Philosophical Phunday: Meaningless Coincidence

Back on the 2nd of September I noticed a weird coincidence in the comics pages. Three of the strips seemed to be thematically linked. First there's Garfield doing a pretty standard Garfield bit.

Garfield, 2014-09-02.

That Mirror-Garfield talking to Real-Garfield thing is a running joke. Then we have Crankshaft in which we see the old "someone sees something weird and then looks at their drink and says they're never drinking again" joke.

Crankshaft, 2014-09-02.

If you've never seen that one before you must have been raised in isolation with no access to television or movies. But then we have the final piece of the puzzle, that links these two strips together.

Curtis, 2014-09-02.

It's Curtis doing a combination of both those jokes (in a too young to drink way). Weird, right? That's all, I didn't really have a point, it's just something I noticed.

---

Safe Havens, 2014-09-03.

OK, this is the equivalent of a human being terrified of McDonald's because they eat mammals in there! Dodos are not chickens.

---

Alley Oop, 2014-09-18.

Sorry, Alley, I agree with this guy. Your teeth are perfectly straight, your hair is neatly trimmed, your body is strangely hairless. You look nothing like a caveman.

Philosophical Sunday: See the resemblance?

Alley Oop, 2014-08-25.

No. No I do not see the resemblance.  I would go so far as to say that Ooola looks nothing like Lana. But don't worry, these clever film people have a solution for that. It's a blonde wig. Never mind that their faces are completely different and presumably so are their bodies, a wig will solve it.

---

Ginger Meggs, 2014-08-29

Uh, so which Batman villain is that supposed to be? I guess maybe he means the Joker, but, well, I do not see the resemblance.

Philosophical Friday: Lazy and Dumb

Bewley, 2014-08-18.

Man, what a wasted opportunity. You had the punchline right there in panel two, all you needed to do was stop. You could have made the panels larger and included more detail in the illustration (rather than just flood filling with brown). I know, that's more effort than coming up with a second, less funny joke to fill up that space, but it would have been so much better.

---

Between Friends, 2014-09-19.

Let me just quote the character description for Kim here: "Kim is creative and introspective. As a feminist, freelance writer, she enjoys the perks of flexible career." I see three grown adults here, and it doesn't occur to any of them that maybe one of the men could cook? Feminist.

---

Todd the Dinosaur, 2014-08-22.

Forget the joke here (such as it is - T-Rexes have short arms. Ha ha, bet no one's done that joke before) and focus on the first panel. Specifically the narration box. I know that the people who colour comic strips are terrible at their jobs, but come on.

Philosophical Friday: A new concept in comics that I hope never to experience again

Tina's Groove, 2014-07-14.

OK, you've got to listen to this. Now try to make it all the way through the week. That's certainly... something.

---

Dog Eat Doug, 2014-07-31.

There's no way that that bird could have been hidden from the dog. It's hidden from us, but the dog is looking at the scene from a totally different angle.

Philosophical Friday: Nagging Wives

Freshly Squeezed, 2014-07-07.

Yeah yeah yeah, shoplifting bad, important lessons, etc. but what the hell is that thing he stole? It looks like one of those shitty fake gameboy things that only play one terrible game because the screen just has certain pre-defined shapes on it like a calculator. What those cost is about $2, surely? Do they even make those any more?

---

Hi and Lois, 2014-07-08.

Marvin, 2014-07-08.

Ballard Street, 2014-07-11.

Husbands, always storing useless junk!
Wives, always throwing away treasured possessions!

Never the other way around, you may notice. And there's no chance of any sort of negotiation or compromise or even just talking to each other like grown adults who respect each other. Because men are disgusting slobs who will happily live in filth and women are joyless nags who exist to impose neatness and cleanliness on men. Obviously.

Philosophical Friday: What even is a bird?

Edge City, 2014-06-13.

According to his official character bio on Comics Kingdom, Len "used to play in a punk rock band ... and stays true to his rock-and-roll roots" so you'd think he'd be a bit more open to this kind of thing.

---

Bewley, 2014-06-30.

Oh come on, breasts, teeth, hair. Why even make the characters in your comic birds if they're not going to be even remotely bird-like?

---

Curtis, 2014-06-30.

