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Doodles by Mac & Sack, 2/11/07

I had a minor obsession with Doodles by Mac & Sack in the early days of this blog, which was recently rekindled when I realized that the “Sack” half of this doodling team is one of my favorite political cartoonists. This so-called “kids” Sunday feature still centers on way too much trauma for my taste. Today, having somehow escaped the clutches of a “friendly” boa constrictor, our nameless koala hero must crawl through the acid-drenched intestines of this hideous beast before the digestive process dissolves him into nothingness.

Also, in the “Doodle Zoo”: crossing a monster and a clown? For the love of God, aren’t clowns themselves monstrous enough?

Curtis, 2/11/07

Today’s Curtis illustrates the pitfalls of not following the FBOFW route but instead just keeping your characters the same age indefinitely. Curtis’ dad has, in his socio-cultural tastes and proclivities, been depicted as a typical baby boomer, in love with Motown and funk, and implacably opposed to the “rap” “junk” beloved by his eldest son. That all worked fine when the strip debuted in 1988. Now, nearly twenty years later, Greg would be getting on a bit in years to have come of age during the Temptations’ heyday but still have eleven- and eight-year-old kids. Today, we see that his age is being stealthily advanced; now his cultural tastes were set in what looks to be the late 70s and early 80s, the age of Space Invaders and the embryonic MTV. The problem is that that’s getting perilously close to the birth of hip-hop as a widespread cultural phenomenon; in five years, we may be seeing Mr. Wilkins berate his son with “You call that ‘Compton Kaheem’ junk rap? In my day we had Grandmaster Flash and Run-DMC!” or the like.

Also, as faithful reader AtomicDog and others pointed out, the punchline here is cribbed from a classic Peanuts strip, though in that case the “nyaahs” weren’t directed at Charlie Brown by his own father, which adds a bit of an edge here.

Panels from Judge Parker, 2/11/07

The main point of Sunday’s Judge Parker involves some mysterious, sinister lady in a pillbox hat who will no doubt be featured over and over again saying close variations on the same thing this week, so instead I wanted to focus on the throwaway panels, which offered me a chuckle with their depiction of this trio of North Americans contemplating architecture. “Oh my God, that building is, like, so old! Totally awesome! I bet it’s like, older than, like, my grandma and stuff! It’s so old it doesn’t have a parking lot! Radical!”

I’m not sure how long Neddy has been wearing that beret, but I hope it results in no end of mockery for her at the hands of the Frenchies. Also, Abbey seems to have suddenly transformed into The Mullet Without A Face.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/11/07

Man, words can’t describe the look of shock and horror on Rex’s face in the second panel. I think he heard the word “hard man” and thought for a brief, terrifying moment that June was going to try to initiate sexual relations.

Meanwhile, in the living room, I’m curious as to what direction we’re going with Niki watching Weeds, which, if you don’t know, is a show that centers on a soccer mom played by Mary-Louise Parker who is secretly running a marijuana business in her perfect exurban subdivision. I foresee a number of possibilities:

• “Heh, heh, now that these losers have let me into their home, I’m going to start corrupting their kid! LOSERS!”
• “God damn, this show reminds me of my loser druggie mom and her loser druggie boyfriend. LOSERS!”
• “Hey, my mom’s in the drug trade too, but the chick on this show is attractive and well dressed rather than skanky, and her family lives in an enormous McMansion, not a filthy tenement. LOSER!”
• “Jeez, the Morgans sure have a lot of premium cable channels that show softcore ‘erotic thrillers’ after 10 p.m.”

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Once again, I put off Sunday’s strips till Monday, but I do want to start your week off right with some sweet, sweet comment of the week action. This week’s top comment:

“Near as I can tell, Gil Thorp’s idea of basketball is judo-chopping a ball into a large basket of gingerbread men. Finally, something in this strip that makes sense.” –Rhekarid

And the many funny runners-up:

“A3G makes sense once you realize that everyone’s in eighth grade!” –AppleGirl

“Crankshaft is a lot like those Taco Bell commercials where hip young late-twentysomethings talk about the latest disgusting food offering from Taco Bell in that I hate both of them. The similarities pretty much end there, but I needed to get that off my chest.” –Joe

“Tommie’s outfit is hot … if she’s wearing a skirt with a bustle and high-button shoes and it’s 1892.” –gnome de blog

“Also, that ‘DAYS LATER’ in Gil Thorp really threw me for a loop. It’s a bold insight into the workings of the Thorpiverse. It could have been just minutes after the game, it could have been DAYS LATER, sure; but couldn’t it just as easily be a thousand generations hence, on some distant planetary colony? Apparently, yes, it could. You can’t tell the characters apart, anyways, so this supports my hypothesis.” –Foobar

“Bil Keane on Drawing. Today’s lesson: perspective. ‘When you draw the smug, angry face on your basketball-headed caricature of a son, only give his bulbous pig nose one nostril!'” –Steve S

“If there is justice, then the precipitation in Gil Thorp is nuclear fallout.” –Analyzer

