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Shoe, 10/3/04

Due to newspapers’ pernicious habit of intermittently cutting off the top of some Sunday strips, comic artists can never be sure that the first two panels of their weekly color installment will make it into any given paper, which means that they generally use that space for some throwaway gag. If you do get these intro panels, then you often end up with two punchlines in one strip. Maybe the journalistic cabal is planning even more drastic surgery to the Sunday funnies, though, because today’s Shoe seems designed to survive being cut into three pieces if necessary. In addition, the short-short-long configuration of panels in both the second and third row will allow the strip to be crammed into whatever space a heartless layout designer can devise.

However, like a squat military transport vehicle that’s designed to maintain structural integrity no matter what violence is done to it, the resulting strip isn’t pretty. Instead of one funny punchline, we’re subjected to three sort-of funny ones, including one (the third) that was done better years ago in Calvin and Hobbes. I do have to admit though that I like the solid exposed ceiling beams that have had so much loving attention mysteriously lavished on them in the third panel of the second row. Also, in this strip we learn that Cosmo likes to lounge around the house wearing saddle shoes. A good sign that I’m a comics junkie is that I love finding details like this even in strips that aren’t “funny” per se.

This is a good as time as any to point out the fact that Skyler is mysteriously a ward of his Uncle Cosmo rather than, say, his parents, which is honestly part of a larger comics trend. Of course, actual families produced the old-fashioned way abound in the comics, but still, there are a much larger number of uncle-nephew households in the comics pages and cartoons in general than there are in the real world. I’m assuming that this is to prevent us from having to ever imagine Cosmo (for instance) having sex, which, quite frankly, is a blessing. Those comics artists know their stuff.

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1. We’re moving to Seattle soon, and I start to worry that the local newspaper there won’t carry the soap opera comic strips. How will I keep up with Mary Worth? Then I remember that I often download these very strips from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer‘s Web site for use in my blog. I feel a great wave of relief washing over me.

2. The National Hockey League’s Stanley Cup Playoffs are underway, which means that ESPN is running a hockey playoff summary show every night at 9 p.m. This is bad news for me, because it preempts the program that was previously in that time slot: The Comics Roundup. The comics show has been pushed to the lesser-watched ESPN 3 network, which I don’t get. This, I think, is a good reason to pay for more than just basic cable.

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The Family Circus, 10/2/04

Hey, the dotted lines are back! And in the daily panel, no less! That’s great. It gives you something to latch onto in this panel, in which nothing else seems to have any meaning or purpose. You see, Jeffy goes around the clown because, well, because he doesn’t want a free coupon, I guess. And he’s sweating because … clowns are scary? And he says “Oops!” because … well, I have no idea why he says that. And he’s holding something in his hand, but it’s way too small for me to tell what it is. And when’s the last time you saw a clown in full get-up handing out free coupons? Usually they’re passed out by bored college students/homeless people. Unless there’s a big to-do or something. True story: On the day that Star Wars Episode I premiered, I walked by a theater where it was showing, and among the mob outside was a hapless individual dressed up as a giant cup of yogurt who was passing out free yogurt samples. Poor bastard. My friend and I actually got to go in and see the movie for free because some disgusted nerds who had bought tickets to every show playing that evening refused to see it again after the first time and were just handing them out to people. After we saw it, we understood why. We didn’t take any yogurt samples either. But, back to my point, which is as follows: today’s Family Circus — what the hell? I thank you for your time.