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For Better Or For Worse, 2/7/07

Who among us — particularly, who among those of us who have had the misfortune to read his loathsome monthly letters — hasn’t wanted to say “*#@[star][Saturn]!!” to Michael Patterson? At last Grandpa Jim, who certainly didn’t leave his farm to stoically fight the Nazis just so his whiny ingrate of grandson could make mad bank with a book about an innocent Irish girl and the stoic Canadian who left his farm to fight the Nazis who abused her, says what everyone else is feeling. My only concern is that the final thought balloon undermines the joy at seeing the eldest Patterspawn obscenely insulted, that maybe Jim thought he was saying “Good for you, m’boy! I always knew you’d make it!” instead of “*#@[star][Saturn]!!”. However, I choose to believe that he’s wondering about the construction of the book because he’s hoping, once next fall comes around and his strength has returned, that he can beat Michael to death with it. *#@[star][Saturn]!! you, Michael.

Hi and Lois, 2/7/07

“Because once the two of them die of pneumonia, I’m another step closer to 100 percent of the inheritance. Then all I have to do is rig Chip’s guitar to electrocute him, and … MOO HA HA!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/7/07

Rex Morgan, M.D., is trying to worm its way back into my affections with the whole “June throws herself at a thirteen-year-old boy” gambit again; I have to admit that it’s kind of working. I’m interested to see what strategy she uses to distract Niki from his simmering class resentment. “No, it’s not really so big … uh-oh, I just splashed water all over my white t-shirt!” You don’t want to know what the carrot is for.

Mark Trail, 2/7/07

Wait, Mark Trail was in the army? Maybe his obsessive love of nature is some kind of attempt to make up for the massive Agent Orange deforestation program he ran back in ‘Nam. He does seem to have received extensive training in righteous-fist-to-face combat.

I am a little unnerved by Mark’s shit-eating grin in panel two. It’s too easy to assume that Mark and Dan were all not asking and not telling when they were in the service, and anyway, it’s well known that Mark finds sex with anyone to be abhorrent. I’m guessing Dan was Mark’s connection to sweet, sweet heroin. The reason Mark so angrily beats up drug dealers on his turf nowadays is that none of them offer product as satisfying as the horse he got back when he was in the army, and Mark demands high-quality goods, dammit.

Pluggers, 2/7/07

When it comes to food science, gerontology, and/or chemistry, pluggers are terribly misinformed.

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Faithful reader MonkeyPants, who (I shall only say mysteriously) has reason to know, sent me the following tidbit today:

I believe that the color people use blue as a placeholder to remind themselves that they still have to color that segment.

This goes a long way towards explaining yesterday’s oddness with Lt. Fuzz along with last week’s smurfification of the Phantom’s evil day traders. Apparently the coloring staff are now also using blue to remind all of us that they still have to color that segment.

Update: I originally typed “Faithful reader MonkeyHawk,” who is in fact a different faithful reader and has no inside knowledge of comics coloring (at least none that has been shared with me). I apologize to both MonkeyPants and MonkeyHawk for the mix-up, now corrected.

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Beetle Bailey, 2/6/07

Those of you who read Beetle Bailey in black in white in the newspaper, as God intended us to do, were spared from the horrifying and baffling sight of an entirely blue Lt. Fuzz. I mean, forget changing races; our blond-haired junior officer seems to have changed species. The only even vaguely reasonable explanation I can come up with is that this is some kind of comics coloring sweatshop version of day-for-night filming. Some movies that don’t have the budget to properly light night scenes shoot during the day, then run the film through a blue filter to look more like nighttime. (Fans of MST3K will remember Attack Of The The Eye Creatures, a film in which this technique was implemented particularly ineptly.) Apparently someone down at King Features coloring thought that giving Lt. Fuzz a shiny white face would be all wrong for this ill-lit situation, and the only color in the limited palate available that vaguely conveyed a sense of shadowing was this weird blue.

Those of you who read Beetle Bailey in black in white in the newspaper were not distracted by this puzzle from the “punchline,” which doesn’t make a damn bit of sense no matter how much you look at it, so we online types got let off pretty easy.

Curtis, 2/6/07

Some have claimed that my Curtis geography lesson yesterday was misplaced, and that the idea of “Compton Kaheem” being from Philly is actually part of the joke. I’m still dubious, but I am sharp enough to realize that this strip is setting us up for a punchline tomorrow. Still, almost everything about it is stunningly loathsome. The elder Wilkins’ creepy mechanical laugh (not the first time it’s appeared in this strip), his little sing-songy invitation to his 11-year-old son to watch a little soft-core human degradation, said 11-year-old’s clench-fistedly eager anticipation of same with his dad sitting there behind him, the very idea of a “syrup chapter” of the venerable Girls Gone Wild franchise … I’m frankly having a hard time thinking of anything that might happen tomorrow that could redeem this, except perhaps the entire human race being wiped out by an asteroid.

Mark Trail, 2/6/07

Ah, Mark! For a man so in touch with the natural world, you sure do talk like an android. I’d love to hear Mark talk about some fishing stories. “There was this one fishing story, I used to tell it to Cherry when we were first dating. Rusty loves that story! His little face just lights up and he says, ‘Tell it again, Mark, tell it again!’ Excitable little kid. Yup, that sure is a great story. Then there’s this other fishing story I like to tell…”

The Phantom, 2/6/07

For those of you not in the know, “Bandar medicine” is the Phantom and Guran’s little code phrase for roofies. I have no idea how they think that’s going to help, unless “ill” is code for something I don’t even want to know about.

Gil Thorp, 2/6/07

Speaking of people going, having gone, or being about to go wild, those boys don’t look like they’re going anywhere near wild in panel two. There are entirely too many clothes, for one thing. And not nearly enough syrup.