Interchangability

I'm not suggesting that this is any more than a coincidence, because it's just the time of year that these types of strips appear (just like the Calvin & Hobbes water balloon strips). I just find it kinda nifty when strips that usually don't have a lot in common find a common vibe.

Speaking of a common vibe, I was reading a strip last week and something about the dialogue struck a chord with me, so I did some editing to illustrate what I thought about it.



Okay, so my crappy editing skills make it obvious that the dialogue doesn't come from the strip pictured, but it does seem like a normal Calvin & Hobbes conversation, right? Actually, the dialogue is from this Peanuts strip, originally published July 30, 1959. Further evidence that Mr. Schulz was way ahead of his time.

Semi-Closure

Note: I meant to post this yesterday, but saved the draft when it was almost finished, and then I forgot to finish it... instead of trying to edit it to make it seem like I know what I'm doing, I'll leave the original post intact, and slap a follow-up on the bottom.

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Normally in comic strips, a week-long story arc will conclude on Friday, since not all newspapers carry the title on Saturdays and/or Sundays. But something about today's Drabble just seems unfinished. I have this weird feeling that tomorrow we're going to find out that he got the wrong house, it just seems like the sort of thing that he would do.

Speaking of Friday closures, check out today's Garfield:



This is the first time I can think of that it didn't irritate me that a Garfield strip had absolutely no joke to it. After Wednesday's revelation, I was emotionally invested in the story just enough that today's conclusion, while a little more ambiguous than I would have preferred, is satisfying enough that the lack of a gag is forgivable.

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after-the-fact update:
It turns out my Drabble prediction was wrong.

That's right, he got caught. Um... what a plot twist. Or something. I think I might stop reading Drabble.

On the plus side, today's Garfield is a cute Jon-being-a-dork (but a very happy dork) follow-up giggle. Yeah, I know the strip will probably go back to total suckage next week, but for now I'll call myself almost a fan.

Garfield

Sometimes I discover little things about myself that seem to resemble Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, although I don't think I have full-blown OCD, just a hint here and there. One of these things is that when I'm reading the comics in a newspaper, I have to read every strip on the page, even the ones I know I won't like. They take each mere seconds to read, and bits and pieces of them appear in my peripheral vision while reading the good ones, so part of me keeps thinking that I should just go ahead and read them. As such, a few years ago I got into the habit of reading the ones that I dislike first, that way there's a higher chance of "ending on a high note" (I don't have any compulsions about what order I read them in).

This is my long-winded and sort of wimpy way of justifying why I read Garfield. Both of my local papers carry it, and every once in awhile a strip does make me laugh slightly. I won't bother setting up the back story, but today's strip took me by surprise. Not because of the humour (there's very little), but because of the plot point.



Years ago I watched the Garfield and Friends cartoon, and there was one episode where Jon finally convinced Liz to actually go on a date with him. Jon tried to leave Garfield at home, but of course he managed to join them. And of course, he ruined the whole night, but Liz's reaction was that if Jon cares about the cat enough to put up with his crap (remember, she's a veterinarian), then he can't be all bad. I don't know if that plotline was worked into the comic, but I think it has a lot to do with her revelation in today's strip. Aside from the introduction of Nermal, the Garfield comic has introduced very few plot-influencing elements over the years, choosing instead to rely on recycling the same six gags with barely detectable variations. I have a feeling a change is finally on the horizon. Whether this will be a good or bad thing remains to be seen.

Derivations

As I almost finish catching up, I come to what I hope will be my most frequent topic, crossovers. What I love about these things is that there's such a wide variety of methods and styles. One of the most noteworthy was a massive multiple crossover last year. From Wikipedia:

In 2005, Blondie celebrated its 75th anniversary with a three-month-long story line, featuring various surprises including cameo appearances of characters from other comic strips such as B.C., Beetle Bailey, The Family Circus, For Better or For Worse, Garfield, Hägar the Horrible, Shoe and The Wizard of Id, among others. In addition, Blondie and/or Dagwood were featured in Dennis the Menace, Hi and Lois, B.C., Family Circus, Baby Blues, Hägar the Horrible, and Curtis.

Of course, while that was a very fun story arc, it was completely authorized and pre-planned. What I'll be noting more often in this blog is when an artist does an unauthorized crossover, often as tribute, mockery, or the grey area in between, satire. A few weeks ago FoxTrot made a fairly light-hearted jab at one of my least favourite titles, Family Circus.



I think Bill Amend intentionally avoided naming the character, so that it could be left as a generic Family Circus-styled entity. It makes the joke a little more subtle, and reduces the possibility of getting sued.

The very next day, Sally Forth made an even more subtle external nod.



This was especially noteworthy since someone who has never read For Better or For Worse (where 4evah and Eva are from) would still understand the strip. Rather than a reference or parody being the punchline, it's a subtle tribute.

And finally, yesterday's FoxTrot gets A for effort, but a great big "meh" for the joke itself:



The humour of this strip should come from the bizarre crossover, but instead it just combines the Jason-hates-his-sister joke with Cathy's body-image-problems joke.

