Post Content

Mark Trail, 11/21/06

If there’s one thing we can count on in this crazy mixed-up world, it’s the deep satisfaction that comes from seeing Mark Trail punch an armed man in the face. Man, that’s good stuff. Note that Mark’s raw power is enough to not only blast Snake into the next panel, but to change his shirt from blue to orange and blow the hair right off the sides of his head. Physics and logic are no match for a Trailian knuckle sandwich. I can’t wait to see how Jake’s sideburns and mullet will react to what he’s got coming to him. Forecasts call for heavy bold lettering for the next few days.

B.C., 11/21/06

I stared at this strip for an awful long time before I finally gave up on it. I sort of assume that any joke about “the real purpose of school busing” is somehow about the evils of the commingling of the races, but I really can’t suss that — or much of anything else — out of the “punchline.” My best guess is that it’s about having sex in the back of a school bus. The line underneath the word “learn” goes right into my soul and shatters my need for everything in this world to make some kind of sense.

Beetle Bailey, 11/21/06

See, it’s like they know computers exist, and have seen them in pictures and know how to draw them, but they’ve never actually used one, so they don’t know about their more obscure features, like the delete key.

Dennis the Menace, 11/21/06

“Or is it a good thing? Imagine if we could pay someone to take care of Dennis … someone other than us … who lived far away … far, far away …”

I’m frankly a little concerned that the Mitchells consider Dennis playing in the next yard over to be “roaming.” That strikes me as a mite overprotective. Watch out, kid, or you’ll end up in up in some kind of subterranean gulag.

Apartment 3-G, 11/21/06

OH MY GOD MOST AWESOMELY AWKWARD THANKSGIVING EVER!!! It actually seems pretty likely to me that, just to add to the discomfort, Gina will somehow invite herself over, thus ensuring that someone — or better, several someones — will be attacked with a turkey-carving implement. I wonder what disaster killed off all of these people’s families, leaving them to spend Thanksgiving with each other. I also wonder what kind of hat Margo will wear to dinner. Maybe she’ll dress up like a Pilgrim!

Post Content

Slylock Fox, 11/20/06

There are some puzzling narrative decisions going on in this Slylock Fox. Apparently the artist has tired of actually drawing the mystery scenarios and has decided to settle for the thrilling visual spectacle of Slylock reading a word problem to a group of schoolchildren. Still, I’m so God-damned trained by this feature that I keep staring at the clock on the wall, thinking that the fact that it’s ten after nine is an important clue of some sort.

Perhaps once he’s assessed their fitness for detective work, he can explain how you can make a living from butting into other people’s disputes and solving them with elementary deduction. Max Mouse, meanwhile, is just courting death. It’s bad enough that Slylock brought the tiny rodent into a class full of predator animals, but Max’s inability to keep away from the teacher’s apple should by all rights get him devoured before recess.

Judge Parker, 11/20/06

As Raju heads off into the boat-wrestling sunset, I hope that we get lots and lots more Celeste Black to fill the void. I’m loving her swoopy arm gestures in the first panel here; presumably she’s performing an interpretive dance piece entitled “Jesus Christ I’m so hung over WHY ARE THE LIGHTS ON SO FUCKING BRIGHT IN HERE I hate you all”.

Archie, 11/20/06

Archie is, of course, a moron, but the setup for this joke was so convoluted that it’s hard to blame him for his poster verbiage faux pas. I’m more concerned about the fact that this placard was created in an art class, and yet is essentially just a bunch of words on a big piece of paper. The curved line at the bottom doesn’t make it “art,” and “Mr. Weatherbee” isn’t even centered properly. Pretty sloppy, Andrews.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/20/06

Sorry I couldn’t work up the energy to cover last week’s Rex Morgan, during most of which June was holding our mop-haired purse-snatcher at broompoint. If you only follow this strip through my commentary on it, you should know that we learned a few things last week about our cast of characters. We found out that Nikki and his trashy mom are Katrina-driven evacuees from New Orleans, forced to live in the slums of Rex Morganville because George Bush doesn’t care about white people. We also learned that if you take June’s purse she will never let you forget about it.

There’s some problematic punctuation going on in our omniscient narrative box at the upper left. No sentence in which the main verb is modified by the word “reluctantly” should ever end in an exclamation mark.

Post Content

Beetle Bailey, 11/19/06

Beetle Bailey is totally divorced from anything actually happening in the U.S. military, as has been repeatedly noted by everybody ever. Today’s strip gives me an intriguing idea, though. What if the reason that Camp Swampy was so unlike the real army is that nobody there was actually in the army? It’s just a bunch of weirdos/re-enactors/lunatics wearing a mishmosh of army uniforms from different eras who have got a hold of some surplus army jeeps and are playing out a bizarre drama for their own inscrutable purposes. The missile in panel five indicates that the real army has finally wind of their little game, and has declared war upon them for impersonating the military and sullying its good name with their rampant incompetence and stupidity.

The General Halftrack piñata is panel seven is just about the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. Since all Beetle Bailey characters are incredibly cartoonish anyway, it’s difficult to portray something that’s supposed to be a stylized version of one of those characters in the strip, so it pretty much just looks like the general’s been lynched by his angry men.

Curtis, 11/19/06

When I first saw this strip without the top two supposedly disposable panels, I was pretty baffled by Gunk asking Curtis to “take me to a mailbox.” I mean, I know he’s from tiny Flyspeck Island and all, but surely he’s lived in the neighborhood long enough to know where the major landmarks are. Panel two reveals the real source of the so-called humor: Gunk is such a wacky crazy foreigner who doesn’t understand our ways to such an extent that he doesn’t even know what a mailbox looks like! Whoo! This, of course, is dumber than a sack of hammers, as is the Curtis convention of one character simply vanishing in the last panel as a reaction to another character’s outrageousness. Poor Gunk never will find that mailbox, but that’s OK, since his hand-drawn stamp won’t take his mail back to Flyspeck Island. God, I hate Gunk.

Mary Worth, 11/19/06

Oh, so they like each other now. How depressing.