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Archie, 9/1/06

Ahh, the joke-writing computer rears its ugly head again. You can tell because Dad Archie uses the phrase “1-cent coin” in panel one, which has never been uttered by any carbon-based native speaker of American English ever. My guess is that both the first and third panels originally used the word “penny,” but some rule in the mechanical comic creator’s humor-generating algorithm required that key words in the joke not be repeated and instead be replaced by synonyms, so this clunker got pulled out of some second-rate thesaurus and plopped into place.

More proof of this strip’s robotic origins: Jughead appears to have pulled a fully-formed, ready-to-eat hamburger out of the refrigerator. A cybernetic artist would obviously be unfamiliar with the details of how biological life-forms acquire their fuel.

Mary Worth, 9/1/06

Man, look at their faces in panel two. Those two are about to have some angry, angry sex.

I have to confess something. I used to own a shirt that looked remarkably like the one Aldo is wearing. And this wasn’t some long-ago artifact of my non-fashionable youth; I wore it regularly until it developed a hole in it about a year ago. It was long-sleeved, and was just a V-neck rather than a polo shirt with a collar, but the color and the stripe are pretty much exact matches. It creeps me out a little.

Apartment 3-G, 9/1/06

The saddest thing about panel one is that Tommie thinks she’s flirting.

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Shoe, 8/31/06

The punchline of this joke is at once bland, hackneyed, vaguely sexist, told better elsewhere, and immediately forgettable — classic Shoe, in other words. Of more interest to the comics student is Roz’s wide-eyed, head-bobbling reaction. She looks like the Perfersser just told her that the Health Department is planning to shut her diner down because of a psittacosis outbreak, not because she’s just been fed some dumb “male birds are from Mars, female birds are from Venus” shtick. (By the way, Perfesser, girl birds have feathers, not hair.) Is she not used to this sort of lameness? How long has she been in this damn strip?

The Phantom, 8/31/06

I have to admit to being a little dissapointed with the conclusion of this Phantom storyline, with the Ghost-Who-Yuks-It-Up-With-Midgets seeming pretty blasé about allowing Chatu the Shirtless Terrorist to escape and shirtlessly terrorize another day. Now we know that, for the Phantom, the big thrill is not bringing bare-torsoed ne’er-do-wells to justice, but instead setting things up so that you can really screw with their heads a few years down the line.

Luann, 8/31/06

Hey, everybody! The Toni and Brad Show’s back! Just like we’ve all been waiting for all this time! Right? Right?

Right?

[awkward silence]

In an effort to say something nice, I’ll say this: I like the way Reddy’s eyes are cast sarcastically to the right in the first panel. I’m imagining an elaborate series of electrodes attached to Brad’s ape-like mug so that the li’l safety robot can display a full panoply of lifelike facial expressions.

Mary Worth, 8/31/06

And heeeeere comes the bludgeoning.

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For Better Or For Worse, 8/30/06

Never has the flabby make-it-up-as-you-go-along nature of the Foobian plot been on display as nakedly as it is here. I mean: How far away is Liz’s apartment from her parents’ house that she would considering moving back there to shave a little off her commute? And she’s been back down south for, what, three months now? Don’t they have leases in Canada, or are Pattersons just allowed to break them with impunity? And doesn’t Ellie have any say over whether her totally adult and self-sufficient daughter decides to up and move back in, or is she just going to go on with the passive “It’ll happen if it happens” attitude? These are questions that I want answered. In return, I’ll answer April’s question about why Liz wouldn’t want to move back home: it’s because she’s, like, 26, and living at home when you’re 26 and have a job is for looooooosers.

Dennis the Menace, 8/30/06

Speaking of losers, Dennis is continuing his trend of eschewing menacing, preferring instead to hone his floral-themed dinner-table bon mots. It actually took me about 45 seconds to grasp the “bud”-“blossom” wordplay going on here, and I finally only got the joke because of the presence of the rose on the dinner table, which I assume was intentional. Note to cartoonists: If you need to put in a visual aid to forward the cause of a pun in your comic, your pun needs work.

Slylock Fox, 8/30/06

Apparently it’s terrified prey week in Slylock Fox. As if the terrified beaver wasn’t traumatizing enough, check out the discarded ribcage, presumably of one of his family members, next to the crocodile on dry land. Today’s scene of the savagery of nature provides a backdrop for a true/false quiz. “True or False: Sometimes things that are cute and basically good die in agony for so that something more powerful and vicious can survive. (Answer: So very true!)”