11/10 comic quickies

I like comics with morals. Like this one's - don't let old people use the internet.

Soon I'll be treated to a plot that centers around this old lady searching for cans to recycle to pay off her "the Amazon site" debt. And it'll be funny. Oh, it'll be funny.


What's interesting here, besides the sexy, sexy animals all looking right at you (if they weren't sexy, how would you know that they're all female?), is that cat. She's a pussy with one thing on her mind....


So this is what straight sex looks like? Good to know.


Another Sunday, another anti-sodomy sermon.


From the How It Is Dep't: Dr. McRealPerson spends his whole day away from the unwashed masses.... Can't be too clean, I always say...

But sometimes he has to interact with janitors in his building... Oh yeah-h-h-h-h! Hallo, Doc... How you are? Put it dere..

*Urge to repeal the estate tax

Qomics for Everybody but Me Edition

Even though there are occasionally actual queer references in the comics, I still feel like there's a comic for everyone out there in the world but me! Here are a few examples of all the cool groups of people for whom there are comics:


There are comics for anarchists:



Comics for people who haven't heard of primary elections:



Comics for the obsessive-compulsive:



Comics for people who find Peter Parker sexy:



Comics for 5-year-olds (haha, poop is funny!):



Comics for PETA propagandists:



Comics for demon-possessed dog owners:



Comics for people who have followed Blondie long enough to notice every detail of Dagwood's outfit:



Comics for people who enjoy road-head:



And, finally, comics for horrid human/beast mutants who were never meant to be:


***

OK, and I have two others. First, Rex Morgan, M.D.:

Yeah, why didn't he? I mean, she's a woman, answering the door and showing her face to who knows what men, and he's off thinking that his new bride is safe in the cabin. Doesn't she know her place?

But all this talk of newlyweds spending an entire week alone in a cabin has one thing on Niki's mind, as he looks right at it in panel three. Sit tight, there, Niki! Soon Rex'll get you to that cabin!


And BC:

OK, here we have a dating service with a woman behind a desk in its proper context: 20,000 years in the past. No, wait, I mean 5-6000! Sorry, BC, I forgot that the world is no more than 6000-years-old!

Last last Saturday's 9 Chickweed Lane

Kneeling comes naturally for a priest. Mm-hmm. Doesn't Mark Jordan estimate that 2/3 of priests have G-cards? Well, then. I'm going to say that this is more likely than not a blow job joke.

Friday's 9 Chickweed Lane

One of the comics I didn't catch up on after my hiatus was 9 Chickweed Lane. While it has the only regularly featured queer character in all of the comics that I follow, I can't get over the fact that it reads like a 16-year-old's Sex and the City fantasy and actually praise it for its inclusiveness along the lines of sexuality.

It's queer inclusive. There, I said it.

But without having caught up on the current plotline, which I just started reading this week with Edda getting some woman (her mother the perfessor?) to try on a revealing dress, I don't know what to make of this. The past few days have been devoted to some grotesque Queer Eye for the Straight Former Clergy Guy. (I concede I don't really know who's whom in 9CL. I can't get much help from McEldowney's own website, so I'm going to assume that every man I don't know is the former priest guy and every woman I don't know is a professor.) It's all climaxed to this, where the gay couple is overjoyed at their creation, a modern Gomez Addams. (Is Gomez Addams supposed to be the ideal of gay male beauty and straight guys just don't get this? Is that the joke?)

Well, the long and short of this is that, taken in isolation, this comic is crazy. Taken in the context of the past week, this comic is even crazier. So I'm guessing that if I read this and fully caught up, I'd find out that these two people are being dressed up to go meet a telepathic unicorn in hopes that it won't execute them for having eaten its last leek. At which point I'd be huddled in the corner asking McEldowney to make it stop, please make it stop.

9 Chickweed Lane

Another actual queer reference. Seth here always gets the weirdest lines, but at least they make sense this time around. Too bad the moral is "understanding" or "compassion" or something like that.

9 Chickweed Lane

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!! The stupid unicorn is back!

One thing I've noticed: if you can't write that well, stick to dialogue instead of third-person omnicient. Having a narrator tell your story, as I learned in a several years of creative writing seminars, is actually a lot harder than it looks and makes your writing talent more transparent. First-person voice and dialogue are easier because they're less abstract - the writer only has to think about how people would actually say something, not the best way to say something - and can be blamed on the character's voice.

That might explain why I've been so critical of this storyline in 9CL. That and the fact that I have no idea what's going on.

Monday's 9 Chickweed Lane

Oh, God, the unicorn plot isn't over.

No, Edda, having a dream about a unicorn doesn't make you crazy. But doing the splits and wetting yourself does.

