Comics From Afar/Catching Up
My wife has been on what I call a "rock-star tour" for her job, traveling to major cities like New York, Seattle, etc. to train others. Knowing how much I like variety in my funnies, she brings back the comic pages from these locales, causing me to wonder what's wrong with Orlando that we only get ONE page while Denver gets TWO. Are we doing something wrong?
Well, not really, since most of the comics in the Denver Post are, in my opinion, sketchily drawn and too reliant on vague and snarky humor. Strips like "Agnes", "Overboard", "Nest Heads", "Brewster Rockit: Space Guy!" and "Adam" just failed to ignite any reasonable form of passion. However, it was nice to see some other strips that I forgot even existed, let alone persisted. Remember "Tiger"? (or maybe you never forgot.) Wow, what a classic! "The Amazing Spider-Man" serial, "The Wizard of Id" and a wickedly funny "B.C." - how I miss these strips! The Post also had a bunch of one-panel beauties that I'll have to look up like "Loose Parts", "Close To Home" and "Natural Selection" ("Marlene!! For the 800th time, it's not the clothes that make you look fat!! It's actually being fat that makes you look fat!") There's also the excellent "Sherman's Lagoon", a daily "Pearls Before Swine" (is it me or is it funnier on Sundays?), an interesting three-panel called "Preteena" that could be a precursor to "Zits" and a sharply drawn wit-fest called "The Meaning of Lila" that'll have me surfing for certain. But what got the biggest laugh out of me was "Boondocks" for July 18th, ("Steve Stoute says McDonald's is a lifestyle brand", "Sounds like somebody might be smoking a little McCrack.")
Sunday Sentinel - how brilliant a parody of "Gulliver's Travels" in "Zits" - how hilarious to see Snoopy expelled from a wading pool by Lucy, passing by Linus with a big cheesy grin on his face (Linus: "on a warm sunny day like today, in a neighborhood such as ours, it is not often that you'll see a beagle floating downstream..") Could Sunday have been the end of the "Ordinary Basil" serial in "Non-Sequitur"? (it was starting to lose something in the telling, I've forgotten what the quick wit of Danae and Lucy was like...) and the first huge guffaw for "Shortcuts", focusing on the topic of hermit crabs, with our host's declaration that "this cartoon is all about ME!" Nice.
And today's big puzzler - if "Beetle Bailey" could always distract Sarge from beating him up by lobbing a candy bar, why doesn't he just stock up on the damn things? It would probably save him (and us) from the brutality!
posted by Bing Futch @ 6:36 AM
2 Comments:
I'm surprised you didn't like "Agnes." She's not always gut-busting, but she has an astute insanity that really endears her to me.
"Pearls" fatal flaw is that it very often runs one-week jokes. I often wonder if anyone reading it for the first time would find it funny because it's such a long set-up sometimes. But, I look forward to it. In my paper, for some reason, it is buried in the Classifieds, ffaaaaaaaarr from the comics section.
We lost "B.C." a long time ago to this horrible, horrible strip called "State of the Union" that I think Bill O'Reilly must draw himself because it is a terribly unfunny idea of what a right-wing pundit would laugh at.
It has actually made me want to write to the paper to complain.
I shouldn't judge comics by seeing just one strip - but something about those in my list just had a sense of "meh" all over them. I'll re-visit "Agnes" to see if it gets any better.
I agree with you about "Pearls" - but sometimes the payoff is so damn great. My favorite has to do with "you can't always get what you won" - very funny schtuff.
Seems to me that a LOT of comics have been serializing, stretching out plot developments. I wonder if that's a sign of a lack of ideas, or just a desire to string people along, get em hooked?
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