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Luann, 2/17/06

Curtis, 2/17/06

Ladies and gentlemen, here on the last day of this Valentine’s Week (yes, it’s a whole week now, didn’t you get the memo from Hallmark and Cathy?), we have a battle royale between two comics love stories that just … won’t … end!

In this corner, in black and white, we have the eternal Brad-Toni-Dirk triangle. See the teasing! The sullen glares! The violation of restraining orders! The gratuitous use of the word “Chunkboy!”

And in this corner, in living color, we have the latest chapter in the Curtis-Michelle love-hate dipole. See what happens when the boy who can’t say “no” meets the girl who won’t say “yes”!

I think we have to acknowledge Curtis as the clear winner here. I’m getting real sick of Toni’s coy little sidelong glances and unnaturally pouty lips. From an artistic point of view, she’s got nothing on Michelle’s hilariously disgusted facial expression in panel three: eyes bugged out, lips curled in disdain, sweat balls flying, motion lines tracking her escape route and a well-placed elbow ready to jab her wannabe paramour in the throat if it comes to that. And while Brad’s wide-eyed, dot-mouthed horror in panel three of Luann is evocative of his new awareness of his own romantic ineptitude, it doesn’t convey bleakness the way Curtis’ lonely, underdressed blizzard trek does. Mostly, though, this Curtis promises to at least end the Michelle nonsense for a few weeks, whereas I have a sinking feeling that the Brad romantic hijinks will continue on indefinitely.

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Dick Tracy, 2/16/06

Popeye, 2/16/06

I recently made the drunken boast that I would start reading a slew of new comics, and today I’ve finally made good on that promise. I expected that it would take me a few days or weeks to get into the swing of things, but even on this first flush I am stunned by Popeye and Dick Tracy, to wit: Popeye and Dick Tracy still exist? Holy crap. I would not be more surprised if I found out that some kind of bastardized Krazy Kat was being churned out by George Herriman’s great-nephew and appearing in a few suburban dailies.

Both of these strips jumped out at me because they seem to be going out of their way to say “Look! We were written just last week, certainly not during the Harding administration! Really!” Dick Tracy, for instance, features an quite lovely picture of one of those new-fangled eco-friendly wind turbines, in flames and tumbling to the ground. Is this strip now focused on the battle for freedom against American’s addiction to oil? The presence of the “evil Oily” would certainly seem to point in that direction. Perhaps we’ll see the Halliburton board of directors armed with Tommy Guns in a future installment.

Popeye, on the other hand, seems to have fallen into a trap I noted earlier: making jokes about technology that nobody involved in the strip actually has a grasp on. Does Olive Oil’s mangled sentence in panel one mean that she’s putting her picture on a Web dating site? Olive Oil? Web dating site? That’s a very disturbing thought to try to get my head around, so disturbing that I’m going to stop … right now. Still, I like the wordless third panel: Olive stalking off hunched over, knuckles dragging gorilla-style, fuming furiously, while a clueless, black-eyed Wimpy can only wordlessly wonder “?” (Twice!)

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Mary Worth, 2/15/06

Mary, Mary, Mary. If I want uninteresting, unattractive characters making boring conversation, I’ll read Judge Parker. If I want a conflict resolved by off-camera deus ex machina, I’ll read Spider-Man. But Mary, I’ve come to expect more from you. This is the strip that brought us Smitty Smedlap, Tommy the Tweaker, Barfin’ Anna Tieg, and Rita “The Cocktail” Begler, after all. But the current plot — which, painfully enough, has dragged on since October — has slowly slid from dull to soporific; now it seems that my hopes for a months-long risible courtroom sequence, in which we’d be treated to day after day of Wilbur Weston squirming and uncontrollably perspiring, finally bursting into tears during an ill-advised attempt to take the stand in his own defense, have now been dashed.

It perhaps says something about my hardened, post-modern inability to feel empathy that Wilbur’s slack-jawed, limb-flailing spasm of joy in panel two inspires me to only vague feelings of disgust. It no doubts marks me out as shallow when I say that his irksome fashion choices (that electric blue cardigan doesn’t really work with the baby blue dress shirt, and the khakis unappealingly bunched at the crotch don’t really work with anything) aren’t helping. Still, I hold out hope that Mary Worth has some more trials — metaphorical if not literal — in store for our portly agony aunt. Will a heavily armed Jane Hand get past Charterstone’s security and launch us into a tense hostage drama? Will even the hint of legal trouble prompt Wilbur’s syndicate to replace him with an unthreatening-advice-generating computer program, forcing him to take on a increasingly degrading series of jobs that require no particular skills but do require a lack of self-respect? Will Wilbur spin around in his office chair for the next twelve strips, giggling like an eight-year-old boy who’s just heard a joke about poop? Only time will tell.