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Momma, 7/20/04

The Russian playwright Chekhov made a famous observation about drama that would be acknowledged by the worst Hollywood hack: “If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.” Sadly, there’s no gun in today’s Momma. However, the attentive reader will note that the strip takes place on a beach. Marylou and Francis are dressed in bathing suits (and Momma presumably is as well, though her newspaper saves the artist from having to depict a swimsuit on her freakishly stunted frame) and some scattered dots on the ground are apparently meant to evoke sand. Yet there’s nothing beach-specific about the strip! Marylou’s vague accusations could have easily been sharpened into something about Francis’ seaside tomfoolery. Alas, all the bathing paraphernalia sits there unused, like a forlorn and neglected pistol decorating the set of an Edwardian comedy of manners.

My main problem with Momma is that it lacks a consistent point of view. Are Momma’s kids a gaggle of ungrateful spendthrifts who constantly ignore her advice despite their inability to manage their own lives? Or is Momma a hateful old busy-body who never says anything nice and who can’t stand to let go of a single bit of control over her adult children? From what I’ve seen, both statements are true, which is surely a recipe for whimsical entertainment.

Today’s linkbacks go to Dalton and Dave, both fine, upstanding young men who know how to handle themselves at the beach.

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When I started this blog I promised myself that I would keep metaposts like this one (that is, posts about the blog itself rather than about the comics) to a minimum, but I do want make a couple of comments. (All metaposts will be marked as such in the title, so you can easily skip them and move on to the ones where I make fun the shape of little kids’ heads in the Family Circus and whatnot.) Because it’s much more fun than doing work, I’ve been using my nifty (and free!) referrer logs to relentlessly track everyone out there who’s linked to my humble offering here. I’ve noticed that I have attracted the attention of some readers on rec.arts.comics.strips, which I am very grateful for. This is obviously exactly the place where I should have posted links to the blog myself, and I would have had I not sworn years ago, in a desperate attempt to save my academic and social lives, to stop hanging around on Usenet.

A couple of people in that forum compared this blog to a similar but now-defunct feature called Funny Paper (of which I was wholly unaware) only with “none of the nastiness.” The last bit sort of surprises me, since I have in my first week impugned the racial authenticity of Stephen Bentley and compared Mary Worth to a train wreck. I guess the Funny Paper people were pretty unpleasant. Hopefully I won’t turn anyone off with my own personal vendettas, but for what it’s worth, I promise not to call for the death of any currently working professional cartoonist (at least not in this forum). It’s also been noted that Funny Paper‘s motto was “We read the comics so you don’t have to.” I swear that I did not rip my site’s title off of this. In fact, I ripped it off from “Dog Bites,” a column by Laurel Wellman that ran in the San Francisco Weekly in the late 1990s. Wellman used to tease/mock San Francisco Chronice columnist Jon Carroll by offering one-sentence summaries of his work under the heading “We read Jon Carroll so you don’t have to.”

Finally, a link back to a North of the Border linker, ronniecat. ronniecat shudders at the thought of mad “props,” so I offer big “ups” and a “shout” out instead.

OK, metapost over. Tune in tomorrow as I call for the death of whoever it is who draws Marmaduke, and possibly for the death of Marmaduke himself.

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Dilbert, 7/19/04

I used to like Dilbert. A lot. Maybe it’s because I’m kind of technically inclined and geeky. Maybe it’s because I used to have an office job that supplied at least of whiff of the bureaucratic nonsense that gets parodied in the strip.

Or maybe it’s because it used to be funny. I realized today while reading it that I haven’t laughed at it for ages now. So I dug out an old Dilbert book I have, and, sure enough, it used to have nice pacing and actual punchlines. Too much of the strip today follows the template used in today’s strip, which goes something like this:

1. Bureaucratic figure says something revealing incompetence, ignorance, and/or hostility, using latest MBA-spouted buzzword of the moment.
2. Dilbert or another sympathetic character responds with a cynical yet keen and cutting observation revealing the evil and/or stupidity of his/her superior.
3. Bureaucratic figure reacts with further hostility.

I mean, look at today’s installment. Hairballs! Ha! Cats get hairballs, and this cat is mean, and also in charge of HR! It’s funny!

I know Scott Adams is really busy running his media empire, but I wish he’d put some more energy into writing these days. As part of my goal of saying something positive almost every day, though, I do want to point out a nice artistic touch in the first panel: here, the reader’s point of view looks over shoulder of the Pointy-Haired Boss and Asok the intern, revealing just one of the PHB’s hair-points and including a rare close-up on Asok’s intriguing back-of-the-head stubble. This, to me, is funnier than anything else in the strip.