Ignore for a moment the strange and awkward conversation that Corporal Yo is attempting in the first panel:

Let's instead contemplate Sarge's reply. What does it mean, exactly? Is he telling Yo that his relationship with food has become so dysfunctional that it is now impossible for him to be sexually interested in another person, or interested in them in any way, really, aside from their potential to perhaps feed him, or did he just confess to Yo that he is, in fact, a cannibal, and which of those two possibilities is the most disturbing?

This expression of Snoopy's cracks me up:

Here's a rather poor scan of the strip that image is taken from, for context:That is apparently the face Snoopy makes when he's feeling sick from having had too much to eat and drink. That may explain why the face looked so strange to me, as it's certainly not one that shows up in many Peanuts strips, unlike the expressions he makes in the third and fourth panels.

The strip was scanned from the May 25 issue of the Ashtabula County Star Beacon.

I thought this cover was funny:

I think that's a pretty effective cartoon, in that it is both amusing and obvious, but only obvious in retrospect. That is, after I saw it and thought "heh" to myself, I wondered if anyone else had ever used that gag before, and, if not, why not.

That's the cover to the upcoming Bizarro Heroes collection of Dan Piraro's Bizarro cartoons, focusing, naturally, on superhero gags.

The most disturbing image I've seen all week:

Yes, that's a lovingly-rendered drawing of Mary Worth's head attached to a sexy lady's head, smoking a cigarette, while Dick Tracy tells the chimera to stop sitting like that.

Context only makes it much, much more disturbing. Are you sure you want to know the context?

Okay, you asked for it.

That image is the last panel ofMike Peters' April 22 Mother Goose and Grimm strip, which alludes to 1992 Sharon Stone film Basic Instinct:Yes, this is a comic strip in which the punchline is Mary Worth's vagina.

I warned you.

Some thoughts on today's funnies

Have you ever noticed the way Charles Schulz drew the tails on his dialogue balloons?

I never really looked very hard at them until today, when I saw this strip (Alone in a restaurant with only the funnies page of Northeast Ohio newspaper The News-Herald, which contains only 19 strips or cartoons, so I spent an inordinate amount of time with each of them). The tails in the first two panels are a little weird-looking, as they're not even really straight or curved tails, but are super-loose and semi-scribbled on the left-had side. They look super-organic, as if the tails were something taht were being baked or cooked, and the process somehow results in random little bubbles and formations.

I also realized that Schulz must start on the bottom right of the bubbles, with the right-hand side of the tail, and then curving up with the bubble, and then doing the left-hand side of the bubble, before finishing the tail, making the left-hand side connect to the right.

Something like this, I guess:

I also never really noticed, or paid all that much attention, to the fact that the bubbles terminate on the borders of the panels. At least in this strip. I had to really fight the urge to just start looking up old strips and breaking out some of those Fantagraphics collections to see the evolution of Schulz's bubble-tails, and whether the balloon portions were drawn to disappear into the panel borders, or if the shrinking of newspapers strips just ate the edges away.


Here's today's Dustin. It's not exactly a knee-slapper or anything, but I was really impressed with how well it was drawn. It really jumped off the page, and was probably the freshest, most vibrantly drawn comic of these 19 (The closest competition was Patick McDonnell's Mutts, which is usually the best-drawn comic I see on any comics page on which Mutts appears, but this installment just featured two squirrels in medium shot, dancing below a quotation, and wasn't that visually interesting a strip. It also had a ton of white space, so there wasn't much actual drawing filling it up.

The longer I thought about it, the more I began to wonder if Dustin is really that well-drawn, or if perhaps the familiarity of the rest of the comics page—Garfield, Family Circus, For Better Or Worse, Crankshaft, Hi and Lois, Hagar The Horrible, Peanuts—are so familiar at this point, that the lines, characters and settings have become the equivalent of visual white noise. Maybe if I've been reading Dustin for 30 years, maybe I wouldn't get excited by the look on the dad's face, or the little squiggle on the elbow on the sleeve over the bend of his arm, I'd just think it as unremarkable as a Walker or Browne character.


