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Longtime readers know that I am very strict about my commenting-on-one-comic-from-each-day policy. Except, you know, when I’m not. But Sunday’s pickings were pretty slim (except for the appalling Family Circus that was well covered in the previous post’s comments section), and there were two comics on Monday that screamed out for attention, so here they are.

Curtis, 3/7/05

In its continuing efforts to offer a positive image for today’s black teens, Curtis has taken some interesting steps. First it portrayed its tweenage hero as a leering, bug-eyed misogynist (I still can’t get the phrase “nothing more to him than a sexual playtoy” out of my head). Today, we see that he’s so hypersexualized that even his relationship with his bed is layered with lust. Now I have as hard a time getting out of a warm bed as the next guy, but the blandishments (which we can only hope are happening inside Curtis’ cap-adorned noggin) used here are way too smooth-jazz-style flirty for my taste. For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, I find the term “hunny-pot” particularly vile.

The ass-scratching in panel two is a nice touch as well.

So that’s what’s going on in Harlem. Meanwhile, down in Midtown:

Apartment 3-G, 3/7/05

Why don’t you relax and enjoy your “Cereal”-brand cereal, Margo? Every night that Mim spends in some sex-crazed 19-year-old’s filthy Bed-Stuy walk-up is a night that she doesn’t sleep on your couch, which as of two weeks ago was your primary concern in life. For her part, Tommie here shows us that, thanks to her roommates’ longstanding policy of ignoring her, she’s quite good at holding conversations with herself. She’s her own best friend!

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Kudzu, 3/5/05

Just in case you were wondering.

Kudzu is the most egregious (but by no means the only) perpetrator of what I like to call Vacation Cloud syndrome. Were you ever forced to sit through the slides or photos of someone’s tropical vacation, where they insist on showing you all 219 pictures they took of tropical skies because “each one is so different”? And, I mean, you could spend the long time in studying the pictures, and eventually you would see that in there are subtle variations in the interplay of light and shadow that give each picture a unique feel. But you wouldn’t do that, because it would be a goddamn waste of time. Kudzu is a little like that: I’m sure that each one of the “Spiritual Weatherman” or “Preacher Dunn Gives A Eulogy” or “Doris The Parakeet Watches TV” strips has its own individual charms, but, really, will the payoff be worth the effort in figuring out the subtleties? Sadly, the answer is no.

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For Better Or For Worse, 3/4/05

Kudos to FBOFW! Generally speaking, pop culture depictions of the first three years of any human’s life are shown through some sort of rosy, gauzy filter, depicted as a nonstop cavalcade of pure unadulterated love and hugs and family togetherness and candy canes and happy happy oogie woogies boo boo bean. Too often left out are the crapping and the puking and the screaming and the screaming and the OH MY GOD THE SCREAMING MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP. I mean, I know about this stuff and I don’t even have kids. But too often if you bring any of this up, especially if someone who has chosen to bring forth precious new children into this vale of tears we call “life,” you get accused of hating children in general, of hating your interlocutor’s children in particular, and of hating America.

Fortunately, our friends the Pattersons have already proven their hatred of America by their insistence on being Canadian, so FBOFW can depict the non-Ann-Geddes-little-angel side of toddlerdom with impunity. Though good taste has prevented them from taking on the feces and the vomit, they’ve tackled the screeching with gusto. Fortunately for our protagonists, in the strip after this Michael and Deanna were offered rent-free use of the apartment above them by their landlord (more proof of Canada’s capitalism-spurning anti-American hate). But at least we got to see them get close to the breaking point, which wouldn’t happen in, say, Marvin, even if they don’t actually snap.

Apartment 3-G’s Mim, who recently declared that her baby-sitting experience has, like, totally prepared her for motherhood, is clearly someone who needs to be reading this strip. Her rendezvous with Chuck is inching forward ever so slowly, but I thought this exchange was worth reproducing:

Why would Margo be mean? Um, Lu Ann, where have you been? She doesn’t need a reason — she’s Margo!