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Beetle Bailey, 7/25/07

All day, people have been commenting in varying degrees of arousal about the hot, hot Miss Buxley action in today’s Beetle Bailey. All I can say is: why? The Walker oeurvre is one of the funny pages’ more stylized, and there are few less detailed or realistic looking “sexy” women in comics than General Halftrack’s oft-harassed secretary. Seriously, if this was all it took to get me worked up, I’d just draw a stick figure and slap some boobs on it and WHAM! Instant porn. Even the theoretically sexy frilly unmentionables are terribly botched, with Buxley’s brassiere seemingly wrapped around her robe, implying that either that the artist has little grasp of spatial relations and/or undergarment topography, or that she’s dressing quickly because she’s aware of the series of hidden cameras the general has stashed all over her apartment and wired up to the phone somehow.

The less said about whatever’s in her robe pocket, the better. Is it a hot glue gun? Or something more untoward There’s something about its crap-brown color that unsettles me.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/25/07

Now, Heather Avery — that’s a cartoon character whose sex appeal I can endorse. I don’t even care about those little droopy devil horn things on the front of her head, which indicate that she’s probably a succubus in addition to being a gold-digging nanny and stock-manipulating white-collar co-conspirator.

This whole encounter is more than a little porntastic. “Hugh … what is it? I’m getting dressed — and since I’m already in the process of removing my robe, surely it’s unrealistic to expect me to close it again now that it’s half-way open, since I’ll just be taking it off completely in a few minutes. Can’t it wait? The robe-closing, I mean.” Of course, since there’s no blood relation between the two of them and they’ve only met the previous day, there’s nothing untoward or incestuous about the prospect of them falling into each other’s arms for comfort in the wake of their great loss — or at least there wouldn’t be if they didn’t essentially look exactly alike. Even Von and Vera, Mary Worth’s creepy Flowers in the Attic pair, didn’t share this much of a resemblance. Of course, this has less bearing on any potential Heather-Hugh match-up and much more bearing on Milton’s now-revealed-to-be-deeply-disturbing attraction to Heather.

Dennis the Menace, 7/25/07

Lucky for Ruff the Mitchell’s floor is covered with a healthy layer of rotting organic matter! Of course, we can’t blame Alice for the unhygienic state of the house: Henry forces her to wear those killer stilettos at all times, so she can barely walk; I don’t know how you expect her to operate a vacuum cleaner.

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I probably won’t get to new comics until late-ish tonigh, so to tide you over, here are some fab photos from the Land of the Rising Sun! Faithful reader CrabbyGenes, who is a resident of Japan, recently met up with a visitor:

I met SecretMargo in Tokyo today, and we had a great time eating lunch, coffee-shop hopping, buying a book or two, and talking about anything and everything under the sun — including Comics Curmudgeon, of course!

We couldn’t find anything really famous or recognizable in the part of Tokyo we were in to use as a background for the photo. So we just found something that looked Japanese-y. We asked the guy who was handing out the free fans we are holding to take two of the pictures for us. The background and fans are “manga”-ish, but I think they’re just the advertising gimmick for the pachinko parlour we’re posing in front of — the name of which is “Green Peas Pachislo Tower.” You can see it printed in English on the carpet in one of the photos. (Great name!)

SecretMargo is of course sporting his Molly the Bear shirt. Such surrealist shirt slogan/logo combos are of course par for the course in Japanese fashion, so presumably he didn’t raise any eyebrows with it. However, if this photo from the always-amusing Engrish.com is any indication, Japan is already on the ironic comics t-shirt bandwagon:

(Thanks to faithful reader Dan the Wis for the tip!)

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Gil Thorp, 7/24/07

My mom is retiring in the fall after thirty years as a teacher, and I have to imagine that, if one of her erstwhile students had shown up on a hot day in July and said, “Hey, remember me, the kid who accidentally chopped off his own leg with a chainsaw last fall? Could I hang around the school this summer and maybe you can teach me stuff? My dad will buy you supplies!”, her reaction would be — well, not rude, since she’s not a rude person, but firm, and negative. In fact, she didn’t spend her summers hanging around the school at all, possibly to avoid just such an awkward confrontation, though more likely because she has a life, unlike Gil Thorp, apparently.

I’m pleased to see that Coach Kaz has chosen to take time out from his exciting summer to brave the horrifying stench that lingers in Milford High’s gym and hang out with this cavalcade of losers. Mostly I’m hoping that he’s going to teach Bill Ritter that if you believe in yourself enough, you can punch a dude right in the hypothalamus no matter how many legs you have. But Coach Thorp is lucky to have someone else around right now, too, because he’s obviously rapidly deflating. In panel two, he and Coach Kaz both look like ’roided out He-Man extras, threatening to burst right out of those cotton t-shirts with their manly chesteses. But in panel three, slouchy, scrawny Gil looks more like the guy from the famous Charles Atlas sand-kicked-in-his-face ads before dynamic tension worked its magic. Even his flattop is kind of droopy.

Mary Worth, 7/24/07

Good God, what kind of world do we live in where the action in Gil Thorp stays with the same two characters in the same room for three consecutive panels, while the Mary Worth chronology leaps forward “several weeks” willy-nilly? I suppose we’re going to find out that Dawn has been sneaking off to the horse stables to “ride” with Drew for the past few weeks under the pretext of studying. Since it makes absolutely no sense to conceal this fact from her father, we’re just going to have to accept that “horseback riding” in Mary Worth should always be understood to mean “illicit sex.”

Shoe, 7/24/07

Do you ever get the feeling that a cartoon is drawn by someone who’s working off of a script and who almost, but not quite, speaks English? Our random brunette says “I love mysteries!”, but with the little hearts floating over her head and the way she flings her body halfway up the counter, it seems more like she should be saying “I love your hot body!” or “I love crystal meth!” Because this is Shoe, the Perfesser manages to kill this puzzling but genuine enthusiasm with a terrible joke.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 7/24/07

As a work-at-home type, I can tell you that this is a pitfall of the home office lifestyle. That’s why I refuse to answer the phone or the doorbell, and frequently insist that my wife lie about my whereabouts as I labor feverishly in my office with the door barricaded. What puzzles me about the scenario depicted here, though, is the presence of two adult women in the Ragweed household. Is this some weird amalgamation of the modern world of the home office and the TDIET 1950s sensibility, where every male white-collar worker has a female secretary? Or is Ragweed a polygamist as well a freelancer?