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The Middletons, 9/16/04

I think one of the cardinal laws of visual comedy is that often what the human mind can visualize is funnier than anything you could draw. This law is well illustrated in today’s Middletons. We’re free to imagine the steroid-enhanced middle-school behemoths who play for our heroes’ opponents at whatever gargantuan scale we find most amusing.

Of course, it would be funnier if our overmatched tykes had recognizable facial expressions that emphasized their plight. Admittedly, it’s hard to depict them as being wide-eyed with terror when the average Middletons character has eyes that already cover three-quarters of his or her face. At first, I thought there was sweat blob coming off the player on the left in the third panel a là Cathy, but it just turned out to be the date.

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Jump Start, 9/15/04

Today’s question: What’s the most recent year in which a joke about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would have been funny?

No peeking at your neighbors’ papers! Now, are you ready?

We would accept as an answer any year between 1987 and 1989. We would also accept the answer my fiancee gave when I asked her this question, which was “Not this one.”

Actually, since I don’t have kids, for all I know, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles may be back now, just like the Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake and other crappy stuff from my youth. If that’s the case, please don’t tell me; I’d rather remain blissfully ignorant.

(Oh, and confidential to Pervert in Edmonton: Maybe I would have believed that someone might be searching Google for any one of “beetle bailey ‘s pimp nude ass,” “cartoon ziggy in spandex purple fuzzy penis,” or “mary worth naked,” but all three search terms coming from a single computer raises suspicions that someone’s trying to skew my referral logs. The searches for “hillbilly blitzkrieg” and “blondie bumstead sex comics” — the latter on MSN, surely a search engine for bottom feeders if ever there were one — remain unexplained, and disturbing.)

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Mary Worth, 9/14/04

Oh, man, just when I think the current Mary Worth storyline can’t get any better, it does! I knew that when Mary sniffed the fumes from Tommy’s tokin’ this weekend that fireworks couldn’t be far behind, but I never imagined that she’d be so bitchy about it. The nice old lady that we perhaps all imagined Mary to be would have just sat Iris down and said, “I’m concerned about your son’s drug use.” Instead, she serves tea, makes an oblique reference to the smoke detector, and then, with that “whatever,” slips the knife right in between the ribs. Zing! Hopefully now that Iris the social climber has been humiliated by Charterstone’s main arbiter of status, she and her ex-con son will slink back to the trailer park where they belong.

The other day I was in the locker room at our pool and overheard a conversation between two 7-to-10-year-olds, one of whom claimed to have spied some other people smoking pot. “It smelled like tomato soup!” he asserted confidently. Apparently Mary has a little more drug experience to draw on.

(By the way, I stole the title of this strip from a recurring feature in Tom the Dancing Bug, which is one of my favorite non-daily comics.)