The Funnies from Friday, May 25
I read a newspaper Friday. I think it was the Detroit Free Press or maybe the Detroit News. It was whatever paper my dad brought home. I don't read newspapers that much as I get all my news from heavily biased blogs. But everytime I look at one of the Detroit papers, I notice that their content can be divided into four sections:
1. Stories about how the domestic automakers are losing more money than most African counties have as a GDP, because no one in any of those companies knows how to run a successful business or create cars people will want to buy.
2. Stories about how Detroit is a hellhole of uncontrollable crime and poverty and is only going to get worse next year, because nobody in the city government has any idea how to fix it and the mayor receives most of his income through bribes.
3. Stories about how the Detroit Lions will never have a winning season ever because nobody in the franchise knows what football is, exactly.
4. Comic strips
It is the fourth section that I am going to write about this week, because it is the only section I read. The famous site Marmaduke Explained does this almost daily, and Johnny did something like this a few articles back, looking at comics strips from an old newspaper from 1994 he found. Instead of scanning the newspaper like Johnny did, I just grabbed the comics I wanted to discuss from their websites. It was annoying with some of them. The Blondie site, for instance, has the comic as a Flash file, so I couldn't right click and save as. I had to get around their copyright protection with my leet computer skills and the print screen button. I don't understand why the Blondie people need to go to any length to prevent people from downloading their comic. I don't even know why they bother to put their strips online in the first place. No one who is so old as to be a fan of Blondie is going to collect the comic strips online, because the internet is too hard for them to understand. Besides, there is a rerun of Diagnosis Murder on the Hallmark channel they need to catch.
Blondie
Dagwood is getting harassed by a smart mouthed youth on his way to work. You can tell that this child is a ruffian because, unlike every other Blondie character, he doesn't look like a cartoon character from 1940; he has a badass skull t-shirt and I assume a rat-tail on the back of his head. This is opposed to Dagwood, who wears a tuxedo to work.
Mother Goose and Grimm
I think the bulldog has kept the poodle locked in the basement until relations with France improved. But that whole freedom fries thing was, like, three years ago. Leave it to newspaper comic strips to stay current. It would probably help if there was one newspaper cartoonist out there who isn't eligible to collect Social Security, but all the young cartoonists tend to avoid print and make webcomics instead.
Mother Goose apparently was onboard with the whole freedom fries thing when it started. We now can assume she is a hardcore Republican. That is one more comic strip character whose politics we know. Probably all waterfowl in comic strips lean conservative and suck, see Mallard Filmore.
Big Top
Big Top is no more. I have never heard of it until now, so I can't say I will miss it. It doesn't look like it was that funny (not that it would have been a barrier to getting into the comics section). There isn't a joke here, except for Paul Giamatti in the credits as a comic strip character, as if that was even possible! That's not even original. Paul Giamatti is one of those stock celebrity names you just throw into a random list of people for humorous effect, like Robert Goulet or Joe Pesci. Basically, any actor of Italian descent will do. The cartoonist should have at least been a little original with his lame joke and put in another celebrity, such as David Lee Roth. I would believe that David Lee Roth was a character in a comic strip. He would probabaly get really into it and want to pre-approve any lines his character spoke, as well as put the role on his acting resume, mistakanly under the impression that Big Top was an animated series.
I kind of take back what I said in the Mother Goose commentary. This comic strip looks like it may have been drawn by a cartoonist who can get still get an erection without a pill. I think he is young because I don't remember this comic being around 15 years ago when I started reading newspaper comics. Pretty much every other comic strip on the newspaper pages today was there 15 years ago, if not several decades more. I think the reason he decided to throw in the towel was because he was tired of going to cartoonist conventions in fancy hotels and having to deal with a large crowd of geezers who still miss the Amos and Andy Show and forced the awards dinner to be held at 3pm. Plus, they are cartoonists, so they were all stuffing food from the buffet table into their pockets so they wouldn't have to pay for lunch tomorrow. The bitterness of this final strip shows how much he hates other comic strips and cartoonists. I assume he hates Blondie and Nancy most of all, so at least this guy has good taste.
F Note
The human in this comic is playing dead to avoid being eaten by alligators. Both the human and one of the alligators initially believe this technique will be effective. But the second alligator corrects the first and we assume that they then kill and eat the human. See, alligators can't talk, so that's the joke. Or maybe alligators can talk in the world of this comic strip. This human didn't know that he could have just ran away because alligators are slow on land. I thought everyone knew that. I knew that as a kid, but that was just from all the alligator attack drills we did at my elementary school.
Frazz
Blues writers and/or humor columnists are all homosexuals.
Hagar the Horrible
I bet the first two panels were going to be the strip for the day. But then a lawyer for the Dan Browne warned him that he'd risk getting sued for plagiarism by the Laffy Taffy company if he didn't alter it. The third panel is still not funny, but it's not like Dan Browne is trying in the first place.
Non Sequitur
Non Sequitur is for people who enjoy the political and social commentary of Doonesbary, but want a comic strip with less words. Doonesbary will have two to three people talking in every panel and will end with some obscure joke about why consumers or politicians are stupid, and you'll only understand the joke if you remember the news from six months ago back when the strip was drawn. Non Sequitur isn't going to be that complicated. It's just going to have some quick comment about why all white men with money are evil. The guy who draws Non Sequitur is angry that being a cartoonist doesn't pay that well.