Diverse earworm solutions.

With regular "strip"-style titles, there's a wide variety of levels of quality. From waste of ink to near genius, and everything in between. But with the slightly rarer one-panel titles, there seems to be very little ground. Either you have classic and legendary, like Far Side, and Bizarro, or you have mindless tripe, like Family Circus and Marmaduke. Thankfully, my local papers don't carry many of these titles, so I only end up reading them when they happen to be on the same page as others that I'd rather read (and I usually look at them first to get it out of the way). The Better Half is mediocre at best, and even though I probably only see it 3 or 4 times a week at most, it seems like it recycles its own jokes more often than any other title out there. But even I am baffled at how the following two gags ended up being published within the same week:



Granted, the first gag mentions "songs" in general (and then I saw her face... now AAAHM a BE-LEEE-VAAHH!!), and the second specifies ads and themes from television (staaaanding taaaaaaall, on the wiiiiiings of my dreams...), but it's still two different punchlines for the same joke, and neither of them is all that funny. But maybe the real question is, if you had a choice between a vacuum cleaner attachment or surgery to get rid of those earworms, which woud you choose?

Revelations

I haven't been actively "following" Andy Capp until recently, but I've been aware of it for at least 10 years, and been reading it on and off all that time. And until this morning, if you had asked me the first name of Mrs. Capp, I probably wouldn't have been able to tell you. Until this morning.



Sure, the niece uses "Auntie", but Mrs. Capp is nevertheless an Aunt Flo. Obviously, this will never be a source of humour in the strip itself, even on a subliminal level, but I have a feeling that if it was real life instead of a comic strip, Andy would take every opportunity to make wisecracks about this.

Also, I found out just two days ago that Red of Red & Rover is a boy.



The issue of his gender never really had any effect on plotlines, it was only the dog saying "he" that clued me in. There were other clues, specifically the fact that he is shirtless in the wading pool strips, but little Zoe was shirtless in Baby Blues recently, so even if I had noticed I probably would've shrugged it off.

Math is Hard

Well, I suppose it's time to start dealing with the backlog of posts that built up while I was trying to get this thing working. First off, one of my least favourite comics, Crankshaft, from the beginning of the month:



Now, I'm not bitching that this strip isn't really that funny (it would be more noteworthy if a Crankshaft strip actually was funny), but it's important to note that this strip was published on July 1st. Last time I checked, 1 was an odd number.

Also, this quick gag from July 8th's Adam@Home speaks for itself:

Politickin'

Okay, I usually try to stay out of "political" issues like this, especially when they're specifically and obviously American (I'm Canadian), but I can't hold my tongue on this one. Seriously, what the hell?



I know it's a comic strip and not reality, and Scott Stantis is a political cartoonists so there's the "satire" element, and all that, but does Stantis actually think that this is acceptable? Whatever you might think about flag burning, if someone burns a flag, and you think it's a terrible thing for them to do, your recourse is to make your opinion known in a mature, legal, socially acceptable manner. And if it's illegal (is it illegal this week? I can't keep up), then have the law deal with them. And if it's not illegal, then bitch and whine that you think the law should be changed.

Burning a flag is a form of expression, and only the flag gets harmed. Intentionally punching someone, on the other hand, is assault, plain and simple, and not in any way shape or form a comparable form of "expression", it's violence. This sort of thing should go without saying, but when someone can publish this "joke" in a strip that gets wide circulation, obviously it needs to be said. If someone punched Scott Stantis because they disliked the way he expressed himself through his strip, would he consider it an acceptable response?

My only hope is that Stantis doesn't have any children.

Monkey Business

Last Thursday, July 13, was the 81st anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial. It would be a truly amazing coincidence if Darby Conley didn't know the significance of the date when he happened to slip a reference to the trial in the current Get Fuzzy story arc.



See, it's neat when dailies make reference to things like that, but it's slightly more gratifying when they do so in a subtle way (there's nothing in the strip to suggest that it's the anniversary), and even moreso when they manage to make it part of an ongoing story, rather than the focus.

It Starts...

Quick introductory post. No promises on the "quick" part, actually, I've never been very good at summarizing, so when I say "long story short" you can expect a group of people to say "too late!"

I created this blog a few years ago with the intention of updating whenever anything of signficance happened with my experimental music. Very little has happened recently, and when stuff was happening I wasn't updating the blog anyway. So I abandoned the idea of making this my music blog (and started using my LiveJournal for the occasional music update), and deleted the two pointless entries I had.

Then I was asked to fill in for a few days when Matt of the Silent Penultimate Panel Watch had to take a trip. I had also been watching other comic blogs for awhile, and started to become aware of some comic-related observations of my own. So for the last month or so I've been considering starting a comic blog, but I'm just getting around to it now. In the interest of being realistic, I won't even make a guess as to how often I'm going to post updates, and I currently don't have any specific focus, but one thing I will keep an eye on is when a comic makes reference to another comic, or breaks the fourth wall in any way.

My first actual entry will come later today. Oh, I make little or no distinction between "entry", "post" and "update", so try not to get confused.

Ciao!