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curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

catlord posted:

Oh my God, I love that panel of Sparrow explaining (I assume deadpan) her psychic's past life issues.
Yeah, it sets up a whole implied joke about the psychic making excuses for her bad behavior. And Bechdel puts in that joke very smoothly - Sparrow's advice is pretty reasonable for her, and then Ginger provides the expositional setup while arguing with her (appropriately), and then Bechdel returns to the plotline by having Sparrow stick to her not-entirely-unreasonable guns.

There are a LOT of strips that could learn about exposition and setup from this.

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curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

Was Batiuk too lazy to look up *actual* ways to fight unjust deportations and use them to educate readers or is he just intentionally writing lame stories?

Selachian posted:

Edge of Curse You, Red Baron



LOL at the title. Oh, and where is Sam going to land?

One of these days I want to see the hero blow up the villain's base using these absurd self-destruct mechanisms. "Oh look, the base is already riddled with explosives! And I thought this was going to be difficult."

curtadams fucked around with this message at 13:57 on Oct 24, 2020

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

Horace posted:

Bill Clinton had the number of a pizza place he visited decades ago and never revisited saved on his iPhone 4.
Amongst many other issues he'd never have had the number in the first place. Presidents don't do their own event planning.

Evil Mastermind posted:

Do you think he thinks he's doing a good job, or does he just constantly try to write something then just goes "gently caress it who cares"?
This story is so disjoint and misses so many ways to be more interesting and less absurd that I'm wondering whether it's something like the end stage of Apartment 3G where everybody was making fun of the ridiculous art but after a while people realized that the artist (then about 90) must be having some kind of dementia and it wasn't funny anymore.

curtadams fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Oct 26, 2020

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

Haifisch posted:


1978 comics

I didn't remember Travels with Farley being wingnutty. :(

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

Johnny Walker posted:


Mark Trail



Oh boy. She's addressing the old versions of MT. :munch:

I say Amy Lee has been hired by Marc3 to send Marc4 to Happy Trail Farm to be recaptured.

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

Slammy posted:

Dinky Fellas (December 17, 1964)

This is a reference to the Ajax Detergent Commercial, which featured a white knight doing just that. According to unverified sources, jokes about that were reasonably common in the African-American community at the time. Turner soon made Diz an advocate for black pride and this joke seems out of character to me because I never saw these very early strips when Turner was building his ensemble.

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

Magna Kaser posted:

0 of those are Chinese characters in Nancy. The ad is all real characters but it's kinda nonsense and just a list of random stuff in Chinese, no idea if it's any more coherent in Japanese.
Japanese can't be written entirely with kanji, because it has inflection, and needs some additional syllabic characters for that. So it's not good Japanese either. Most kanji have very similiar meanings to their Chinese analogues, so it's probably nonsense as well as ungrammatical.

It's a pity Bushmiller didn't go to somebody who wrote Chinese to put an easter egg joke in the kanji. That would have been an instant classic.

Medenmath posted:

Vintage Valiant (Dec. 28, 1941)



I enjoy Val's satisfied smile in panel 5.

Anti-slaver defend-the-weak Val's ethics are remarkably situational. And although this has been said many times, drat, that art!

curtadams fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Oct 29, 2020

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019


If you like Pina coladas -
Getting lost in the rain.


Holbrook seems like a decent guy, but there is (almost?) nobody who can write a quality daily gag strip for decades. He's writing and drawing THREE. It's inevitable that the jokes will be lame, the plots nonsense, and consequences unexamined.

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

Dykes to Watch Out For #113 (1991)


Sadly for many of Sparrow's news headlines there are several possibilities to choose from. The "national victory celebration" for returning Gulf War soldiers (and Gulf War weapons hardware) was on June 8th, 1991 and cost $12 million dollars so I guess this places this strip in the spring. Trying to pin down the rest of the stuff depressed me too much so I gave up. Feel free to do it yourself but leave me out of it buddy. Not today.
I don't think the headlines are about specific incidents so much as the total obsession of local media with reporting crimes. It was even worse then because there was so much more crime than there is now.

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

Best Boondocks ever.

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

Poil posted:

quote:

The Bloop posted:
The real regulation should be requiring clearly displayed unit pricing IN CONSISTENT UNIT TYPES
The US doesn't have this? Wait, of course they don't.
Maybe it's a California requirement, but here the supermarkets post comparative information on similar items with cost per (some appropriate measurement).

