Tune in tomorrow as Rev. Croom embarks on a new life of selective observance. He'll dine and dash (thou shalt not steal), covet Herb's wife, murder Jamaal, and make a graven image, but he'll at least call his mom to wish her a happy birthday (honor thy father and mother). The funnies haven't been this theologically bold since Judge Parker financed the construction of a giant needle big enough for a dozen camels to thread.
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.
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.
Hagar the Horrible, 7/26/04
As a former professional historian in training, I can assure you that the Vikings were a thoroughly nasty lot. They pillaged, destroyed, raped, maimed, enslaved, and looted their way across northern Europe for several centuries. There was a set prayer in the Irish church’s prayer book that went, “From the fury of the Norsemen, oh Lord, protect us.” Thus, I have to believe that the spirits of thousands of Viking warriors in Valhalla moan with disgust every day when they read Hagar the Horrible.
Two aspects of this strip caught my eyes. First, the flag: frankly, I’m impressed that Chris Browne executed a semi-decent Scandinavian flag here. Hagar supposedly lives in Norway, so maybe that’s what the flag is supposed to be, though the shoddy coloring job makes it look as if it’s the flag of Normandy. If we take the Old Norse sagas as our guide, though, it’s probably more accurate to imagine that it’s his own personal banner, and that as Hagar says, he’s carving out a private chiefdom for himself in this bleak and deserted land, where he will preside over his men’s council as they spar over women, fight their blood enemies, and loot the weaker races around them. Thus it’s all the more disappointing that Hagar talks real estate with the first local he sees, rather than roasting him alive in a sacrifice to Odin.
Which brings me to my next observation. What exactly is the deal with this guy’s outfit? People in Hagar the Horrible have very specific clothes based on their profession, so I’ve seen this get-up before, but I can’t for the life of me tell what it’s supposed to represent. He looks not unlike a goth pastry chef, to be honest.