Post Content

Dennis the Menace, 7/27/06

I’m not sure if that’s Mr. the Menace in the background with the surfboard, but Dennis clearly is learning at the beach that his dad’s no paragon of hunkery. In this twisted act of marital warfare, he shows that he’s taking his menacing out of the world of mere mischief and into the dark realm of psychological destruction.

Herb and Jamaal, 7/27/06

Yeah, because it was so much more naughty back when it was up … on her … thigh? My guess is that in the original joke, the tattoo was somewhere a bit below something a lot naughtier (on her stomach?) and then the powers at be forced the poor strip back into the Herb and Jamaal Prison of Blandness and Inoffensiveness. (It’s not the first time it’s happened, either.)

Pluggers, 7/27/06

OK, even when I hate Pluggers, I generally get Pluggers, but this is just baffling. Do non-Pluggers hold their dogs in such contempt that they just say things that excite them, not caring about the emotional roller-coaster ride it puts them on? Do non-Pluggers just have extremely stupid dogs? Or maybe it’s that Pluggers are themselves quasi-beasts, and so their language is close enough to that of the true dogs that interspecies communication is almost possible? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s stupid and doesn’t make any sense and DAMN YOU PLUGGERS FOR MAKING ME THINK ABOUT THIS DAMN YOU STRAIGHT TO HELL.

Anyway, if you’d like a little Pluggers spoofery from the fellow who brought you that TDIET takeoff the other day, click here.

Post Content

So, I’ll probably do more comics later today, but I felt it was important to get right to work this morning on this … this … this.

Apartment 3-G, 7/27/06

Hat man? Hat man? Mark your calendars, folks, as this is the day that Margo went completely insane. I’ve already resigned myself to the fact that our finger-quotin’ beauty has gone bananas for this balding old grump, so now I’m just enjoying her deranged thought processes. “Sexy, cleavage-revealing dress? Check! Chunky necklace that further draws attention to the decolletage? Check! Loopy, Curtis-church-lady-style hat? You better believe that’s a check!”

Frankly, I’m surprised that Google didn’t have the answers that Margo sought. More information on hat men can be found on the Internet.

Update: Margo’s face in panel three has been naggingly familiar to me, and I finally figured out who she looks like: Jack Lemmon. Specifically, Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot. This has forced me to reconsider a lot of things about my life.

Post Content

Spider-Man, 7/26/06

I’ve been trying very hard to ignore the slow-motion train wreck of idiocy that is this week’s Spider-Man, but I can turn away from it no longer. See, they’re filming the climactic elevator battle scene between Marvella (played by Mary Jane) and $1.99 Walgreens Plastic Halloween Cat Mask Woman (played by washed-up has-been Narna Lamarr) in a novel fashion: they’re putting them in a real elevator, with no microphones of any kind (otherwise Narna’s bitchy off-script taunts would be picked up) and having them improvise some fisticuffs. (I hear this is exactly how Robert Altman filmed most of McCabe & Mrs. Miller.) Apparently there are multiple cameras filming from multiple angles, with the fight being edited on the fly and fed directly into the VIEW SCREEN that Beardo the director and Peter Parker are watching. This is, it goes without saying, so bonecrushingly moronic that I fear that I’ve dropped five to ten IQ points just by typing this paragraph.

Note Peter’s thought balloon in panel two: he clearly has the relative inability to suspend his disbelief of a spider.

Crock, 7/26/06

So “Trooper Megan” appears to be not the butt of a one-off joke but a new addition to the lovable and poorly drawn Crock cast. To which I can only ask: why, why, why, for the love of God, why. I’ve just started reading this comic again for the first time in 15 years, and before Megan sashayed sexily onto the scene, the cast was exactly the same as it was when I graduated from high school. Is this supposed to be like Beetle Bailey, where a new “relevant” character gets added every five years or so? If so, this implies that the creators of this strip have just now discovered that women exist who don’t wear burqas. C’mon, Illegible Signature Crock-Writing Dude Whose Name It Is Not Worth My Time To Look Up: you’ve earned the right to cruise on with the same group of ham-handedly named Frenchmen that you’ve been cruising along with for decades now. Don’t make more work for yourself for no good reason — and trust me, this isn’t a good reason.

Ziggy, 7/26/06

Note to Ziggy, Inc.: The 35 Years of Ziggy Classics must amount to better than 10,000 cartoons; thus, I’m pretty sure you can get through the length of Tom II’s vacation without reprinting one that contains a totally dated current events punchline that wasn’t even funny when it was topical. I know it’s cheaper to use a robot arm to just select a comic out of the file cabinet at random rather than have someone use editorial judgement, but you might want to change that process, for quality-control purposes.

Apartment 3-G, 7/26/06

Man, look at that sad face in panel three. Because if it weren’t for totally-not-actually-happening-and-only-implied-by-a-totally-unrealistic-series-of-events-and-sitcom-style-misunderstanding action, she wouldn’t be getting any action at all.