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

Selachian posted:

Edge of Narcolepsy


Stories so lame even the characters fall asleep.

It's really amazing what Republicans get away with. This was public knowledge at the time, and Bush had openly stated he was stopping operations against non-state terrorists (like bin Laden). But there were no consequences. Later it was revealed that the Bush administration had actually learned that bin Laden was planning to use commercial planes against the US and their only action had been - that top cabinet people stopped flying commercial. And still, no consequences.

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

Vargo posted:

I did this and asked for Randy to take over Popeye specifically and also called out for more Mandrake.

But more important is the question "What comic would you LEAST like to see revived" and it's crucial to answer "Krazy Kat."
Lol, I already said that on my own because I HATE the brick-braining running gag.

If that questionnaire is really about Milholland's "Popeye", it's kind of off because Milholland's revival is so different from the various early versions. It's more a parody of the original, which wouldn't work for any of the others because they aren't well enough known* (that includes "Krazy Kat", which I know a lot of aficionados like, but it's been gone way too long for the general public to get anything.) Theoretically a good rework could make any of them good (see Alan Moore's reworkings of Swamp Thing and MiracleMan) but that's unknowable and has little to do with the value of the originals, so what's the point of a survey?

*OK Flash Gordon mayyybeee because of the later movie which gets light play for mockery.

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

csammis posted:

This is not a "Don't post 'Cathy'" screed, post it and post all comic strips, but I have to get this off my chest:

I find Cathy viscerally uncomfortable on a level that is surprising to me. Her fawning attitude is just the worst. I get that Cathy's supposed to be the butt of the joke and she's mostly called out on it but it's still just unbelievably gross to see that servile "I can't be happy if he's not in my life 25/8!" and "Feminism is why I can't keep a man!" behavior presented in the main character over and over and over. She doesn't even seem to have another characteristic to help paper it over. I have no idea if latter-day Cathy is any better - this is my only exposure to it outside of the popular culture "Haha Cathy said 'Ack!'" trope - but holy poo poo I have to hope that the character develops at all.
She gets better. She's always neurotic, but on more of an everyday level, not on this kind of "call 911, we have a psychiatric emergency". I started reading Cathy in the early 80's - about 4 years after this material - and I never knew she was *this* messed up at the start. From some of the interviews that got posted, Guisewite was writing the strip partly as personal therapy and I guess it was successful. I personally like the early 80's Cathy I started with far more than this - this can be pretty funny, but I agree with you Cathy is *so* messed up it makes me uncomfortable.

Irving also gets softened a lot. By the time I started reading he was callous and chauvinistic, but no longer actively malicious. Eventually as Cathy slid into being a legacy strip he lost that and became kind of a male version of Cathy.

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

fondue posted:

I feel like a super villain is being born here ...

The Upper Crust. Takes all your bread and blames you for not working enough.

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

Medenmath posted:

Vintage Valiant (Mar. 29, 1942)


One of the many things about old Prince Valiant that makes it great is that it does a great job of rotating the victim-persecutor-rescuer drama triangle. In 3 strips, Gawain has gone from victim (in the dungeon) to rescuer (getting supplies for him and Valiant) to persecutor (tricking Dame Gilbert) back to victim - without ever violating the character, which often happens in storylines that spin the triangle too fast.

Selachian posted:

Nope, he's serious. His contract with Gocomics came up for renewal, apparently. I don't recall him explicitly mentioning whose decision it was not to renew the contract, but the upshot is he moved the strip over to tapas.io instead (and, in the process, started it all over). He was also talking about putting it on Webtoon, but it doesn't seem to be there yet. And he seemed quite enthusiastic about the plans for Lucinde pinup calendars and whatnot.
Pinups from traced artwork is going to bring some problematic copyright issues. Of course, he'll probably be saved from them by nobody buying.

curtadams fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Nov 13, 2020

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

I'm super stressed and busy with dissertation stuff so here's a sneaky middle-of-the-knight DtWOF. It's a really, really funny one, too.
Dykes to Watch Out For #117 (1991)


I hope I will have time to post another tomorrow and then on Tuesday things should slow down a little. Sorry for the skimpy post.

"Skimpy". I see what you did there.