Well, whose fault would you say that is, Greg? Given that you offer him no other way to get money and asking you actually works around half the time, why wouldn't he do it? You are the cause of your own problem, but you're blaming Curtis for it anyway, because you blame everything on Curtis. Fuck you, Greg Wilkins. Also Ray Billingsley.

Philosophical Friday: Ugliness

WuMo, 2014-06-11.

God, this comic is hideous. Not in a Reply All kind of way where it's just pure ineptitude, this looks like it's meant to be ugly. And I mean every single WuMo strip. Reply All can get away with looking like arse because it's actually funny, but the example above is as close as WuMo ever gets.

And it is close, it's almost good enough to be one of the less funny F-Minus strips. Of course, in F-Minus there wouldn't be a caption telling you it was a blood bank, that would be conveyed through, I don't know, putting the Red Cross logo on there or something. I'm pretty sure Tony Carrillo could draw a recognisable mosquito too, so the entire label would be unnecessary. And the manager would have one of those F-Minus grumpy faces. That's how you do this joke.

Even then though, WuMo would still be hideous.

---

Todd the Dinosaur, 2014-06-12.

How is that even an easier shot? And does every cartoonist play golf?

---

Finally, here's a selection of Office Hours panels, a comic from the 1960s.

Office Hours, 1966-03-26.

Office Hours, 1966-01-14.

Office Hours, 1966-03-14.

Office Hours, 1966-02-05.

The past was terrible.

Philosophical Friday: The good, the bad and the ambiguously worded

Edge City, 2014-06-02.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who read that as "You eat as much as possible. Like cave people did." That diet is really popular.

---

Wee Pals, 2014-06-03.

Oh my god, this is just the best. Especially that last panel, but all of it, really.

---

Fort Knox, 2014-06-05.

Look at that facial expression. You can really see the anger, can't you?

Philosophical Friday: Bring Back DailyINK!

King Features Syndicate publishes their comics online through the website Comics Kingdom. It's one of the two places I read the comics I talk about here (the other being Universal Uclick's GoComics). But before Comics Kingdom, King Features had a site called DailyINK, and it was about a billion times better.

I should point out, when they changed the site they added a bunch of stuff that I really like. They started putting up higher resolution images and expanded the archives so you can see older strips, and they added a bunch of vintage strips, which is nice. So it's not all bad.

But the biggest change for me, on a day-to-day basis, is that everything now takes much longer to load. The way Comics Kingdom works is that all your subscribed comics appear on a single page. And even though it won't display them at full size until you click them, it loads the full-size images anyway. I read a lot of comics, so I basically have to start the page loading and then go and do something else for a while to give it time to load.

That would be an inconvenience, but not a major one. What really annoys me is the fact that even a single strip now takes around 15 seconds to load. It may not sound like much, but it feels like a while when you're just sitting there waiting for it, and if you're trying to read through archived strips then it really adds up.

This ends up meaning that even though you've paid for access to their archives, browsing them is such a hassle that I doubt many people make much use of it. By comparison, the archives on DailyINK didn't go back as far, but strips loaded almost instantly, so you could easily read through old comics.

The other change that makes the archives less useful is the fact that the images are now accessed in a different way. It used to be that you could enter the image URL to go directly to it, and they were named in a straight-forward manner. If today's Spider-Man strip was tas20140530.gif then you knew that yesterday's would be tas20140529.gif, so you could actually write your own scripts to grab a whole lot of comics all at once to read offline. The actual URL I get for today's Spider-Man strip now is http://safr.kingfeatures.com/idn/ck3/content.php?file=aHR0cDovL3NhZnIua2luZ2ZlYXR1cmVzLmNvbS9UaGVBbWF6aW5nU3BpZGVybWFuLzIwMTQvMDUvU3BpZGVybWFuLjIwMTQwNTMwXzE0NDAuZ2lm which is obviously not supposed to mean anything to a human reading it and gives no hint of what the previous one would be. I don't even know if that URL would work for anyone else or if it's unique to me.

I've contacted King Features about this issue, and here's what they told me:

We've had a few complaints about speed compared with the previous site, but there's definitely a lot more going on. For example, the new site is responsive and is built with mobile devices in mind. That comes at a price.

Thanks for the feedback.

