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Comment of the Week

Saul is over in panel one, pursuing his passion: narrating events to people in real-time, as they unfold.

—Victor Von
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Ooooh, wow

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Hi and Lois, 11/7/04

The list of comics strips that have not used drug lingo is a bit shorter today. I have to admit that Hi and Lois’ place on that list, just above Hagar the Horrible and just below Family Circus, always seemed pretty secure to me, but apparently I was wrong about the extent to which drug culture has infiltrated the funny pages. For the record, the word that’s really alarmed me here is “peaking.” All the other stuff could be derived third-hand from bad movies like Flashback, but “peaking” … it arouses suspicions. I’m just saying.

(Note to my mom: I only learned about the word “peaking” from other kids myself, not from personal experience. Really. Winners don’t use drugs. I’m my own person!)

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Pun alert!

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Gasoline Alley, 11/6/04

I would just like to point out that the soul who, up until mere moments before the action in this strip, was resting under the stone angel in the first panel was named Moira Less. Get it? It’s like “more or less.” Get it? Get it?

The guy in the mausoleum next door is named Uriah Pert; I’ve been staring at that for ten minutes, and I have to admit that I don’t get it. Please explain it to me, somebody. I do appreciate that ol’ Uriah had a big dollar sign put on his gravestone. Me, I’m going to put all kinds of freaky Masonic symbols and stuff on mine, so that someday some pot-addled teenaged conspiracy buffs will stumble upon it and it’ll blow their little minds.

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Tell me how that makes you feel

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Dilbert, 11/5/04

Ziggy, 11/5/04

One must assume that psychiatrist jokes popped into the pop culture ether about a week after Freud hung out his shingle in Vienna. There’s nothing like the experience of opening up your innermost thoughts and feelings to serve as a subject for uproarious humor and cruel mockery; the New Yorker cartoonist staff has been making hay from this for decades, and of course Lucy van Pelt is the Jungian archetype of the hostile therapist. But when you have a cartoon character whose whole purpose is to be a case study in haplessness, well, you get results like these, where cartoon characters as old school as Ziggy and as (relatively) new school as Dilbert are the butts of what is essentially the same joke. I do have to say that this Ziggy is all the crueler because he looks like he’s about to burst into tears (the dark circle under his eye is a nice touch). Dilbert at least can stick up for himself. Also, apparently the fact that Ziggy is lying on a couch and talking to a bearded man in a suit with a notepad doesn’t convey psychiatry clearly enough to the unwashed masses, because there’s a little sign to that effect hanging in the background.