Prickly City and Get Fuzzy: ...

Maybe I'm getting soft, because I sure am picking a lot of best comics of the day these days, but both of these comics are very funny in a completely different way than today's 9 Chickweed Lane is funny. 9 Chickweed Lane is funny because of its strong dialog. It features no action of interest.

Today's Prickly City and Get Fuzzy, on the other hand, are notable for their limited--or complete lack of--dialog. While the humor in Prickly City is dependent on the dialog, the punchline is image-based.

Get Fuzzy, meanwhile, has been set up by the last couple weeks of Bucky's insane communist Muppet conspiracy theories. Today's strip is Satchel's silent reaction to them. The whole thing is the punchline.

Monty: Haven't you seen that WWII Lockheed C-60 hanging in the basement?

There are two punchlines in this comic: the image-based one in the third panel and the dialog-based one in the fourth. They each come in reaction to the set-up in the second panel, and they are each funny on their own. Putting them together, however, somehow makes them both less funny and results in a worse comic. Turning the first punchline into a cut-away with another panel after it robs it of the power it would have had as a final image, while including the image before the fourth panel makes the second punchline seem like an afterthought.

I get the sense that the cartoonist couldn't decide which punchline was better, so he decided to use both. But that's cheating. Part of working in a medium with severe space limitations is being a ruthless editor. Sometimes you have to cut good stuff so that the stuff you do use is more affecting. Not that there aren't times when cheating can pay off. This just isn't one of those cases.

And just in case anyone's wondering, personally, I would have gone with the first punchline. But I'm a big fan of image-based humor, so I'm a little biased.

Drabble: Dad, what would a cartoonist DO if he lost his glasses?

I am rather amused by today's Drabble. This has never happened before. I'm not entirely sure what to do.

Get Fuzzy: Stop! I'll kill you!

Bucky wearing a onesie wins the day.

Monty: OK! OK! I admit it! I forgot the last four digits of your model number!

I'm sorry. I know I should probably stop being so amused by this storyline. But come on! The vacuum's holding an umbrella! AN UMBRELLA! It's funny!

Get Fuzzy: Morning, Rob.

Why do I love Get Fuzzy? Because of the sandwich in Satchel's thought balloon.

Garfield: I finally nailed it back down!

This Garfield, as usual, would be better without Garfield. But even with Garfield, it's pretty good, mostly because it manages a degree of subtlety that Paws Inc. rarely attempts. The funny part of the comic is Jon's bandaged hand. Garfield's cheap punchline is mostly just a distraction.

Doonesbury: Mike's summer daydream.

This Doonesbury is more smart than it is funny, but we here at The Comics Section are a cultured sort, so we can appreciate this kind of thing.

Trudeau is talking about the tension between our desire to see people change and our desire to see them stay the same. Change is inevitable, to a degree, but at the same time, that change comes so slowly that we don't even notice unless it's been years since we've seen each other. What's more, people will never change in the way we want or expect them to. And what's still more, if they were to change in the way we wanted or expected them to, we would inevitably be disappointed.

Trudeau is also talking about all of this as it pertains to characters in serialized fiction, which is even trickier. If characters remain the same for too long, a comic strip or a television show or whatever will become stale. But if the characters change too drastically too quickly--and thus unrealistically, like the old friends at reunions--they become fake, and the show becomes a shadow of its former self.

The scale is nearly impossible to balance. But this is what we ask of our artists. We're bastards like that.

Family Tree: MO-OM! This is IM-POR-TANT!

The actual punchline in this comic is pretty bad. But the combination of the drawing and Twig's well-emphasized dialog more than makes up for it.

Pearls Before Swine: Me sell ranch to Bob. He say key to cheeken ranch is have axe. Show stoopid cheekin who boss.

I know a lot of people don't like the way the crocs in Pearls Before Swine talk, but I think it's an interesting attempt at dialect, which isn't something we see a whole lot of in the comics section anymore. Granted, Stephan Pastis occasionally uses it as a crutch, which is lamentable, but most of the time it's just a part of the crocs' identity. Characters should speak differently than one another. There are more subtle ways to achieve this than dialect, of course, but subtlety has never exactly been Pastis's specialty.

Also, more comics need axe murders.

Monty: Mr. Crumpet, I command you...Eviscerate! Eviscerate!

Things that are funny about this cartoon, in order from least funny to most funny:

1. That the dog is scared of the cat.
2. That the dog is a shih tzu named Mr. Crumpet.
3. That the dog's bow is identical to Master Sedgwick's bow tie.
4. Eviscerate! Eviscerate!
5. Disembowel! Disembowel!
6. That the dog drinks kiwi-lemonade.
7. That the dog drank too much kiwi-lemonade.
8. That the dog is actually peeing in the third panel.