So it doesn't look like they intend to do anything about this at all. Apparently whatever back-end improvements they feel they've made to the site are worth the fact that the whole thing is worse than the previous version from the perspective of people trying to use it. Still, if you have a Comics Kingdom subscription then I encourage you to complain about the site, because if enough people do then maybe they might eventually feel it worthwhile to do something.

Philosophical Friday: Poor Execution

Dustin, 2014-05-21.

Look, this is just terrible. This is a one-panel joke forced into four panels. It's a joke that should have been in The Better Half or Ziggy, without the three panels of set-up. And I say "should" but really, it's not that good a joke to begin with. Certainly not so good that it was worth stretching out to four panels.

---

Barney & Clyde, 2014-05-23.

That guy in the last panel. Why is he there? What is his expression supposed to convey? How is he necessary for this joke? What was the point of drawing him? If they felt like there was too much white space they could have tried something crazy like a background.

Philosophical Friday: Makeup For Card Sharks

Sherman's Lagoon, 2014-05-08.

There are just so many ways that this joke doesn't make sense. Firstly, beige? Ordinarily I'd blame the colourist, but in this case they're sharks and there's no way they would ever be beige.

Secondly, lipstick? Do those sharks look like they have lips to you? I know the whole talking animal thing generally relies on the assumption that the talking animals do human things even when they don't make sense (like sharks sleeping in a bed), but the drawing still has to support the joke and you can't have them talking about their lips when they clearly don't have any.

Thirdly, how the hell is beige lipstick even supposed to work for a human? It wouldn't make your face hard to read, it would just make you look like you didn't have lips. Which, again, Megan doesn't.

---

Dustin, 2014-05-12.

One of the running jokes in Dustin (as seen here) is that Dustin is lazy and doesn't do anything to look for a job. It would work a lot better though if there wasn't the other running joke of Dustin constantly looking for work and taking any job that comes along no matter what it is or how temporary. He works all the time.

So you end up with strips like this where Dustin's reaction comes across entirely differently than intended. He's supposed to be "Argh, I have to actually work and not be lazy any more? OMG!" or whatever but instead he's "Uhh, OK. Why is dad being nice to me this morning?"

It's like there are two comics running simultaneously, or like we're seeing two parallel universes, and none of the characters ever know which one they're in.

Philosophical Friday: Anger, Disgust and Curiosity

Nancy, 2014-05-06.

WHAT? No. I covered this last week, Fritzi is at least ten years older than Phil, there is no way he can possibly be a year older than her. That does not work. I'm not talking about how the comic's actually been running since 1922 so they should actually be over 100 or anything crazy like that, just going by in-universe evidence presented within the last couple of years. You are blatantly contradicting yourself, Mr. Gilchrist, and I add this to the long, long list of reasons you are terrible at your job. This retconning of Fritzi and Phil would be bad enough even without the blatant inconsistencies.

---

Turning now to something that horrifies me for completely different reasons, a post on the Something Awful forums recently mentioned the existence of a Kevin & Kell roleplaying game. For those not familiar with Kevin & Kell, consider yourself lucky. This part of the description for the RPG gives some idea of the horror.

A world somewhat like our own, where there are no humans and every animal under the sun is sentient, where predator and prey dance endlessly in a waltz of death, and where the love between a rabbit and a wolf may offer the world's last, best hope.

It's a light-hearted sit-com where people murder each other all the time and the only people who think there's anything wrong with that are considered to be terrorists. But it's OK because none of the main characters get murdered. Some of them do the murdering though. In fact, some of them work for a company that specialises in murder for those who can't be bothered killing their neighbours themselves. And this is just casually mixed in with the usual sort of jokes about tech support and relationships.

So I kind of really want to know what this game is like, but I'm glad it's out of stock, because otherwise I might be tempted to actually buy it, and I'm sure that that would not be a good use of my money.

Philosophical Friday: Aunt Fritzi the Cougar

Mandrake the Magician, 2014-05-01.

Several witnesses see him, including Mandrake apparently. Is that not Mandrake there at the bank?

---

Nancy, 2014-04-29.