Saturday's 9 Chickweed Lane

OK, the stupid unicorn subplot's over. Here's my evaluation: F! Why?

• It was a dream. No, no, no, no. You're not allowed to do that anymore. It's so played.
• There really was no conflict. Sure, the unicorn didn't like Edda, but I don't like Edda and there's no comic about that. But all they did was be snippy to one another, so there really was no plot.
• Unicorn? No.
• Edda never rode the unicorn. DISAPPOINTING.
• Her boyfriend's ugly. Oh, wait, that has nothing to do with the unicorn thing. But it's true.

Any other reasons?

9 Chickweed Lane

Haha, "The unicorn had also stiffened." But he wasn't as "erect" as Edda, haha.

I was going to do this one last, but then I realized I'd have a big drawing of horse's ass above the fold until I got through Tuesday's comics. Because that's a lot of ass there. Yep.

9 Chickweed Lane

Near where I live there's a bar called "The Unicorn". Funny story about that - one of my friends in high school, who was kind of annoying, was a year ahead of me and became a prostitute in college. "Dane" came home during the summers to dance and walk around nearly naked at The Unicorn (this isn't Canada where you can actually be naked at a bar) and he'd always brag about how he was a prostitute and a stripper and it just made me even more annoyed with him. So jump ahead a year, I was at a gay cafe with another friend of mine from high school, let's call him "Joey", who was also annoyed by Dane's snooty prostitutery, and when we saw Dane we tried to avoid him. Of course, one thing about snobs is that once they've targeted you, you're done for.

He waved at us, and we went over there, and he was telling us about how he was working at The Unicorn, and Joey had no idea that it was a skin bar, and we all had to keep leaning in to speak to Dane because he said he was hard of hearing in his left ear (honestly I thought he was making that up so that everyone had to lean in to talk to him). So yadda, yadda, yadda, Joey was being polite and was like "Maybe I'll run into where you work this summer", and Dane said, "Oh, they don't let you in if you're under 21." Joey was like, "Well, you're 20, so how do you get in there?" And Dane said, "I wear a G-string."

Wait, that'll have to be the punchline to this story, because it gets really mean after that. Long and short of it, when I get my own sitcom, there is totally going to be a snobby Midwestern prostitute character that everyone will try to avoid because he's such a snob but they won't be able to politely.

But back to 9CL, this isn't making any sense at all. Why can't the unicorn just walk around Edda if it's in such a hurry? It's an effing unicorn, shouldn't it have the power to walk around someone?

Qomics for Queers - For the record, I blame King Media Features

Well, my fears from last week were misplaced; there's absolutely no shortage of gayness in this week's comics. It did, however, take me all of two days to actually put this together. It definitely couldn't have been caused by a lack of motivation. This Wednesday's Slylock Fox (after the jump) was, for a comics-outer, like looking into the face of God and having Him whisper back, "I love you". I was reminded why I got into this business: immature penis jokes. Because, even with all its bells and perks and whistles, isn't that what being a comics-outer is really all about?


Let's start with Saturday's 9 Chickweed Lane:

Wow! An actual gay reference in a real comic! Inclusive! Well-drawn! Wonderful! Well... except for that tiny, tiny detail: it makes no sense. Here are some possible explanations:
1. Cartoonist McEldowney thinks that "Oh, sweetie, if only" is some kind of universally known gay pick-up line, like "Lookin??"
2. The first two panels have nothing to do with the joke; Seth just really doesn't like Mark's goatee.
3. For the length of time that is panel 2, Seth thought that Mark was a carnivorous lion, making him envy the quick instincts of real gazelles.
4. I joined the boat way too late on 9 Chickweed Lane, and the strip has developed its own alphabet and language that only looks like English, and the above conversation is really a mother-in-law joke.


Friday's Family Circus:

This pretty much explains itself, I guess. One little gay boy drew a Village People moustache on his infantile brother. Seriously, people, nothing to look at here.


This Friday's Dennis the Menace:

Considering the outfit you're wearing, cowboy, I don't think it was your room she wanted you to straighten.


Wednesday's Rex Morgan, M.D.:

It's funny because it's true! It happens like this every time when I have to pull away from my vapid, self-absorbed life and boyfriend to show some sort of affection towards my wife after she talks me into mentoring a teenage near-orphan with flattery, and I'm closing in and closing my eyes like someone would plug their nose to take bad medicine, and it's always like, BANG!, saved by the gunshot!


This Wednesday's Slyock Fox:

Any more? Let's see.... Banana? No, that has seven letters. Penis? No, five. Johnson... no, no no, that has seven letters. Hmmm, these puzzles are really hard!