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Shoe, 7/28/04

When I read today’s Shoe, my first thought was, “Huh, Shoe’s real name is P. Martin Shoemaker. How about that.” Then I realized that I didn’t know the full name of anybody else in Shoe. Then I realized that maybe the reason finding out that Shoe has a first initial, middle name, and last name surprised me is that he and his cohorts are A BUNCH OF GOD DAMN BIRDS.

A friend of mine in California, sentenced to driving school by a traffic judge, chose to go to “Comedy Driving School,” after which she bitterly reported that “there’s a difference between being funny and being in a really good mood.” Similarly, there’s a difference between having a comic strip built on a wacky premise (like, say, that there’s this newspaper staffed by birds) and strip that uses that premise to generate actual humor. The birds of Shoe live and work in treetops, but for the most part they hate their jobs, drive unreliable cars, flunk in school, make clumsy passes in bars, and wear ill-fitting tuxedos and unfashionable glasses just like normal humans. I know that Shoe has been around for decades, so maybe I should assume that every possible funny aspect of its characters’ talking-bird existence was mined for comedy gold before I was born. But frankly, I’m not feeling that charitable. So here’s my challenge to Cassatt and Brookins: start making bird jokes in Shoe or … or … or face further tongue-lashings in this blog!

Oh, and while I’m making demands: no more “sexy” girl birds. They creep me out. Today’s linkbacks go to the weblog @ interbridge.com and Domestic Psychology, both of whom, I trust, support my anti-sexy-girl-bird stance.

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Eager readers simply will not let the question of Apartment 3-G‘s swapped panels die. Alert reader Dalton has swapped the art, but not the text, of the second and third panels of Thursday’s Apartment 3-G to reproduce the original author’s intended effect. It’s like the special edition of the original Star Wars trilogy, only significantly less crappy.

“Behold my l33t p40t0s40p ski11z,” says Dalton.

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Kudzu, 7/27/04

Kudzu is a good example of why I read all the comics every day. 95 times out of a 100, I find it preachy, smug, reactionary, and generally annoying. The strips where Ida Mae serves as a liberal strawperson to pick on infuriate me; the strips were the Preacher Will B. Dunn reads from a “modern translation” of the Bible are just lazy.

But then you get to stuff like today’s strip. In today’s American religious climate — where most people don’t go to church, and the fastest growing churches are large “nondenominational” generic Protestant churches — where else but in Kudzu can you find jokes about the different religious sensibilities of Baptists and Episcopalians? Where else can you pick on the quirks of the Methodists? The church league baseball/basketball/bowling/whatever installments are even better. I keeping waiting for a “one hand clapping” joke about the crowd whenever Preacher Dunn’s team plays the Zen Buddhists, though it never comes. These strips almost make up for the awful ones where the preacher’s parakeet comments on reality television. Almost.

As a side note, I think the title of this strip is a good example of comic semantic drift. When I first started reading it, I thought it was just a sort of nonsense word title, or maybe a reference to the strip’s overgrown Southern locale. It was only about a year later that I realized that there actually was a character in the strip named Kudzu. Kudzu is an everyman character who was probably intended to be the viewpoint character early in the strip’s history. Presumably the artist quickly realized that, like most everyman characters, he was boring beyond belief.