4/8/2018

i'm back
i'm bad
in both demeanor and general quality

Alright so for the one person who actively read this shit (probably SuperIdiotMan00) here's an explanation as to where I have been for the past couple of months.

I had decided to take a short hiatus caused by the fact that I didn't want to waste money buying the paper every single day for the purpose of doing this thing.
This hiatus before I knew it morphed into six months for a variety of reasons:
1. General severe procrastionation caused by a. the need to calm down after a day of freshman college work and being demanded to do it, as well as the fact I was signifigantly more into the tackiling of edit projects.
2. General lack of interest in the comics as a whole, from what I had read of them in the time since I no longer considered them worthy of criticism, just...BAD. This is largely due to the fact that most comics that jump out me as being "bad" nowadays...groan...try to take on social manners. Ones that I had in person been debating in detail

So why the hell am I bringing it back?

Well the one thing that still after all this time had been fascinating me was just how goddamn long we'd been without a change, any change to the comics in the NYDN, the last one having been in 2013 (incidentally the first year I tried to make a blog about this kind of thing). I promised myself if I was to ever start doing this full time again I would start it when a change happened.

Well this is it.

After five years, one of the comics "Soup to Nutz" might be going away.

Nothing is written and whether or not this means a new strip for me to analyize, and therefore get pumped about doing this blog again, is unknown, but still the mere prospect is enough for me to want to do this again.

Secondly, my dad showed me there was an app to just get the NYDN comics included. I had always thought this app was text-only but that ended up being how HE personally chose to read it. You can get the comics there.

So between that and the fact I already have two riffing projects "Raster Reviews" on YT and a private one on a fandom Discord, there's no excuse.

Let's get started.

...unfortunately, given that the app excludes comics on Sunday only due to not "technically" being in the paper (a pull out) we must resort to using the pirate method

although this is not a "proper" update I will just for the sake of getting ready present what would have been the worst had this been one:

this gets it from the cunting first panel alone. What is supposed to be pinning him down. The D clearly has enough space to let him down. The 3 for no discernable reason grew a tumor in the bottom right just to implae him, one which also makes it look like hisn head and left arm got torn clean off. was it that hard to make it an average sized D.

Alright so just a quick update as to where this has been: I don't actually read the comics every day and I was hoping to start once again when I started the blog. However, buying the paper every day was getting expensive, the entire dollar it cost, due to my money mostly being my lunch money in college and therefore very tightly rationed. This, and the most recent times I have read the comics nothing has stood out as particullay blog-worthy. Between all this I may make it a more general "best and worst I have seen in recent memory" starting now. Let's begin.

Best:

yay for saying "Crap" in todays world


Worst:

wow...

An ENORMOUS problem with Pearls Before Swine nowadays is a bit too much "Phones are evil and Thomas Edison was a witch". I'm fine with this joke in moderation, after all if I was not it would likely demonstrate an opinion-intolerance on my part about what elders may think of phones

And at any rate.

fucking a....

This is only a toe's length above Pastis just finally slapping and making a strip thats just no panels, no artwork, just "PLEASE STOP USING PHONES AND READ THE PAPER INSTEAD CAUSE IM LOSING A JOB" scrawled across

9/1/17

Best: One Big Happy

im a sucker for drawings of the front of a house


Worst: Pearls Before Swine

'
oh dangmuffins pie ala mode

...Hey dudes

 Have you heard

Our president uses Twitter to much

Twitter happens to be a medium in which if a human being happens to be the president whilst using it they will mostly likely formulate non-presidental text

somehow I was not prepared for Pearls Before Swine

In a weird way I was kinda relieved when Pastis suddenly decided to take a bipartisan stance despite having done a painfully unfunny, uncreative and unsubtle storyline whilst the election proper was happening wherein Rta ran for president using methods totally unrelated to those of anyone we know. Even if it was blatantly because he didn't want to be political.

The relief is gone.

