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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/8/04

Fellas, don’t let the ladies fool you when they talk about wanting men who are “sensitive”, “caring”, “literate”, or “not felons”. Since time immemorial, girls have always gone in for bad boys. No matter how nicely they dress, with their big fluffy pastel-colored bows and such, they’re inevitably hanging around places where bad boys go — bars, detention, prison — waiting to get their hands on some surly, untameable stallion.

It’s good to see that the teachers in Hootin’ Holler, untouched by the educational reforms that have swept over the U.S. since the end of the Hoover administration, are still publicly humiliating naughty children Cultural Revolution-style. Also, Whar Th’ Boys Are would be a great beach movie in which four hillbillies, or possibly four pirates, came to Ft. Lauderdale on spring break in search of a little action.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/7/04

The avant garde-est of the soap opera strips (in terms of art, of course; surely there’s something avant garde about the recent dog vs. shark battle in Mark Trail) just keeps getting avant garde-ier. Today’s strip starts out normally and then starts getting trippy in panel two: Heather’s disembodied head smiles knowingly as it floats against an abstractly patterned background. Then in panel three, all hell breaks lose. Is it just me, or does June look deeply freaky? Her eyes have ballooned to 12-year-old-anime-girl size, and all her facial features seem pushed forward, focusing on the shiny, shiny object, while one taloned claw reaches out to snatch it. It took me a minute to figure out who she reminded me of — and then I realized that it’s another ring-loving character from fiction:

I also think she kind of looks like a parakeet, but I couldn’t find an appropriate picture by press time. Anyway, the whole thing is pretty weird. Did someone put some PCP in June’s morning coffee?

Bonus observation: in the first panel, Heather is holding her hand in that weird, contorted position typical of newly-engaged women who want to draw attention to their rings without, you know, actually mentioning them — except that it’s the wrong hand. Give her time, she’s new at this.

This week’s alarming search term: “‘Canadian Ballet’ mints”. Classy!

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Beetle Bailey, 10/6/04

I should say right off the bat tonight that the current drug-dealing storyline in Mary Worth attracts me so powerfully that it’s taking every ounce of willpower to not do that strip again today. But I know that you, the readers, deserve more variety, so instead I’m going to take on a very serious issue in the comics community: Overly Contrived Setup Syndrome, or OCSS.

OCSS is a humor malfunction that occurs when the author of a comic comes up with a punchline first, then works backwards to create an scenario to set up that punchline. For all I know, this happens all the time, but I would only offer a diagnosis of OCSS when the creaking of the machinery is painfully obvious. Take this Beetle Bailey, for example. The punchline: Sarge whistling because he accidentally ate a whistle — that’s funny! (It’s actually not, of course, but stay with me.) So, um, why did he eat the whistle? I know, because it fell into the stew! But why would it do that? Why would Lt. Fuzz be leaning over Sarge’s stew for it to fall in? That’s a pretty contrived scenario. You see that events become progressively less probable when you consider them in reverse order — a sure sign of OCSS.

OCSS is a symptom of gag-driven strips. Basically, some strips (I would say the better ones) are character-based, which means that the humor is derived … from … the …

Oh, no, I promised that I wasn’t going to do it.

Let me start again. In a gag-driven strip, everything’s about a particular punchline, which means that … it … doesn’t…

Mary Worth … crystal meth … must … resist … argh …

Oh, hell, I give up. Enjoy!

Mary Worth, 10/6/04

You know what they say — the first piece of gum is free!