Not sure what the lead time for the average comic strip is, but the Japanese tsunami happened about five weeks ago, and radiation jokes aren't as funny today as they might have been, say, two months ago. It's an unfortunate strip, even if it was merely a matter of accidental timing. Poor Scott Adams; everything I read about him online these days seems to be negative.


The cave-people of B.C. have always regularly demonstrated anachronistic knowledge, but this one's pretty weird—the dictionary isn't just discussing things from the cave-people's future, but from out future.

Maybe they're not really from the past, but from sort of lost world...?


After reading this, I thought to myself that just burying things is actually a pretty good way to go about spring cleaning. I myself do a lot of cleaning by burying things, although I usually just bury them under other things or furniture—like, burying papers under more papers, for example—rather than burying them in the ground in my backyard.

Then I grew worried. If I am recognizing something of myself by reading Marmaduke, is that a sign that I'm approaching middle age? In a few more years, will I be laughing at Marmaduke? Cutting it out and hanging in on the fridge?!

I've never felt closer to death.

A few funnies from Friday

This is a rare instance where the ability to easily color comics all the time–both online and in print, as in the example of this scan from the Cleveland Plain Dealer–can actually actively ruin a comic.In black and white, this would have been kind of clever, as a drawing of a barren desert wasteland and a drawing of a barren snowy wasteland would look identical, and the reader would have to depend on context clues to tell which of the two was actually in the drawing. Whitehead's gag, however, is to include two, conflicting sets of context clues, demanding a neat little clash.

However, the sand or snow the characters are traveling across is colored to resemble sand, so that the fellow on the right looks out of place, deflating the tension of the "Is it a desert or a snowscape?" question the drawing would otherwise beg.

It's not often you see a clever comic thoroughly unraveled by the coloring like this, and I spent far longer pondering the effect of the coloring on Whitehead's original intention than I did enjoying the moment the cartoon otherwise would have offered.


Hey, the first kid is three heroes in one, while the second kid is only two heroes in one. Are the character's they're playing in conflict, or teamed up? Because the first kid would win in a fight; he's got Superman's powers, Batman's brains and gadgets and Aquaman's...je ne sais quoi. The other kid is just Spider-Man mixed with a plastic toy.

(Does "Bat-Aqua-Super-Man" sound awkward? I would think you'd start with Super, and end up with "Super-Bat-Aqua-Man," or perhaps "Super-Aqua-Bat-Man," but the latter reminds me of the band, and thus suggests a far different superhero).


This is a weird one. It seems like a decade or two ago papers wouldn't have run it because it had the word "gay" in it, and nervous editors would be worried about acknowledging the existence of gays in the notoriously conservative newspaper comics pages, and now it seems like maybe they shouldn't have run it so as not to offend any of their many gay readers.

Also, I can't take my eyes off the lit stick of dynamite on the teacher's desk. This strip is basically insane.


That is the worst drawing of a sheep I have ever seen in my entire life. It looks a little like a drawing of a sheep by someone who has never actually seen a picture of a sheep, but heard someone describe one once. If I didn't read the dialogue, I would have assumed that was a baby polar bear.

Reminder:

Lucy van Pelt is not to be trifled with.

Apparently you have to not hoard comics to really appreciate this comic strip.

This happened again this past weekend, and once again the comic strip in question was an installment of Peanuts, which is now officially the most often cut-out-by-my-mother-and-left-for-me-to-find comic strip in the paper.

You can click on the strip to make it bigger and thus more readable, if you missed it when it re-ran in your local paper a few weeks ago. The joke is, of course, that Charlie Brown supposedly has a comically unlikely amount of used comic books for sale, and despite the exaggerated for comedy's sake amount, Rerun or whoever the kid on the right is doesn't think it's quite enough comics.

