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Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/25/05

Whoa, no wonder June was unable to identify a human bone last week: if her freakishly extended arm in the first panel here is any indication, her body doesn’t actually contain any bones. Nurse by day … Elastic Lass by night!

Or, in this case, also by day.

I know medical professionals are all down on the way Americans eat now and everything, but I think if I were a preschool-aged moppet like little Sarah, I would be a lot less perky and endearing if my parents forced me to eat “Flakey Wheats” for breakfast every morning. I’ve eaten Cap’n Crunch and Cocoa Pebbles regularly for the past thirty years, and my I still have all my teeth and most of my pancreas, thank you very much.

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Gil Thorp, 1/24/05

Speaking of enjoying things ironically: in today’s Gil Thorp, we learn that Gil’s irrational aversion to supporting women’s athletics stems from bitter memories of a tragic male cheerleading accident. Sometimes this stuff just writes itself.

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FoxTrot, 1/23/05

As sad as I was about the recent Baltimore Sun comics purge, there were a couple of bright spots for me: Foxtrot and Get Fuzzy were two of my favorite comic strips when I turned to the San Francisco Chronicle for my funny pages needs, and I was very excited to be getting them on a regular basis. But now it’s been six weeks and my reaction to the triumphant return of both to my life has been: meh.

Sunday’s FoxTrot is representative of my malaise. It took me two or three reads to get the actual point of the joke: Jason’s iguana has eaten Paige’s shoe, and in response she’s drawn an extremely long flipbook of her bashing her little brother with a mallet. The problem is that it’s not immediately obvious that the people in the flipbook are supposed to be Jason and Paige, at least to me, which led to several minutes of bafflement. Get Fuzzy, which arguably was my favorite strip in the paper as of 2002, has been even worse, spending what seems like the entire last six weeks focusing on the extremely un-funny running battle between Bucky and Fungo the ferret, with events grinding on at an excruciating pace worthy of Mary Worth.

But anyway, I come to you today not to insult these strips, but to get introspective. I know, intellectually, that I used to like the both of them. It’s been six weeks now, and they’ve yet to elicit a real laugh from me. Have they gone downhill that fast? Are both in an extended rut? Or have I fallen into the grips of the postmodern condition as a result of writing this blog and general Gen-X-ed-ness, whereby I can only enjoy things ironically? Because that would be kind of sad.

Still and all, Jason is holding a star-shaped glob of iguana vomit in the last panel. Maybe that counts for something.