“MW: Until this strip, I never realized how very very hard it is to draw Asian people. I can almost see the tongues sticking out of the artists’ mouths and the sweat beading on their foreheads as they labor over those ever-so-tricky Asian features.” –Poteet

“Of course, who could sleep with Aunt Rachel and Groves going at it hammer-and-tongs with the screams of ‘Here comes the butter for YOUR scones!’ echoing through the apartment. Brrrrrrrrrrrr.” –willethompson

“Of course, [Cedric]’s only working for Rachel for a week. Which means he’ll soon be looking for other temp work. Which will probably involve working as a life model at Neddy’s school, much to her embarrassment and titillation. This being Judge Parker, he’ll turn out to have a physique like the original GI Joes — buff, ripped and lacking a penis.” –cheech wizard

“What’s up with Gina? Disturbing hairdo and tendency to leer mischievously at her friend making out with Timothy Dalton aside, in previous strips she is always depicted as shorter and more petite than Tommy. Now, in today’s installment, she suddenly looms over her Victorian-garbed friend like a pigtailed Colossus of Rhodes. Is she standing on a box or something? Maybe she abruptly put on some platform shoes? Or is she just a woman with freaky hair who has a super-power that enables her to change her size?” –Lyman Returns

“A3G: I know it’s no ‘Theodore,’ but I just like calling Neil ‘Jacuzzi McDude.'” –Red Greenback

“If Bandar medicine is anything like Bandar livery or Bandar haberdashery, I’d say Mozz is in some deep shit.” –SmartPeopleOnIce

“I typically comment about how manly the women are drawn in GT, but it strikes me that Lisa Wyche isn’t only manly here, she also looks like an android. Lil’ Orphan Annie didn’t have pupils, but at least she knew to smile so that she didn’t look like a horrible pod person who had come to destroy us all. I know a few sports fans would argue that Lisa is ‘in the zone,’ but her look says ‘I will destroy you and eat your heart while you sleep.'” –King Folderol

“‘Have you ever seen a Wurlitzer?’ might actually be a great pickup line. Depending on what you want to pick up.” –Old Fogeyette

“In addition to Mary Worth, Judge Parker also features an aged crone nursing a paramour back to health. All the soap comics lately have characters on their deathbed. The metaphor is perfect.” –yellojkt

“Mark is a journalist, not a forest ranger, despite all evidence to the contrary.” –Gabe

“Yes, I’m doing a ‘boy, is the artwork in Gil Thorp terrible’ comment. But it really, really, is!” –HBGlord

“Points are not the only metric for a point guard. Guarding counts too. And, in Gil Thorp, keeping your general appearance from one panel to the next should count for a lot.” –ohyes

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Curtis, 2/10/07

What a roller-coaster ride this week has been in Curtis: from Philly’s own “Compton Kaheem” to drunk, jiggling, syrup covered ladies to the fantastic dancing Nicholas Brothers to Curtis being savagely mauled by vicious dogs. I will ignore the labored and unnatural “I met … I met … we’d like you to meet” set-up so that I can question “Onion”‘s assertion that he needed to get his stomach pumped after accidentally ingesting a little Meow Mix. Cat food is bland and not very nutritious, but it certainly isn’t poisonous. I mean, I ate a whole bag of dog treats when I was a kid, and I came out fine!

What? It was an accident. Honest!

Still and all, if Curtis is killed or at least horribly disfigured by this pit bull attack, it might be adequate punishment for the horror that was “the syrup chapter.”

Mark Trail, 2/10/07

Speaking of labored and unnatural, I’m beginning to suspect that the real name of this feature is Mark Weg in Verlorenem Wald and that the dialogue is all translated on the cheap. I’m pretty baffled by the sentence “Rusty here is the main member of our family … he keeps us all in shape”; I assume it means that Rusty has near-omnipotent powers, like the little kid in the “Put them in the cornfield” episode of the Twilight Zone, and he forces Mark and Cherry to engage in their various inane adventures for his amusement and benefit. Meanwhile, “Sally, the love of my life” sounds to me like a circumlocution that allows Dan to avoid actually describing the nature of their relationship. Presumably, their prudish hosts wouldn’t allow them to share a bedroom if he said “Sally, my latest assistant grifter/sex buddy” or “Sally, a thirty-dollar-a-day hooker I met at a truck stop an hour before we got here.”

Mary Worth, 2/10/07

I like Mary’s self-righteous assertion that helping others is the exclusive province of the young and impoverished, while middle-aged types like Jeff ought to be instead carefully monitoring their investment portfolio so that he can be sure to be able to afford ever larger powerboats and thrice weekly “dates” at the Bum Boat that don’t result in any action. Still, I’m not entirely sure that 21 is the primary age for selflessness. I’d have been much more amused by Mary’s “You’re not twenty-one anymore” plea if she had discovered Jeff sucking Bud Light out of a keg tap while being held upside down by two guys named Chad and “the Gooch”.