Note the layered closing joke - Lois almost walking out with a tag attached would be a joke, but the real joke is Lois misinterpreting Ginger's comment - or maybe she isn't and is needling Ginger a bit more? Which would be a 3rd layer, if it was actually intended.

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

Dykes to Watch Out For #120 (1991)



As amigolupus mentioned the other day, one of my favorite things about DtWoF is that Mo is difficult in a very believable way. Her friends love her but they aren't rhetorical doormats, her curmudgeonly ways have consequences and people push back on her in interesting and dynamic ways. Here we see her lovely mood about Thea crashing head-on into the simmering subplot about her relationship Harriet.

"You used to think I was adorable when I panicked" is kind of a big red flag but an almost heartbreakingly human and relatable one. I think it's obvious that Harriet flagged Mo's flaws right away but perhaps naively thought she could "fix" her in the same way that Mo thought she could "fix" Harriet's liberal streak. This whole long subplot, while ramshackle and progressing in fits-and-starts, feels very very compellingly like break-ups I've witnessed and break-ups I've been through, where everybody involved is a good person and everybody loves and cares for each other, but the romantic relationship is just corrosive over time.

I cannot find a recipe for "sweet and sour soybean succotash," but I can imagine that it's pretty good, presumably a succotash mashed up with sweet and sour tofu. If I remember and if my wife is game I will try to invent this dish out of vegan Frankenstein parts and report back. I like sweet and sour tofu and I like succotash so gosh I bet Mo is partying.
This is one of the strips which makes me suspect some autobiographical leakage. Harriet's final comment sounds like something you say when a relationship is over, but Mo and Harriet stick it out almost another year, with at least two strips indicating a reasonably happy relationship.

My take on "you used to think I was adorable when I panicked" was more about how flaws don't seem like flaws when you're first in a relationship. IIRC there's a joke about just that in one of the strips in the first volume (pre-storyline) of DTWOF.

I expect "sweet and sour soybean succotash" doesn't have tofu, because it's not in the name. I'd think it was succotash with edamame replacing lima bean, and a sweet and sour sauce. Limas -> edamame sounds like an improvement to me.

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

TGIDTWOF

Dykes to Watch Out For #121 (1991)



Thea is a pretty good character who remains kind of on the margins of the plot. I guess it makes sense and in a way I really appreciate it-- the core cast is and remains this tight circle of friends and room-mates and romantic partners and later long-term additions tend to either be new partners or relatives or kids. Thea's a co-worker, and you know, usually even if you really like and get along with a coworker they will be out of your life when one of you moves on to a different job. It always really bugs me on workplace sitcoms like The Office or Superstore or whatever when two characters get married and 80% of the guests at the wedding are just people they work with. I think Bechdel keeps Thea at a realistic distance.

Anyway that's that! This is a somewhat unusual Madwimmin-centric strip in that there are no book cover puns or anything like that.

Edit: Oh, here's a question. Starting with this volume the Firebrand Books editions round out each book with a bonus, extra-long story. Most of these are in-continuity and either flesh out background stuff like Mo's college years or how everybody met, or serve as expanded versions of stuff that happened in the main story. I'll definitely post those. This volume's, however, is a little different-- it's a little autobiographical meditation by Bechdel. Would people be interested in reading this or should I skip ahead onto the next book when I get to that point?

Bechdel is very realistic in that new relationships normally form from outside the group - much as in real life. The way that Lead Boy and Lead Girl basically *have* to have a relationship -even if they are totally unsuited - really grates on me.

There's a story about forcing relationships I find entertaining. When Modest Mussorgsky first wrote the opera Boris Godunov the opera house refused to perform it because it didn't have a love affair, and they insisted all operas *must* have love affairs. Mussorgsky wrote in an affair between a gold-digger and the villain, which I've always thought sounded like mockery of that absurd requirement. But, the opera company apparently had a weak sense of irony, because they accepted the altered version and performed it.

I *love* Serial Monogamy! Even if you don't post the other backing stories, you *have* to post that one. Very funny and insightful.