Of course, when I read the strip, not only did I not laugh at the situation, I thought to myself, Jeez, that's not really that many comic books, is it? That can't be more than two longboxes...well, maybe three tops.

And then I realized that I had many times more used comic books than Charlie Brown has for sale in that panel and, were I to pile them all up like that for a sale, they would not only fill the top of the panel, but probably spill far beyond its borders.

And then I wept softly.

I still haven't gotten used to this aspect of Mark Trail strips

You know how, because the strip is nature-related, the second panel of the daily strips often cuts far away from the action (or the "action") to show an animal in the foreground, while the principal characters continue to play out their scenes, dialogue bubbles emitting from deep, deep in the background.

Of course, at first and sometimes second (or third or fourth) glance, it usually looks like whatever animal is in the foreground is speaking the dialogue, and thus Mark Trail often looks like it may just be a completely surreal, insane comic strip with bizarre cutaways and talking animals.

For example, in this installment, a pelican seems to be thanking someone named Matt for being its guide, while a house below answers it.

I saw this particular strip at Josh Fruhlinger's Comics Curmudgeon site, the same place I see most of the soap opera comic strips that I never read (I don't generally read the funnies unless me and a newspaper are physically in the same place at the same time and I have nothing better to do during that time, and even then most of the papers I'm around tend not to have Fruhlinger favorites like Mary Worth and Apartment 3-G).

This particular Mark Trail storyline has been the best I've read/watched Fruhlinger read since the one with that poor fawn getting its ass literally kicked, due to its sexy set-ups that might be more natural in a romantic comedy, or a pornographic film of some kind, or maybe a rerun of Three's Company, but seem strange and awkward in Mark Trail.

For example, in this strip our hero walks out of the shower naked and finds a female visitor has come in and decided to sit and wait for him. Fruhlinger, an experienced Mark Trail parser who probably never has trouble remembering that the animals in the foreground aren't actually speaking the dialogue bubbles that seemed pointed at them, noted the size and placement of Mark's dialogue bubble in the last planet: "Faced by the sudden and terrifying prospect of a woman in his room, Mark covers his genitals the only way he can: by bellowing out the largest word balloon his lungs can muster."

That's a trick that, by the way, can only work in comics.

What a glorious medium.

This is how my local paper decided how to fill the hole in the funny pages left by Cathy

I think I may have seen some mention of papers doing something similar to determine how to replace Cathy Guisewite's Cathy on one of the comics blogs I read, but it was kind of strange to see this in my hometown paper.

I don't regularly read this paper, so I'm not sure if they ran these same five strips for five days in a row (which would make sense, since it's hard to get a good idea of what a strip is like by picking a single one out at random), or if they ran five different strips each day for five days, for a total of 25 choices (I checked today, and the contest was over, but I didn't see any of these five on their comics page though, so I don't know).

I can understand why a paper would choose this method, as it a) fills up a lot of space (which seems to be a big concern for this particular paper, which is apparently always seeking different strategies for killing space, given the number of high school athletics photos are run at one-fourth the size of a full page), b) passes the buck on the decision-making, and thus diffuses some of the negative letters to the editor complaining about the awful new strip ("Don't blame us, the majority of our readers wanted that dumb strip you hate!") and c) invites reader participation/engagement with the paper in a relatively low-stakes way.

Still, it seems a little strange to me, as it's hard to imagine any paper giving that sort of control to their readers over other aspects of the paper. Editors at small city, wire service-dependent papers like this one are always making many little decisions about content, but would they leave it to their readers to vote on which syndicated op-ed columnists they run? Which advice columns? Which paper's crossword puzzles? Which wire service they subscribe to?

Probably not, which seems to reveal the paper's lack of esteem for the importance of the funnies page. But hell, maybe I'm just sensitive about this sort of thing, it being comics-related and all.

I found it interesting that the two forms of voting mentioned in the little paragraph explanation were to either drop off your choice at the newspaper office in person, or to mail it to the office. No email? No, of course not—no one who reads the paper version of a daily newspaper is online. (Okay, I'm just being a jerk; it's probably to circumvent attempts to stuff a virtual ballot box).

