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Herb and Jamaal, 11/3/04

Herb and Jamaal loves to do strips in which poetry by African-American writers accompanies some moment in the lives its characters. Which is all well and good, if potentially infringing certain copyrights. But usually there’s some at least vague connection between the poem and the action in the strip. Here, all I’m getting is: “Herb’s mother-in-law: she exists, and she lives in this house.” Which doesn’t have anything to do with the poem, as near as I can tell.

So, here’s my challenge to you, IRTCSYDHT readers: come up with some poem that fits this strip better than this one! I’ll take the best ones and Photoshop the new text in (or, more likely, ask Photoshop blackbelt Dalton to do it). We’ll show that we can beat Herb and Jamaal at its own copyright-infringing game.

(You know, now that I’m looking at it again, Herb’s mother-in-law is looking oddly … busty … in that last panel. You don’t think “walk a high wire” is some kind of wire bra reference, do you?)

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Hi and Lois, 11/2/04

Of course, comics should have a slightly (or perhaps extremely) skewed worldview, but they’re best when that worldview is internally consistent. It’s not just funny when people say wacky thing; it’s funny when people say wacky things and other people react to them as if they’re normal.

That’s why this strip fails for me. Not only is Mr. Thurston’s question about cartoon characters totally without context and deranged (were there any cartoon characters running in previous years? Ross Perot doesn’t count), but Hi’s reaction to this question is exactly what your reaction would be: wide-eyed horror. That’s not a joke, that’s just dementia.

Fun fact about Hi and Lois: Mr. Thurston was once referred to continually as “Thirsty” and had the bright red tell-tale nose of a drunk. Now the nose and the nickname are gone, though the slovenliness and dysfunctional marriage remain. Maybe his question comes from a bad case of the DTs.

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Family Circus, 11/1/04

A week ago, I would have scoffed at the idea that any child Jeffy’s age would even know what marbles were. However, Monday I went to a nine-year-old’s birthday party, and you know what the gift that made the biggest impression was? Marbles! I was shocked, and a little horrified. You know, when I was a kid, we had to play crappy video games on an Atari 2600 (and what person born during the 1970s doesn’t remember the bitter, bitter disappointment that was the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man?). And so many people of my generation went on to slave away selflessly in the computer industry, for almost no pay, in order to produce whiz-bang, photorealistic, ultraviolent video games so that their kids didn’t have to suffer like we had suffered. And this is how they’re repaid? It just makes me sick.

This panel illustrates one of my favorite narrative oddities in the Family Circus: dialogue that’s half in word balloons, half in quote marks below the panel, and all half-assed. Also, sometime this week someone on the Family Circus production line decided to kick the caption font up from Roman to boldface. Maybe the whole family’s just been shouting a lot lately.