Brewster Rockit: Now, imagine yourself flying!

The Yoda parody is fine, but what really makes this comic funny is Brewster's facial expressions.

Brewster Rockit and Monty: I think your machine is malfunctioning.

Both of these comics rely on fairly subtle, mostly image-based set-ups, and therefore actually require the reader to pay attention in order to completely get the jokes. This is an unfortunately rare occurrence in the comics section.

On another note, I've been meaning to write about Monty for a while now, but it's such an efficient, low-key sort of comic that it's often hard to find anything particularly interesting to say about it. But it's one of the better comic strips around, and you should probably read it.

Baby Blues: Anyway, that's what it feels like to be me lately.

Considering that Jerry Scott created both of them, it's not surprising that Baby Blues and Zits are very similar strips. And so pretty much everything I wrote about Zits here applies to Baby Blues, too. The characters are sometimes too broadly archetypal (though, slightly sharper than the characters in Zits) and it sometimes leans too heavily on relatability, but the drawing is often terrific.

Such is basically the case with today's installment. The image in the second panel is just top-notch absurd humor. The faucet-breasts, in particular, are especially funny.

Peanuts, Zits, Cathy and Pluggers: When will you have a baby? or The limits of relatability.

One of the things that makes Peanuts so great is how relatable it is. In today's reprint from 1962, for example, we can relate to Linus because, while we've probably never been blown over by a Beagle, we have all had our assumptions and expectations unexpectedly overturned.

But there's other stuff going on here, too. The characters are (obviously) very well-defined, and their interaction is realistic within the world of the strip. The drawing, meanwhile, is expressive and sufficiently illustrates the absurdity of the joke.

In Zits, the characters are somewhat less well-defined, being at times little more than broad archetypes. In this strip, Jeremy isn't really a specific character so much as a stand-in for every teenage male everywhere; the same goes for Connie, who is just a stand-in for every mother of a teenage male everywhere.

As such, the strip has a tendency to lean a bit too heavily on relatability, which is the case here. The drawings, however, are often very well done, which is also the case here. While the joke isn't really anything special, basically just amounting to "Kids sure do eat a lot, don't they?", the image of Jeremy detaching his jaw and swallowing an entire ham in the second panel is funny enough that the lazy premise gets a pass.

I'm not generally in the target audience for Cathy, but I can relate to this particular strip. And that's a good thing! But it's still not funny.

The problem is that merely being relatable isn't enough. The characters in Cathy, like the characters in Zits, tend toward the archetypal. (The other big working woman comic, Sally Forth, actually has far better characters, despite being written by a man.) Cathy Guisewite's drawing, meanwhile, just isn't expressive or absurd or, just in general, good enough to be funny on its own. And so there's a lot of times when all the strip has to recommend it is its relatability. Which very nearly makes it Pluggers for working women. And that's not a good thing to be.

Because as much as I thoroughly despise Pluggers' self-congratulatory blue-collar populist bullshit, that's not its biggest problem. Pluggers' biggest problem is that it's basically relatability porn, so much so that it's actually written by the readers. The characters are not even archetypes, but instead completely blank slates onto which the readers are to graft themselves. And the drawing rarely has anything to recommend it; the characters exist as animals, for example, but for no good reason.

Today's installment isn't a great example for making this point. The joke is actually decently constructed, and the dog-husband's mortified facial expression is almost sort of amusing. As such, it's probably the best Pluggers comic I've ever seen. And, yeah, that's probably the faintest praise ever.

Of course, a lot of people like Pluggers. And a lot of people like Cathy. Because those comics are simple, and people understand them. Readers don't have to think about them or read them carefully or really even look at the drawings. And that's the problem. Relatability is a good thing, but using it as a crutch isn't. Doing so cheapens the relationship between the readers and the comics, turns it into something lazy and cheap and superficial. That's where Pluggers started, and where Cathy is at now, and where Zits could end up if its not careful. Peanuts never did give into that impulse. And that's another one of the things that makes it so great.

Mutts: Let. It. Go.

It's Earl's helpless expression in the second panel that made me laugh. He wants to let it go. He knows he ought to let it go. But he just can't do it.

It's just like that time I was addicted to heroin.

Baby Blues: She's all yours!

Sometimes the joke is word-based. Other times, like in today's Baby Blues, it's image-based.

That baby is crazed.