Also of some interest were that none of the five strips above really seemed all that Cathy-esque, in terms of subject matter or content. Pickles is a family sitcom-like strip, I suppose, and this particular installment of Dustin does mention dating I suppose, but none of these five seem particularly woman-oriented the way that say, Tina's Groove or The Pajama Diaries are.

Of these five, I think Pickles is probably the closest one to actually being funny, but mostly just because of the overreaction of that dude on the right in panel three...seeing that toilet seat fall down all by itself like that raised his hair as if he just saw someone spontaneously combust. Dustin seems like the best-drawn though, and would probably get my vote (reading through the archives of Dustin, it's actually a pretty strong strip). If I cared enough to vote for Cathy's replacement in my hometown newspaper that I never read.

Some superhero costumes in this weekend's funnies

Sunday's Family Circus strip offered a wordless observation of the distance between kids' Halloween costumes in their imaginations and in their minds, and our pal Batman makes an appearance. Given the timelessness of most of the costumes—clown, witch, jungle cat—I would have guessed that this might have been a re-run of an older panel, save that the current artist gave young Billy's Batman costume those crazy fake abs so many superhero kids' costumes have developed over the last few years. Those things really freak me out.


Yesterday's Blondie featured Dagwood and his boss Mr. Dithers attending a costume party, the latter dressed as Superman...with one slight alteration. The gag's not really funny, but I like Mr. Dithers' shape, and seeing it wearing that particular costume. I also really like the fact that this is a joke—if that's not too strong a word for what is occurring in the panel—that could have been told at any point since Superman's creation in 1939. That seems fitting, given the strip's longevity.


Here's another one from yesterday's funny pages—Ted and Sally Forth dressed as Hawkman and Hawkgirl. I don't even really understand the "joke" in this one (Is it a weather thing? Because is the weather on October 31 and November 1 really that different?). But it doesn't really matter. The basic design of Hawkman's helmet is so funny all by itself, with those big, crazy hawk-eyes which here, as is often the case in the comics, move as if they were the real eyes of the person wearing the helmet, is such a strong visual gag that mild daily comic strip humor is simply eclipsed by the the default insanity of Hawkman's helmet. Interesting that Ted actually looks like the superhero when he puts that costume one, while Sally looks more like Sally in a costume. I guess it's because we get to see her hair sticking out of the bottom of the helmet, and that she doesn't have big googly eyes over her normal eyes.

Recently seen on the Cleveland Plain Dealer funnies pages:

I don't know, I think she looks pretty good in red and white, and the maple leaf tiara's nice. To see more of Dan Piraro's work, check out his website (I particularly enjoyed the sketchbook section and the gallery of animal rights-related cartoons).

This installment of Funky Winkerbean appeared the same day in the same paper's funny pages: I was quite surprised to see the word "whore" there. Sure, Old Les was using it to refer to himself, and in a joking, self-deprecating was, as part of a metaphor construction, but still—whore. Remember during the endless 2008 Democratic primary campaign, when the Clintons and Hilary Clinton's campaign feigned a freak-out over some goofy pundit-type used a construction of the phrase "pimp out" to refer to Chelsea Clinton working for the campaign?

"Whore" is an even stronger word than "pimp," isn't it? And newspaper comic strip readers even more prone to blushing, fainting and hand-wringing than political-types, right?

Once I got past the use of the word whore though, the whole thing just sort of confused me. If you're not following the ins-and-outs of Les Moore's life as seen in Funky, he is apparently promoting a book he wrote about his late wife's death. For some reason, this PR or agent lady says he needs to do interviews in order to secure blurbs for his book, but blurb's don't come from interviews, they come from reviews. Reviews, or the publisher simply asking someone famous to provide them with a blurb to put on the back cover.

