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Doonesbury, 10/1/04

OK, so let’s see. The U.S. is in the middle of fighting two wars right now, by my count, one of which managed to get almost every other country on Earth to hate us. The current president is one of the most polarizing political figures since Nixon. And we’re a month away from an election that both sides are calling the most important in decades.

And so of course, Doonesbury is spending a week focused on The Apprentice.

I do still like Doonesbury generally, but it’s definitely been getting creakier. It’s hard to do pop cultural commentary when you’re not particularly in touch with pop culture anymore. If you really want your TV watching mingled with political commentary, I guess you have to go to The Boondocks. There at least the characters talk back to the TV, instead of grinning like morons like Zipper here. I’m misquoting what someone else said online here, but: Remember when Doonesbury used college students to make fun of adults, rather than to make fun of college students?

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The Boondocks, 9/30/04

Like a lot of us, The Boondocks has been in a more or less constant state of seething political rage for the past four years. Which is fine as far as it goes — there’s a lot of funny that comes out of angry. But it’s been too bad that the strip has jettisoned a lot of its cast in the process and become something of a daily diatribe. Some of the funniest Boondocks series have focused on the supporting cast (e.g., Tom getting kicked out of his house after his wife voted for Nader, Riley humiliated when his family found out that he listens to Lauren Hill).

Anyway, the strip has never shied away from doing meta strips-about-the-strips stuff, so it’s nice that in the process of reintroducing a long-missing character, the fact that she’s been long-missing is acknowledged in a funny way. It also takes the fact that everyone’s the same age all the time and turns it from an oddity into another joke.

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Herb & Jamaal, 9/29/04

It’s move bodies! A real friend helps you move bodies!

I mean, that’s the joke. “A friend is someone who will help you move; a real friend will help you move bodies.”

Seriously, dude. Get it right.