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Sally Forth, 9/26/05

Hah! I’ve only been married two weeks and I’m already relating to married people in the comics! No, I’m not talking about today’s Cathy, where Cathy’s mother-in-law is brought to a state of eye-popping rage when faced with the prospect of sleeping on a futon; I’m talking about today’s Sally Forth, where Ted gets fat. Because now that I’ve landed me a fine woman, I’m totally letting myself go. Also, I’m going to stop doing work. Since I work at home anyway, I figure I’ll have a good eighteen months of sittin’ on the couch all day watchin’ my stories before she notices that we’re bankrupt.

Anyway, this strip illustrates the problem of a strip having a separate writer and artist. Ces possibly sent the artist a note to the effect of “MAKE TED EXTRA CHUNKY TODAY” or something, but in the end he just has the same oddly linebacker-shouldered look that he and everyone else in the strip, including Sally, always has. The only evidence that we have that this isn’t Mr. Forth’s first double-dip into the pie are his pants in panel one, which are clinging disturbingly tightly to the area around Little Ted, and even that’s not because his hip region is particularly big, but because his trousers are much, much too small. In fact, if you really want to either make yourself laugh or give yourself the heebie-jeebies (depending on your personality and/or inclinations), imagine that Ted’s pants end just below the bottom of the frame. Because the only thing sexier than little short shorts are little short shorts with a belt.

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Blondie, 9/25/05

In my first non-metapost as a married man, I don’t really feel a need to point out the insufferable lameness that is the Blondie wacky anniversary adventure, or the problems with this strip’s surf instructor’s technique (which, according to Mrs. Curmudgeon, who’s been known to “hang ten” now and again herself, are many and egregious), or even discuss Blondie’s lovingly detailed breasts. No, today I want to draw your attention to Dagwood in the first panel on the second line, and specifically to his torso. At first glance it appears that he’s wearing what one would expect for a surfing lesson, which is to say no shirt at all. But the absence of nipples, combined with the baffling rippling concentric circles around his neck, lead me to believe that he is in fact wearing a flesh-colored turtleneck. Let’s hope that he hasn’t actually fashioned a shirt of real human skin in some kind of twisted, ritualistic attempt to gain spiritual power, conquer the big “momma” wave, and awe everyone with his surfing prowess. Because not only would that be wrong (yes, I take the tough, unpopular stands against making garments out of human flesh), but it clearly hasn’t worked, which is always embarrassing outcome to an unspeakable act of totemistic horror.

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So we went and got married. It was real nice, real nice, I tell ya. Then we went to Greece for two weeks. That was real nice, too.

A couple enterprising Cardinals who knew us before this blog gave our nuptials a worldwide audience attended the blessed event and have posted pics on this forum thread, if you’re interested. Pix start on the fourth post, so scroll down.

After returning from our honeymoon, we arrived home to a huge pile of mail and a mysterious box from some glass-blowing outfit. We opened it with some trepidation, only to find inside, courtesy of yellowjkt, two painstakingly hand-crafted blown-glass symbols of marriage: two swans, birds that, if you haven’t heard, mate for life.

Hopefully these won’t be rudely shattered by some ungrateful drunken houseguest years after my tragic demise. You can’t really see it in this pic, but the glass making up the little beaks and wings is golden colored. They are simultaneously two of the most hideous and wonderful things I have ever seen.

Tomorrow, I think, there will be real, actual, new comics commentary and content. Also, I will get around to reading the comments on the ULTRA POST — congrats on hitting quadruple digits, by the way. And soon, a redesign of the redesign, with legibility in mind. But while I’m still on my gettin’-hitched high, I wanted to share one more thing with you. See, we asked our guests to e-mail us wedding-, love-, and us-themed haiku for our wedding; a friend of Amber’s wrote them onto little flags that were hung around the wedding site. She also set up a little station where people could write more haiku during the reception. Some of them were sweet, some were silly, all were wonderful. But the one I wanted to reprint here was from our friend Sam Wiley, who loves Mary Worth as much as I do:

They’re not like Tommy
Who sold that guy some bad stuff
Their love is good stuff