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Family Circus, 1/19-20/06

Lotta hate in the Family Cicrus over the past couple of days. Billy’s the cool one, all anodyne disdain, hitting on the fact that the worst that can happen to him is meaningless, which means that there are no rules and nothing to hold him back from fulfilling every desire of his id, from putting his contempt for his fellow Circus members on display for all to see. Jeffy, as usual, is more volatile, his hatred of his family and himself breaking out uncontrollably as he flies into a vicious rage for no reason. Poor Dolly is there to mutely bear the brunt of the bad behavior. Don’t worry about it, honey: it’s about their own demons, not you.

I add here today’s classic Peanuts from 1959, in case the Keanes want to see just how dark a kid’s soul can get.

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First, there was the newspaper. It was and is my preferred method of reading the comics. Despite the fact that I am a big computer nerd and spend most of my day on the Internet, and the fact that on-screen comics are often larger and more legible, I really prefer reading the comics on newsprint for sentimental reasons.

Then, just over a year ago, came the Baltimore Sun’s great comics purge. In order to maintain my Mary Worth fix, I set up a custom comics page on the Houston Chronicle’s Web site with the purge victims and a few extra soap operas for spice.

Now, however, I’m feeling a little bored with my repertoire of daily strips. I mean, how many times can I make fun of the big-headed freaks in the Family Circus? Well, honestly, I could do it every day … and, in my head, I do do it every day … but surely you’d be bored with it eventually.

Thus, I’m taking suggestions on additions to my reading list. Here are the rules:

• The comics listed under “Pick a Comic” in the left-hand nav bar are the ones I already read every day, so don’t bother naming one of them. The only exception is the Wizard of Id, which I read once when I was in New York City and felt the need to comment on. But please, don’t make me read the Wizard of Id every day. I’m begging you.
• The strips you suggest should appear on the Houston Chronicle comics site. Since I already have a custom page set up there, it’d be easy enough to add any of these strips to the list. But the last thing I need is to feel obligated to zip back and forth between various comics Web sites.

Anyway, there are a lot of strips there, so do chime in with your suggestions, and please provide some rationale on why it’d be good for me. Maybe the strip would make good fodder for mockery; maybe I would actually enjoy it non-ironically; maybe those two categories are not mutually exclusive.

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Get Fuzzy, 1/18/06

It has come to my attention that some of my readers do not find Get Fuzzy amusing. These people are, for lack of a more subtle word, wrong. Let us count the things that made me laugh about today’s installment:

1. The phrase “he would reject it as being unrealistically squalid.”
2. Rob’s spindly legs.
3. Bucky’s palms-up outspread paws.
4. Bucky’s pot belly.
5. Bucky’s sly look. Imagine if Sally Forth used the phrase “shoebox full of dead rats” when she deployed her sly look. That feature would be improved thereby.
6. The phrase “a shoebox full dead rats.”

If you are not convinced, there is no hope for you. Now if you’ll excuse me, my cat is demanding to be let in from the back porch. Hopefully she doesn’t have another rat to add to the shoebox.