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Mark Trail, 7/18/04

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Why do cows burp so much? As usual, Mark Trail isn’t afraid to tackle the tough questions. One of the interesting things about this comic is the wild dichotomy in tone and artistic skill between the daily and Sunday strips. Generally, I find the human members of the cast of characters almost indistinguishable, since they all seem to have the same jet-black hair, weird pupil-less (or are they all-pupil?) eyes, and monstrously thick eyebrows — and of course they all speak in the same stilted, contraction-less dialog. I’ve been reading the strip every day for nearly two years, and I still have no idea who the hell anyone is. (Fortunately, the current plotline’s villain has a mullet and big sideburns, so he’s easy to pick out. Men with mullets are bad, people, bad!)

The Sunday strips, though, are a different story, and give me the impression that Jack Elrod was a wildlife artist before he took the Mark Trail mantle upon his shoulders. I love the cow drawings in this installment — check out the rippling muscles in the upper left-hand panel, and the face caught head-on in mid-moo at the bottom center. The bovine beasts project a definite majesty even as Mark discusses their gastrointestinal distress and its contribution to the coming eco-apocolypse. Another lovely detail is the presence of random birds flitting about and landing on the cattle — one of this strip’s signature touches.

(By the way, I always thought it was cow farts, not burps, that were the problem. No less an authority than erstwhile Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader once suggested building “boxes around their assholes” on a particularly memorable installment of Da Ali G Show. Sorry, Ralph, but Jack Elrod begs to differ.)

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Peanuts, reprinted 7/17/04

I want to start off by emphasizing that I don’t think Peanuts should be run in daily papers anymore. Yes, it’s beloved by all, but Charles Schultz is dead, and with so many artists trying to break into the scene, it’s a shame that part of the ever-shrinking comics section is forever occupied by repeats. (The death of Hank Ketcham apparently hasn’t stopped the production of daily installments of Dennis the Menace with his name on it, but that’s another, and much creepier, story.) People who want to read the old stuff should buy the books.

That having been said, I’m sort of glad that younger people are getting to see the older strips. In the last few years of Charles Schultz’s life, the strip was loopy and sentimental; but the stuff they’re repeating now reminds us that for most of its history Peanuts was about loss, failure, and longing for things you can’t have. Almost everyone in the strip had such doomed romantic feelings: Lucy for Schroeder, Sally for Linus, Peppermint Patty for Charlie Brown, Marcie for Peppermint Patty, and so on. Charlie Brown’s unrequited love for the little red-haired girl is legendary, of course, and the rest of his life isn’t much better. His baseball team won only one game in the strip’s history, and then had to forfeit because their outfielder, 5-year-old Rerun, bet on the game. His baseball hero is always on the verge of being sent to the minors. He is bullied by his psychologist and is largely ignored by his dog, who refers to him as “that round-headed kid.” They don’t mention any of this when they use him to sell insurance.

Snoopy is probably the only character in the strip who is generally happy, largely because of his ability to retreat into fantasy. Even he sometimes grapples with life’s failures, as in this week’s strips, though he bounces back pretty quickly.

Incidentally, thanks are in order to my close personal friends Matt and Laura, and to the total stranger who runs furtive explorations, all of whom linked to me.

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B.C., 7/16/04

I almost invariably hate B.C., so I’m rather surprised to find that my first mention of it this blog is positive. Jokes about golf and/or toilets date back to the Paleolithic Age themselves, but what made me laugh in this strip is the use of the word “SKULL,” apparently as a verb, between the two panels.

I’m always curious about strips that are set in specific time periods in the past and then indulge in anachronisms. Does Johnny Hart find the idea of prehistoric golf courses inherently funny? Or did he just get to a point in his career when he ran out of caveman jokes and said, “Darn it, Beetle Bailey does golf jokes, so why can’t I?” Hagar the Horrible is in a similar place today — Hagar and his wife are hovel-shopping with what I presume is a bloodthirsty Viking realtor — but this strip gets bonus points because it features a character talking into an 1890s-style phone mouthpiece that’s embedded in a tree.

By the way, mad “props” to TopFive.com, Acorns from an Oakie, and Clea’s Cave, all of whom linked to me on my second day of public operations.