Doonesbury: Wildly inappropriate as usual, Dex.

Things you can say or at least directly refer to in the comics section:

1. S&M
2. Whore
3. Anal

Things you can't say in the comics section:

1. Douchebag

Doonesbury: I'm really busy, Zipper.

Today's Doonesbury is the best comic of the day not so much because of the Martin Luther King joke at the end (which is funny), but because of the throw-away gag at the beginning, in which Zonker claims to be busy while sitting around drinking beer and eating potato chips. The joke is, impressively, both specific and universal at the same time, in that it's very much character-based, while nonetheless something everybody does from time to time.

Doonesbury: Whoa--constarch!

This might not work as a method of picking up women, but it is nonetheless pretty cool.

Doonesbury: Pandora analyzes his list and kicks out other tunes he's likely to dig.

So Doonesbury is apparently selling off panels for ad space now.

Expect a long, moderately witty meta-commentary about this Sunday, followed by contact information.

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.

Doonesbury: Oh...no...hurt you?

This comic is hilarious because Toggle's going to accidentally kill Alex in her sleep.

Doonesbury: Over's where the money is man.

This might sound odd, but one of the things I watch for in comics is all the different ways cartoonists manage to avoid drawing feet, which I assume must be pretty hard to draw. In the third panel of today's Doonesbury, for example, Trudeau puts one of Alex's feet just out of the panel and the other behind a cymbal.

Doonesbury: And this is you in high-def.

The silent penultimate panel is an overused device--there was once even a blog dedicated to it--but I think Trudeau employs it quite nicely here.

Doonesbury: Hold on. I'm mid-tweet.

Whereas most comics have been content to mock Twitter for merely being Twitter (seed of the demon Internet and destroyer of all that is good), Doonesbury has used it much more effectively. Because in Doonesbury Twitter is not just a funny-sounding social networking device that wants to kill newspapers. Instead, it is a funny-sounding social networking device that characters actually use in ways that tell us (largely unflattering) stuff about them.

Specifically, in this strip here, we see Roland Hedley using it in a way that suggests he is an arrogant, superficial ass. Hedley was an ass long before Twitter, of course, but Twitter allows him to be an ass in new and exciting ways. It also works as a pretty solid little satire of all the public figures who use Twitter in ways that suggest that they too are arrogant, superficial asses.

None of this is to argue that Gary Trudeau actually likes Twitter. On the contrary, he seems to have as much contempt for it as any other newspaper cartoonist. It's just that he knows the best way to satirize it is to actually take it seriously and integrate it into his fictional world. The barbs are more likely to stick that way.

Doonesbury: I know I'm pretty low on the food chain, but the truth is I do enable people to order unhealthy amounts of food.

Today's Doonesbury is just a good, solid example of the character-based humor that Gary Trudeau can do in his sleep. And this kind of thing is the reason the strip is so good. The political humor is fine, and I agree with most of it, but it's the impressively textured world that Trudeau has built that really makes the comic go.

It's also a nice piece of joke construction, with a lengthy, well-written set-up leading into a short, unexpected punchline.

Doonesbury: Ack! I had frizzy hair that day. Pick another.

So Alex is apparently transforming into Cathy. Should I have seen that one coming?

Get Fuzzy and Doonesbury: Boogie shark.

Most great comic strips are built on great characters. And having great characters lets artists do things they ordinarily couldn't do.

Neither of these strips has a traditional joke. The pun in Get Fuzzy is buried in the middle panels and never explicitly commented on, while the construction of the joke in Doonesbury is so fractured that it doesn't really play as one. Both artists even go so far as to make little meta-jokes about the subtlety of the jokes that would normally be the centerpiece of a comic by having characters not get them.

But both strips are funny anyway, entirely because of the character interaction. Comics with lesser characters can't get away with this particular kind of subversion and still be funny.