Maybe it works differently in the Funki-verse, but an author interview is actually a really hard place to get a blurb out of, since interviews are more often than not neutral on the quality of the work.

Anyway, look—there's the word "whore" in the funnies!

Four images.

I was pretty surprised to see the above image staring up at me from a rolled-up newspaper on a relative's porch on Sunday morning.

Funky Winkerbean cartoonist Tom Batiuk and/or whoever helps produce his comic strip (I can't imagine he does it all by himself; surely he must at least have a couple of sadness experts advising him on the scripts) has long incorporated superhero allusions and homages into his and/or their work, but I think Deadman is perhaps the most obscure of 'em I've seen before (Not that I've read every installment of Funky Winkerbean or anything; for all I know DC superheroes who have never had their own TV shows or movies appear in Sunday strips regularly).

I mean we know who Deadman is, but how big a portion of the total Funky Winkerbean reading audience do we account for?

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Somehow I forgot to highlight the above cover for What If? Wolverine: Father, which in many months would probably be Marvel's most awesome cover of the month, but then, this month the month this particular cover is being released is the same one during which Ivan Brunetti's image of cute little Marvels all using the gym together is also planned for release).

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Let me tell you a very sad story. Somewhere, someone created this image, and was paid money for it, while someone else, who probably got paid even more money, looked at it and said "Yes, yes this is an acceptable image. I can't think of anything about it that should be changed."

Actually, that's the most positive way to look at that image.

The more cynical way to look at it is that those involved with its existence were all quite aware that it is a terrible, terrible image, but made it that particular type and level of terrible to cater to a particular audience with terrible taste. That is, they were thinking, "Hey, we have this prose urban-fantasy series we'd like to sell to those goofy people who read comic books...what do the things they like look like? Like this? Okay fine, make this look as much like that crap as possible."

Pardon me a moment, I need to go weep quietly in the closet....

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Oh say, look at the cover of JSA All-Stars #10, which came out a few weeks ago: I haven't seen Power Girl's blood-splattered breasts in a while, and I can't remember the last time I've seen them on the cover of a comic book.

Oh Comics, you sure do cater to some very specific fetishes!

Surely a sign that the zombies-in-comics craze must be coming to an end:

One nice thing about newspaper comic strips

I've mentioned in passing before that I have a new roommate now—Yogi, a 12-year-old chocolate Labrador retriever (pictured below). She was my mother's dog and has lived with her the majority of those 12 years, but now poor old Yogo has developed dog arthritis and doesn't travel as well as she used to, so she's been living with me since this past spring. As it turns out, the lifestyle of an old, arthritic dog and that of a comics blogger are remarkably compatible!

A few days ago, I was going to make a pot of coffee for elevenses, and when I opened the cupboard where I keep my coffee I found a Sunday Peanuts taped to the inside of the cupboard door. My mother must have cut it out and taped it up as a surprise where she knew I'd find it the last time she was here.

The subject matter was Charlie Brown ruminating on how thankless the task of caring for a dog is...except for when it's not thankless.

Maybe not the greatest Peanuts strip, and the funnies page it was cut from (not exactly sure which paper, although I can narrow it down to three) had it laid out in an uneven column that hardly flatters it (see below), but it made me smile at the time, perhaps as much because it was a symbol that a family member was thinking of me and used it as part of a nice gesture.

And it reminded me of at least one thing about newspaper comics that is kind of special (Generally I only bring them up on the blog when it's to say something disparaging about how terrible they have become).

Is there any other medium of popular creative expression which lends itself to this sort of gesture? You might see a scene in a movie or a TV show or even a commercial or perhaps hear a song on the radio that reminds you of a friend or loved one, but you can't exactly take a pair of scissors to a TV or movie screen; you can reduce a song to a physical artifact to stick in an envelope or tape to a refrigerator door.

It's technically possible to cut a passage out of a book, of course, but books (like comics!) are expensive. The funnies are delivered to people's houses for such a little amount of money that they're practically free.