OK, so Free Fallin' came out in 1989. That means that Phil was born somewhere between 1970 and 1976. But remember that phone call he made to Fritzi when he first arrived back in Three Rocks? Of course you don't because you're not dangerously obsessed with terrible comics, but I do.

Nancy, 2012-11-27.

So Fritzi was presumably a teenager in 1978. I don't know what the age limits or requirements are for Miss Jr. Three Rocks (or what they may have been in 1978) but America's Junior Miss was for highschool seniors, which is what, 16-year-olds? I don't really know how highschool years work in America, But I think it's safe to assume that Fritzi was a teenager at the time and must have been born between 1959 and 1965 and is therefore about ten years older than Phil.

And if that isn't compelling enough for you, there's also this Sunday strip from 2012.

Nancy, 2012-09-30.

The Nutty Professor came out in 1963. If my assumptions about the Miss Jr. Three Rocks competition are right, Nancy must be four years old, and Fritzi must have been born in 1959 and now be around 55, while Phil is 44 at most. He could actually be considerably younger. This explains why he looks like a child and Fritzi looks like an adult.

---

Agnes, 2014-04-24.

AAAAAAaaaaaaarrrrrrgh! What is that!? WHAT IS THAT!?

Weekend Workshop: Philosophical Sunday

I haven't done many edits recently, so I only one I have for you this weekend.

Based on The Amazing Spider-Man, 2014-04-23.

But I forgot to post on Friday so I'll just use this as a catch-up day.

---

Blondie, 2014-04-25.

Wait, kindergarten? Elmo is only around four years old? I always assumed he was about ten. And even then, the fact that he's always hanging around in the Bumsteads' house was pretty weird, but if he's four then it's just bizarre.

Why is he always at the Bumsteads' anyway? We never see his parents, and he seems to just come and go as he pleases, so it's not like Dagwood is babysitting. He's just a four-year-old kid who comes around to spend time with his adult neighbour for no apparent reason.

---

Bleeker the Rechargeable Dog, 2014-04-23.

If you were going to have a robot lift operator, surely it would just be the lift. You wouldn't have a little robot dog actually pressing buttons. The buttons are there because humans have to use them.

And the idea that these robots have dreams and preferences reminds us again that they are sentient, intelligent beings, and Skip's family owns them. This is a comic about slaves. But it's kind of worse than regular slaves, because they've been specifically designed to accept their slavery, and even to have particular attributes that make them better workers. It's like slavery and eugenics. Also, they're consumer electronics, so when they get a bit out of date they just get thrown out. Refurb is already a second-hand bit of rubbish bought only as an amusing novelty.

It hasn't come up for a while now, but there are strips where Karl demonstrates his awareness of these disturbing facts, and Bleeker just brushes it off like it's nothing. But, and this may seem crazy, Karl is actually the sanest character in this comic. Except maybe Lila, she seems OK.

Philosophical Friday: Giving you the creeps

This week Diamond Lil decided to prove that a perfectly good joke can be completely ruined by presenting it in the wrong medium. Look at this:

Diamond Lil, 2014-04-07.

If this were the storyboard for an animated cartoon, I would be right on board. I can see exactly what's happening and it would definitely be funny in motion. But like this it isn't. The next three days just did this same joke again, and if you took the whole lot and made a little animation of them, you'd have something worthwhile. Instead of something lazy that doesn't quite work.

---

Have I mentioned that The Creeps is fantastic? Well, I'm saying it again. Look at this series.

The Creeps, 2014-04-08.

The Creeps, 2014-04-09.

The Creeps, 2014-04-10.

The Creeps, 2014-04-11.

Comics one, two and four stand on their own merits, but when you're skimming over the day's comics, number three looks like a mistake. It looks like they ran the comic from two days ago again. But the didn't. Look closely. I must admit, it took someone else pointing it out before I spotted it.

The thing that really sets The Creeps apart as a comic is that this isn't an isolated incident. Jean Floch is doing creative stuff like this all the time. Here's one from February:

The Creeps, 2014-02-06.

And another one from the same month (which unfortunately GoComics have kind of ruined). Or, my favourite, this series that ran in December last year:

The Creeps, 2013-12-16.

The Creeps, 2013-12-17.

The Creeps, 2013-12-18.

The Creeps, 2013-12-19.

Seriously, read The Creeps, it's really good.