One Big Happy, 10/6/05
OK, it’s a slow comics day today, so guess let’s play: guess what I like about today’s One Big Happy!
Go on, guess. I’ll wait for you.
Ready?
Word balloon, panel two. I like how rather than writing out the word “blank,” the artist actually put a blank in. Clever, no?
No? Maybe a little?
Well, I liked it. Like I said, it’s a slow day.
Gasoline Alley, Herb and Jamaal, and Kudzu, 10/5/05
There’s nothing that brings out humor better than the interplay of two opposing minds! Yes, it’s the back and forth between two different points of view, and the zingers that well-formed characters can throw back and forth at one another when they’re versed in each other foibles, that really form the core of sparkling wit — nay, heart the comedic enterprise itself.
Or, you know, you could just have three or four panels of some character talking or thinking to herself, with nobody else in sight. Your call, cartoonists!
The saddest thing about this Herb and Jamaal is that, since Mrs. Herb here (I forget her name … Peaches?) spends half the comic mentally rehashing what her husband said, the comic could just as easily been written with the miserly Herb speaking for himself. And maybe Mrs. Slim (I forget her name too … Jim?) is showing some sort of meta-awareness of her soliloquy by reminding us that we’re never really alone, what with the omnipresent LORD always listening in on our conversations. As for Doris the Parakeet … well, I’ve always found it to be a good policy to say as little about Doris the Parakeet as possible.
Apartment 3-G, 10/4/05
And yet if I walked into a police station and started shouting “THE GIRLS IN APARTMENT 3-G ARE STALKING ME, I SWEAR TO GOD” — as I would be well within my rights to do — they’d put me away. There ain’t no justice in this world, I tell you what.
Better not encourage Professor Beardopopolous, Lu Ann, as he apparently has an entire bookshelf full of enormous, folio-sized, 1930s-era ALBUMs — and since he has the arm strength to pull one off the shelf one-handed, you know he shows them off a lot. Will you still think it’s beautiful three hours from now? (“And this is what the backyard looked like in 1951, when my mother tried to plant some bougainvillea. That didn’t really work out so well…”) You may not have to pay to honeymoon there, but nothing’s free.