I don't want to open any web comics vs. paper comics debates, but I think this sort of funnies-as-interpersonal-currency is something the paper ones continue to do better than web comics. Sure, you can print out any comic you read on the web to put up on the office bulletin board, but it's a more engaged comics reader who will go looking at particular sites on the Internet to see strips (I know I'm the only person in my extended family and circle of friends who does so, for example).

Whatever their deficiencies, newspaper comic strips remain the most cut-out-and-taped-to-kitchen-cupboards type of comic...or popular art of any kind.

Well, newspaper comics or amateur, original art by little kids related to whoever owns the kitchen cupboards, I guess....


*********************

The particular strip discussed above:
(As always, clicking the images make them bigger, if you're having trouble appreciating Schulz's line work)

Animal biology in today's Sunday comics

Soooo is that how the dinosaurs became extinct? They just wandered off to the horizon one by one and spontaneously combusted, loudly disintegrating?

Or is the implication in this comic strip that the raptor is so ashamed of itself for being related to a B.C. character that it wandered off over the horizon and shot itself in the head? Because gun ownership among velociraptors brings up a lot of interesting questions that this strip doesn't even begin to address, although perhaps that is how the dinosaurs became extinct. Once velociraptors developed firearm technology, they were able to hunt all of the herbivores into an early extinction, and with nothing to feed on, the carnivores all died off.

I can't remember the last time B.C. made me laugh, but I'll be damned if it didn't make me think today.


Is that thing a zebra? Because zebras don't have hands.

Let's hear it for Stephan Pastis!

I generally only bring up the the modern funnies pages here on EDILW in order to either shake my head sadly at the sad state of the newspaper comic strip in the 21st century, or to make fun of a particularly terrible strip that caught my eye.

Therefore, I feel compelled to point out this particular Pearls Before Swine Sunday strip which I found—honest-to-God, no lie, no sarcasm or snark—to actually be pretty funny. I think I even said "Heh" out loud when I got to the seventh panel.

It goes on for two more panels after that, and I don't really get those panels (I'm not a regular reader; is the human supposed to be the cartoonist?), but wow, that seventh panel, and the way it makes you notice the effort that went in to building the joke—it's a kind of clever, show-your-work sort of strip, made funnier by how hard Pastis worked to get there.

So anyway, despite my usual cynicism for the funnies pages, I guess there really are occasionally funny funnies to be found.

Let's check in on the state of the funnies page, with the Cleveland Plain Dealer

My hometown is about an hour’s drive from Cleveland, close enough that the Cleveland Plain Dealer was delivered here, and growing up it was my favorite of the handful of newspapers available.

It had a much bigger and better comics page than that of my local hometown paper, it offered me one of my first windows into the bigger, more exciting world beyond the city limits in places with buildings higher than five stories and populations bigger than 30,000 or so. And, it was the Plain Dealer which gave me my very first professional writing opportunity—Seventeen-year-old Caleb got $20 for reviewing Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the PD teen-written special section back in 1999.

I hadn’t really perused a physical copy of the paper since moving down south to Columbus, Ohio just about a decade ago, and my only real experience with it was online (I’d often check the PD or other Ohio papers because Columbus’ daily, The Columbus Dispatch, is the worst paper in the world, and despite having office right across form the Ohio Statehouse, they rarely had state government coverage to equal that of the PD or the Akron Beacon-Journal.

Well on Friday I found a copy at my father’s house, and it was the first time I read the Plain Dealer since print media had started dying. It looks like they slimmed down their trim size like most newspapers, and adopted a general shorter-is-better philosophy. For example, in their weekend tabloid-format entertainment section pull-out, a column that used to be somewhere between 600-800 words now looked like it had shrunk to about 400 or 500 words, and the movie reviews all looked shorter (and a few were purchased from wire services).

The most striking change was in the comics section though.

Specifically, they don’t even have a comics section anymore, they have a “Diversions” section.

