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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.

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Mark Trail, 7/18/04

Click here open the full-sized comic in a new window.

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.