pearls strikes again

Pearls Before Swine is definitely one of the best syndicated comics, mostly because it's not afraid to poke fun at the other bland, repetitive comics on the page. Remember the hullabaloo when Blondie turned 75 back in 2005? All the other characters from the funnies page were "invited" to the special-edition Blondie Bash, but for some reason Pearls was snubbed. Good thing, too, because that series of comics was a lot funnier than Blondie's single-panel finale of a bunch of crudely drawn approximations of classic characters all saying "Happy Anniversary" (I would have posted a link to it, but apparently the strip is so prone to copyright infringement that its creators haven't allowed it to be posted online).

At any rate, Pearls is at it again, this time with a series about a fundraiser to save newspapers (and, in turn, the comics page) from extinction. It started yesterday, but it's already on a roll with today's jab at soap-opera-style comic Mary Worth. I can't wait to see who's next.

proofreading--not just for high school essays

Today's Off the Mark was relatively funny, although that's not a very high honor when discussing comics. The problem is that it uses the wrong word--it should have been echolocation instead of sonar. It's true that what bats do is the same thing as sonar, but it's not called that with animals. Fortunately, the comic effect remains intact, but there's always that "if only" feeling.

Today's The Born Loser features the dog Kewpie (who knows how to pronounce that?), a frequent character in the strip. It appears the artist(s) has(ve) only actually drawn Kewpie once, and just continue to paste the same drawing whenever they need to--Kewpie only has one position and one facial expression. Why bother doing anything different if it might distract from the joke, right? And why bother using different jokes if you already have a few good ones? That seems to be Art and Chip's paradigm.

enough

Zits is a fairly popular comic, probably because most people can relate well with it. I admit even I have smiled at it occasionally. But today's is an example of a joke wearing out its welcome. Yes, some high school students' backpacks are excessively heavy. Yes, some teenagers are disorganized and fill their backpacks with junk. Yes, this can be used as a joke. But with Zits, it has become the fallback joke, used for days at a time when the artists (yes, there are two of them--you'd think at least one could come up with something different) apparently run out of ideas.

Speaking of worn out jokes, Brevity is apparently seeking the world record for fastest gag gone bad. I was actually fairly intrigued at the beginning of the week, when it started what it calls "The First Annual Clamato Week." Monday's and Tuesday's comics were above average and even drew a chuckle from me, but the past two days have been disappointing at best. For Wednesday's panel, the artists (again, there are two of them...I'm beginning to sense a trend here) apparently thought that writing the dialogue in Spanish would automatically make it funny. It didn't. And today's is just bland, although it could have been improved by replacing "real life" with "the wild." Hopefully the rest of the week will be as funny as the first two.

a small victory for charlie brown

Charlie Brown is one of those comics I read just because it's there. I usually have no response to it at all. But today's (actually it's probably several years old) was worth a chuckle, not because of the punchline, but because of Charlie Brown's wish to be called "Flash." Something about that name just made me smile.

I'm not a fan of Wizard of Id, but occasionally it's worth the few seconds it takes to read. The interesting thing about it is the device it occasionally employs in the first couple of panels, as in today's. It sort of sets up a quasi-punchline in the very beginning, and then the end relates back to it. Unfortunately, today's gag is pretty unoriginal, but I could see the device working well with a better joke.

garfield almost did it!

For the first time in my life, today's Garfield almost made me smile. The key word here is almost. Unfortunately, though it had a decent joke, it fell prey to a common error in comics (especially those that have been running so long they're probably not written by the same author anymore and if they are he probably pieces together comics from the 1940s to make new ones.) That error is having too many panels. Nearly every joke falls apart if it takes to long to tell or if it is over-explained. Today's Garfield would have actually caused a humor response if it had just trimmed out over half the panels where Garfield just sits there.

Comics are hugely more funny if they give us a joke that is subtle and let us figure out the in-between stuff (such as Garfield still drinking his cocoa) on our own. If a person isn't intelligent enough to understand the joke, explaining it doesn't help at all. If you doubt this, just think back to a time when one of your friends told a joke you didn't get. Once they explained it to you, you either faked a half-hearted laugh or sat there staring. The joke won't be funny unless you understand it anyway, so why ruin it for the rest of us by over-explaining it?

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.