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

Edit: On that note-- a double header since #123 is, I think, a Thanksgiving strip!
Dykes to Watch Out For (1991) #122



Clarence Thomas was sworn in on October, 23rd, 1991. The title is a reference to his highly-publicized charges of sexual harassment, centering on Anita Hill.
Once again the books are a mix, I think, of actual titles and made-up things. The Revolution of Little Girls is a 1992 novel by Blanche McCary Boyd about a young Southern lesbian who grows up and has a whole bildungsroman on her way to Harvard before careening into 60s and 70s counterculture. I assume The Dance of Rage is meant to be The Dance of Anger, a popular book by Dr. Harriet Lerner about how women should recognize and accept anger as a response to toxic relationships. "Tips on Terrorism" doesn't appear to be anything other than something I have now googled so if I'm disappeared I loved you all.

I find Lois' line "You have to admire their technique!", in context, one of the most memorable and compelling lines from the strip. The stuff the bad guys manage to get away with in politics blows my mind.

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

riderchop posted:

Rae the Doe #300, from the web archives



What's good about this bad extended pun is that you don't see a pun coming in advance. When Pearls does it you know it's coming from the strained storyline and weird names. But here it seems like Olive is building up to some surrealistic twist because of the connection to a running gag and only then does she deliver the pun.

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

ukonvasara posted:

I like a fair amount of what new Mark Trail is doing and am willing to give it substantial benefit of the doubt, but I do wish it wasn't trying to rush into separate conflicts involving the unknowable backstories of every single character at once. Take some time, establish and let us get to know the current nature of these versions of the characters a bit, then maybe do the "here's why they're like this" arcs individually?
I think Rivera is trying to make Cherry an equal in the strip, which is good, but I agree the long-term pacing would be better if the Cherry family drama had been used as the B-story for the second adventure arc. Generally there's only so much "soap drama" to be had from a limited set of characters before it starts getting repetitive and/or silly, and it would have been better to spread it out. Also, having *two* mysteries at once which are mysteries only because the author is holding back on which character thoughts they reveal feels a bit much.

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

EasyEW posted:

Funky Winkerbean

As is happening increasingly often, the joke is on Batiuk. Probably 95% of the comics reading population doesn't know the difference between Johann Strauss II, the "Waltz King", and Richard Strauss (no relation) the ultra-late Romantic dramatic composer. Even those who *do* know the difference would mostly consider it an innocuous mistake to swap up their names, especially since Johann Strauss's music is more typically played at holiday concerts. Most people won't get this joke and the few that do won't think it's funny.

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

Powered Descent posted:

It seems like mega-hit comic strips -- let's use a definition of "pretty much everyone would recognize the main character" -- used to come around at the rate of several per decade. But not anymore. The last strip I can think of that became that kind of sensation was Dilbert, and that happened over 25 years ago.

There's been some great stuff since that time, but nothing that's really achieved cultural saturation on the level of Peanuts, Garfield, or even, say, Cathy, or Beetle Bailey. The average person on the street would not recognize Petey Otterloop if shown a picture of him.
Well, people don't read newspapers, so how would they see the comics?

I do think Pearls reached the Cathy/Beetle Bailey level. But that was started effectively 2002 (technically Dec 31, 2001). Which, by the 10 year rule, means the strip that has a running gag about legacy strips is now a - legacy strip.

There's a lot of webcomics I love but they just don't get an audience like the newspapers could. Biggest hit I can think of is Andrew Hussie's Homestuck but that was really sui generis and pretty niche. It seems off that they don't get going - comics were originally a big draw to get people to read newspapers, and now people can follow them for free. But they don't.

Edit: xkcd has gotten some traction in popular culture.

curtadams fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Dec 15, 2020

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

Ghostlight posted:

Axa's had too many marijuana snails if she thinks she's not going to wake up betrayed.

Bogor



Asking a plastic helmet to stand up to a log dropped from 6 stories is quite a lot.

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

Pigsfeet on Rye posted:

The ending of Modesty vs. Mrs. Fothergill is ...not a good interpretation either
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9YtgGMMWdM
That is remarkably bad, to the point it seems like a parody. Everything is bad - casting, acting, effects, fighting. Blech.

curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

Santa Anna's actual sons were named Manuel and Antonio Lopez. /stickler

Somebody fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Jul 25, 2022

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curtadams
Mar 24, 2019

How Wonderful! posted:

In a Christmas miracle of sorts, I have a phone again. Unfortunately I'm still having problems with the app I used to scan DtWOF but I suppose something is better than nothing so please accept my apology for the long delay with a crummy phone-pic of

Dykes to Watch Out For #124 (1991)



I just love how Thea jerks Mo around in this one.

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