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Luann, 9/20/04

Sally Forth, 9/20/04

To my mind, there are two kinds of comics in the daily paper: joke-a-day strips and soap opera strips. In latter, things happen extremely slowly; in the former, nothing ever happens at all. Oh, sure, hijinks and tomfoolery happen in joke-a-day strips, but nothing happens that makes the characters lives’ any different: Charlie Brown never left grade school, Garfield will never have to be put down, and the TVA will never bring modern technology to wherever the hell it is that Snuffy Smith lives.

Lately, though, a few joke-a-day strips have been inching towards introducing some major changes. The big news of the whole year (in an extremely limited sense of the phrase “big news”) is of course Cathy getting married. But here are two other strips that are also making tentative moves towards exciting new things (in an extremely limited sense of the word “exciting”).

Luann of Luann was 12 for essentially my entire adolescence, and then suddenly became 16 and has stayed there ever since. Around the same time, Brad stopped being just an annoying foil for Luann and started to become a interesting character in his own right, which made it kind of unfortunate that his noggin looks more or less like Mr. Potato Head. The Brad-Toni-Dirk love triangle started out interesting for me and then got old, and the latest escalation into out-and-out violence really ought to bring it to some sort of resolution or I’ll be pretty peeved. Incidentally, how old are all these people supposed to be? I pegged the “older kids” in the strip to be in the 18-20 range; if that’s true, it makes it all the more embarrassing that alleged tough guy Dirk skeddadles so fast when Brad’s mom shows up.

On a lighter note (assuming that, like I do, you find corporate back stabbing funnier than domestic violence), Sally Forth has been suffering under the heel of her blustering boss Ralph since Scott Adams had a real job, but that may all be ending soon enough: the savvy, young, possibly gay (lime green pants? pink polka-dotted tie? no straight man could pull that outfit off!) new VP has it in for the old middle manager from hell. It looks like Sally could be in for a promotion over there doing … um … whatever it is she does. (“Nice job on the Underwood account!” Does anyone outside the weirdly nonspecific white-color world of comics and sitcoms ever say things like that?) Will the name of the strip change to Sally Forth, Vice President for Strategic Operations? I hear senior execs get snooty about their titles.

Bonus observations: I like the way the word “Gasp” is rising wispily over Brad’s head, unfettered by any word balloon, in the second panel of Luann. Also, in the first panel of Sally Forth, either Ralph is standing in a weird way that makes his butt stick out, or he has an oddly protruding rear end. Ha, ha, Ralph! Your big ass is fired!

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One Big Happy, 9/19/04

One Big Happy is one of those strips that I can’t decide whether I like or not. Sometimes it’s really funny, generally when it depicts all too accurately adults pushed to the edge of their sanity by the irritating behavior of children. (One of these days the Playground Lady is going to snap, and it’ll be all over the 6 O’clock news, I tell ya.) This cartoon has some promise too, with the bizarre picture of the skating donkey, the very idea of an ice show version of Don Quixote for children, and (another of my favorites from the strip) one of Ruthie’s misplaced outraged rants. So therefore I’m very sad — no, let’s say disappointed — that the whole thing is a set-up for a Family Circus-style malapropism. You can get away with that sort of thing in a three-panel daily, but using an entire Sunday strip to lead into a pun as lame as this is just completely unacceptable.

I still think the donkey is funny, though. Ha ha, it’s a skating donkey! In a sombrero! And it’s really two people in a suit! Hoo boy.

By the way, going to the One Big Happy page at Comics.com gives a series of One Big Happy “classics” that are out of sync with what I get in my paper. Anyone know what the story is there?

This week’s alarming search terms: “blubberybastard” (from the Italian version of Google), the all-too-familiar “miss buxley nude” (from Yahoo!), and, most intriguingly, two separate searches from people trying to figure out what Snuffy Smith’s parents’ names are. I no more believe that there are two different people who independently want this information than I believe that the Family Circus Web server gets overwhelmed by traffic (which claim I encountered anew last night), but the referrer logs say that those searches came from two separate computers in two separate cities. Maybe there’s some kind of online scavenger hunt underway? Anyway, if they’re named anything other than “Maw” and “Paw,” I’ll eat my hat.

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Apartment 3-G, 9/18/04

For my money, I say we don’t get nearly enough of Margo’s stereotyped, somewhat accented mother in Apartment 3-G. But this week’s sequence, in which she looks into Margo’s future and gives her vaguely ethnic premonitions of danger, makes up for her long absence. It doesn’t take a mystical knowledge of the fortune-telling arts of the old country to guess that Margo is going to get into trouble on any given day, of course, and anyone less self-absorbed than our scheming brunette publicist would have noticed that her new client is more Ernst Bloefeld than George Soros. Still, I appreciate a good card reading — we need more of them in the comics.

(I should say here that I guess I’m only assuming that Gabriella is Margo’s mother. I can’t figure out what else the relationship could be, though Margo, that saucy career girl, always calls her by her first name.)

Bonus observations: Margo may not know of two opposites in one heart, but she certainly seems well aware of two different degrees of collar flip-up in one cartoon. And I don’t want to know what she’s doing with her hands in the first panel.