This is filled without about 30 comic strips, plus crossword puzzles, the jumble, a word find, Sudoku, Dear Abby and another advice column, TV listings, horoscopes, a bridge column, some game type of thing called “Public Squares” and an ad for a car dealership, right there on the section front (Ugh).

Actually, perhaps even more striking than the funnies being relegated to a miscellaneous section of the paper is the format of the four-page section. It’s 22 inches long, like the rest of the paper, but only nine-and-a-half inches across, about two inches shorter than the rest of the pages in the paper. Well, the front of the section is nine-and-a-half inches across; the back page of the section is even shorter, about eight-and-three-quarters-of-an-inch across.

They’re also all in color. On a Friday. Weird.

(Above: That's their funnies on the left, next to a regularly-sized newspaper page and my straight edge)

So, of those 30-ish strips, laid out pell-mell up and down the “Diversions” section, most of them are familiar to me as having been in the PD’s funnies since my childhood. There were half-a-dozen new ones that I don’t recall being there my whole life (The Pajama Diaries, Prickly City, Pearls Before Swine, Rhymes with Orange, Frazz and Free Range). That’s at least one-fifth of this comics page that’s changed in the past 25 years or so, and that’s pretty good for the comics pages in most big city dailies, I’d wager.

Well, let’s see if there’s anything to smile about in the Friday, March 19 Plain-Dealer Diversions section. (Hmm, can I still call these the funnies? Or are they now the diversionees…?)


Sally Forth

Sally’s boss (or co-worker? I haven’t read this strip in years) Ralph meets Sally’s younger, hotter sister, and can’t shut up about how bad he wants to fuck her. I think that’s what’s going on here.

This strip is hopefully a re-run from the ‘80s, because otherwise I can’t explain why Sally and her sister are dressed like that. Ralph actually calls attention to their clothes—“Look at your sister, Sal. Now this is how you should dress!”—so I assume here baggy turtleneck sweater with a giant, roll-down collar and huge hoop earrings are meant to be fashionable.

I do like the way this strip is drawn though.


Jump Start

I haven’t read this in so long that I don’t even know who the characters featured in this particular installment of the strip are.


Crankshaft
This is the first strip on the page that I don’t understand at all. It’s one of the installments of Crankshaft where I suspect that it isn’t really a sit-com strip about a cantankerous old bus driver and his family, but is a serious drama strip that is published in another country, perhaps Germany, that has been re-dialgoued for American audiences.

I can think of no other explanation for Pam’s facial expression in the second panel.

Nice cross-hatching, though!


Born Loser

The lead character’s boss is wearing what appears to be a black tuxedo—or at least a three-piece suit—and spats. In black and white, it just looks like a nice suit. In color though, the vest is canary yellow and the tie or ascot is purple, so he pretty much looks like he’s wearing one of The Penguin’s old suits.


Hagar

Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Oh man, the wait at the doctor’s office sure can be long! And that was so even back in Viking days!


Blondie

Dagwood and his young cloneling are sitting on the couch watching TV and the television set is one of those thin, flat screen jobbies. It…upsets me, for some reason. I don’t like seeing modern technology in Blondie, as it seems anachronistic and out-of-place. I always assumed the strip was still set in the mid-fifties.


Beetle Bailey
Actual combat appears to be occurring in this strip, for the first time in my lifetime. However, since the combat seems to involve two opposing armies of tanks, I assume it’s just some sort of war game.


Mary Worth

I only read Mary Worth on The Comics Curmudgeon, because I need someone to find something noteworthy about it and explain that thing to me.


Marmaduke

Holy shit you guys, I saw a preview of the live-action movie before Alice in Wonderland on Monday and it looks terrible. I mean, when I first heard that they were going to make a Marmaduke movie, I assumed it would be terrible, but that preview made it seem a few thousand times worse than I had imagined.


Speed Bump
My dad laughed out loud at this one, and pointed it out to me.


