the value of subtlety

ONE of the problems with The Born Loser is its style of writing. The very nature of comics creates an emphasis on the words used. It's entirely visual, so if the comic isn't drawn well or the captions are awkwardly worded, the joke falls flat. The first caption in today's Born Loser is one of many examples--"The excessive use of foul language in that film was a shock!" It sounds like something you might find in a critic's review of a film, not how you would say it in general conversation. But even that may be excusable if the joke itself wasn't so trite.

Fortunately, today's Cow & Boy makes up for Born Loser's shortcomings with a well-placed visual joke in the last panel. Cow's comment sets it up perfectly, so the reader has an inkling of what's to come, but the look on Billy's face hits it home. He looks like how my brain feels after reading certain comics that insist on beating their jokes into you with multiple punchlines. I get it!

garfield's death throes

Garfield is one of those comics that has existed forever and seems like it will never go away. It's the type of comic that recycles the same jokes over and over. I suspect that Jim Davis hasn't even drawn new panels in the last ten years; he just has templates with the speech bubbles blank and fills them in as needed.

But the only thing worse than a comic recycling its own jokes is a comic that has been depending on that method but then suddenly changes and breaks all its own rules. One of Garfield's running gags has been Jon's inability to get a date. But in recent months he has found a girlfriend, thus shattering the rules of Garfield's universe. In television it's known as "jumping the shark," a reference to a episode of Happy Days in which Fonzie ski jumps over a shark. Garfield should have ended long before this point, yet somehow it lives on. The wildly popular Garfield Chia head must be sustaining it.