying something unmitigatedly nice, I’ll say that I really like this technique that Baldo does occasionally, where normally cartoonish characters suddenly become lifelike, if romantically idealized. For reference for those of you who don’t read the strip, this is what Tia Carmen usually looks like:

Since Baldo is about a Latino family, it’s tempting to call these installments comic-page telenovellas, but their real antecedents are soap strips like Mary Worth or Rex Morgan, I think. I like them because I think they represent the idealized way the characters see themselves, rather than the cartoonish way in which we usually look at them.

Ziggy, 3/29/07

Hmm! Say there, Ziggy seems to be saying something to the mice about something that we, the audience, can’t see! Doesn’t this seem a bit familiar? Let’s turn the wayback machine to November 15, 2006:

Ziggy, 11/15/06

At the time, I said this:

You know what would have made this cartoon marginally funnier? If we could actually see the mice making off with Ziggy’s cell phone. Or see the antenna sticking out of the mousehole. Or see Ziggy holding an empty cell-phone holder. Or really see anything that would indicate that this wasn’t one of hundreds of photocopies of a single pre-drawn “Ziggy talks to the mice” panel, all awaiting only the addition of “hilarious” dialogue and published at reasonable intervals so as not to be glaringly obvious.

(Note for libel purposes: I’m not saying that Ziggy actually uses photocopied panels instead of coming up with a new one every day. I’m just saying that it would save a lot of work if it did.)

Well, it sadly looks like I was right. Despite the fact that today’s Ziggy could have just used the November panel with different dialogue, it seems that the artist has gone through all the trouble of making an entirely new drawing for what’s essentially the same mice-using-wireless-communications-technology joke. To his credit, he managed to make it even less interesting visually this time around.

Spider-Man, 3/29/07

A couple of weeks ago, I proposed that Spider-Man getting hit in the head with a brick would cause amnesia and mistaken-wife-identity hijinks. It was a moronic idea for a storyline, I thought, but hey, this is Spider-Man. Of course, I failed to account for the fact that the Spider-Man strip will do whatever it takes to prevent you from deriving enjoyment of any kind from it. Today, it becomes obvious that Spidey getting bonked in the head and stumbling about woozily for the better part of a week wasn’t meant to set up any ludicrous narrative shenanigans; in fact, it actually served absolutely no narrative purpose at all. As I should have known since this enraging sequence a couple years back, this strip exists entirely as some elaborate bit of storytelling gamesmanship, in which all reader expectations of excitement or at least a vague sense of involvement are continually and gleefully thwarted.

Pluggers, 3/29/07

What I love best about today’s Pluggers is how damn smug Grandpa McCheapskate looks. “Yeah, I’m trying to teach you the value of a dollar … specifically, that it’s four times greater than the value of a quarter. Now go get a job, you little ingrate.”