Free Range

Okay, here’s another one I just flat out don’t get:

I feel there’s a joke about the use of friend as a verb on Facebook and the word “kemo sabe” to be made, but I’m not sure if cartoonists Bill Whitehead made it here. I’m not even sure a joke was made at all.


The Pajama Diaries

No joke in this strip, it’s about cancer. I didn’t know other strips could do cancer. I thought Funky Winkerbean owned it the way Peanuts owned footballs-being-pulled-away-before-they-can-be-kicked gags.


Get Fuzzy

I hate the designs of all the characters in this strip, which often makes it hard for me to enjoy it, but the script isn’t so bad.


Wizard of Id

Hmm…this is even less funny than I remember it being, and I don’t remember it ever being funny…


Judge Parker

Hey, Mike Manley’s drawing now! I didn’t read this strip. I only read Judge Parker when there’s a drawing of a sexy lady in it. This one’s just two brown-haired guys in suits talking.


Peanuts

I think it’s high time to retire the strip. The PD is printing it at about half of the size as the other strips on the page anyway, as if they too know it’s time to get rid of it, and yet they can’t quite commit to going all the way with it.


Dilbert
I think this is the closest thing to a funny strip in today’s section.


Garfield

Scratch that. This is:
Are you talking about the dog’s bark, or are you talking about your own strip there, Garfield?


Zits

I like the lines in this strip a lot, but this particular installment simply has a single panel of Jeremy and his mother standing over a counter top in a white void, while Jeremy says something trite that sounds like something one might see on a t-shirt.


Doonsebury

Eh, ringtone humor.


Prickly City
This one’s new to me. A little black girl is talking to someone she identifies as “Secretary Napolitano,” who is only seen in one of the four panels, a long shot in which Napolitano is seen in silhouette. They are talking about Napolitano being bad at her job, and they are in a barren desert for some reason.

Perhaps if I read more strips I would understand the context of a little girl and the secretary of Homeland Security talking in the middle of a desert, and would thus be better able to appreciate what’s supposed to be going on here.


Pearls Before Swine

Sometimes I find this strip kinda funny. This installment didn’t do much for me though. Well, the last panel is kinda sorta clever. One character, picking a fight with another, says, “Care to step outside?” And the threatened one turns and says “Yes. Because I’m leaving.” That’s not bad, I guess.


Bizarro

This is a Mr. Potatohead joke in a one-panel gag cartoon.


Rhymes with Orange

I have nothing to say about this strip.


Non Sequitir

Or this one.


Family Circus

So the dad is standing there holding a newspaper, and the mom and dolly are standing there in identical dresses. The skirts are pink and red plaid, and fall all the way to their feet. The tops look like black tanktops over purple turtleneck sweaters. And Dolly says, “We got matching dresses… … ‘cept Mommy’s came with more curves and things.”

See, it’s funny because one of them is a grown woman who has experienced puberty, and the other is a little girl who hasn’t.

Well, it’s funny in theory.


The Amazing Spider-Man
This is part of a zany storyline in which Spider-Man, the superhero who became a do-gooder after learning that “with great power comes great responsibility,” has decided to flee New York City because super-criminal Sabretooth is there.

This strip is fantastic.

It opens with a completely gratuitous drawing of Mary Jane in a bikini, and the second panel, which seems like it should be occurring a second or so after the first, based on the dialogue, finds MJ now fully dressed and carrying a package under her arm.

Did they just stop their conversation so MJ could take off her swimsuit, get dressed, wait in line and then make her purchase, only to pick up where they left off…?

Comics are weird.

Is "hell" still a bad word on the comics page...?

Because that certainly seems like the most likely word to end the sentence that lady's yelling at the professor in the third panel of this installment of Apartment 3-G. But they had to use the "@#*%" symbols to fill in for the swear word, and "hell" is an awfully "soft" swear word to have to go full caps lock-ed number keys to cover up.

Perhaps in actuality that lady is telling the professor to "Go to fuck!!" Such a strange phrase might explain his whirling, wobbly-headed reaction to her statement.