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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.

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Apartment 3-G, 10/31/04

Today’s Apartment 3-G trades in two vicious stereotypes about New York City’s residents: that they’re callous, and that they’re stupid. As noted earlier, we just spent a lovely weekend in this gracious city, and if we had been forced to escape from our cruel overlord by hiding out in the back of a flower truck, I think people would have been nicer to us, or at least a little more curious. (“Hmm, terrified, English-impaired young women keep trying to stow away in our van whenever we have deliveries to that mysterious compound — that’s odd. Hey, how’d the Nets do last night?”) I do like the pink- and blue-attired, stroller-pushing, fashion refugees from 1962. Their dialogue in the last panel sounds marginally less stilted if you imagine them as two little old Jewish ladies, though.

I’ve really been drawn to the Sunday Apartment 3-Gs lately. Maybe the evil floating heads have hypnotized me! Must … do … floating heads’ … bidding …

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Mark Trail, 10/30/04

I’m not the first to note this, but Jack Elrod doesn’t seem to like drawing people very much. Maybe that’s why everyone in Mark Trail looks the same. Whenever he can, he pulls back the “camera” to give us some lovely frolicking animal shots. Unfortunately, his word balloons are often nowhere near the tiny, distant humans who are supposed to be saying said words, so it usually looks like the animals are conversing among themselves. For instance, there’s no other normal way to interpret today’s strip but to assume that the leftmost bird is proposing a quick trip to the Florida Keys. At least it isn’t talking to the dolphins, though; as near as I can tell, the reply is coming from the boat itself. I’m not sure if that’s more or less realistic.