I'd like to just give you a quote from Pastis when he didn't suck
"I really wasn't interested in doing these sort of "political" strips. I mean, there are ways to comment on these issues with the subtext of the strip without having to be so blatant."
good times

Let us look at this from a logical standpoint:
The whole joke is essentially that he's using a modern means of technology. We'll hopefully get to this in a less political stigma soon but Pearls overuses these jokes extensively in such a manner that makes it clear he wants you to see it the same way.
Thus I can't help to feel that Pastis is one of the worst kinds of rabid left:
Those who believe that somehow Twitter itself is part of the problem, as if the moment they ban Trump and he must formulate thoughts in paragraphs he'll turn into a master thespian.
For the sake of keeping it apolitical I'll ignore whether or not this is true.
I'll just say this is in ANY case a petty and ridiclous way to look at it, and one that only 2017 could have brought us.
Would we have said in the past Anthony Wiener woulda just became a decent sexual being had we taken away his phone?

8/28/17

Best: Between the Lines

OK I don't have an image here. This wont happen again I'm only getting used to this. but its a talking cow being annoyed a Speak n Say only has him saying moo.

Why is this the best?

Well at first it was not and I was eager about the prospect of finally getting to put BTL on this blog, one Ive been willing to talk about.

But then I realized.

If this joke was handeled by any modern humorist other than the BTL creator, it woulda been a joke about cultural appropriation.

So this gets the best strip for today.

Whatever it takes for the concept of cultural appropriation to never ever be in the fucking comics.

Worst: WuMo

well at least its not a modern joke?

still lips though

and empty space

and the ghost backgorund elements

and too many words to get the jok-alright maybe modern jokes were not this strip's only problem

Hey wait a minute

This too could have been a joke about assuming gende-dammit my own rules are already ruptured

8/29/17 (belated)

Best: Zits

ooohh man it's been forever and a day since I saw a one-panel strip that made good use of every inch of the space

take notes WuMo

and the detail on the iguana...after looking at WuMo for so long it's great to see something that should actually have big lips have them

And everybodys reaction too...this coulda just been them looking with bug eyes BUT NO. Actual dynamic scared poses...

 
Worst: Blondie

look at that nameplate

just look at it

if I was a crappy Channel Awesome wannabe I'd make a joke about how an actual newspaper cartoonist is already picking a fight with me, with perhaps some humorous additions about how the hell that happened after only four days of doing this


but I must remind you I am not

BTW this has been the name of the barber for the longest time and I have always felt this creeped out about it

8/27/17

Worst: WuMo

Alright so continuing the trend from yesterday our fellow suffering from both the Cardgage curse and the Arc of Covenant is trying to take a picture of the sun but geddit people in the past didn't care about how they looked but they do now so there's the strings attached. Gee it's like we evolve and so do cameras. Have these fuckers ever actually taken a well picture or do they just assume pressing the button automatically produces good results.

It wouldn't be a big deal but all it would have taken to get this clearer is the sun's first and third lines. Also maybe actually make good use of the caption that's absent here and just put it at the bottom?

 Best: Gasoline Alley

 Back when there were three pages of comics in the paper I hated Gaisolane Alley, but its starting to grow on me. I dunno why. I feel in the need to not become a flaming Entard and acknlowedge the good with the bad I am starting to get accustomed to the comics never changing and getting used to some of trhem.


...or more likely maybe I'm just glad it has never once been political and somehow still is not.
Oh yeah and there's actually some artistic skill in it.

Anyway here's what I like about this one:
* They actually are self-awar enough to acknowledge the subtle disturbingess of mice advertising cat food
* That written French accent
* It's a drema, not like that A Nonny Moose shit where theres just a moose in the real world
* Third panel is a beautriful use of black
* This unlike many GA strips has a punchline

8/26/17

Best: Soup to Nutz

This was one of the three strips I was REALLY scared to see get affected by the great comedy death of 2016, mainly because all three had already expressed very obvious "Le Sniffles McFatshame" jokes the last I read of them that year during the election. WuMo had not crossed my mind at the time and the other two we'll discuss in the future (spoiler: one of them does indeed blow ass now) but lets focus on this for now...

...wait.

It can't be.

Could it?

A KKK joke that coulda been printed before 2017 no problem? One that is...gasp...APOLITICAL?

I see skies of blue....

Of course we'll probably have those mad that they called them "dunces" at all but it's not like they in any way acknowledge what they do or that it applies to society. Hell it doesn't even say they exist today, he just said he watched "a show" and not the news which means it was almost certainly a history documentary.

And just to clarify, if you think its weird such a seemingly innocent strip would be talking about this at all, there's a reoccurring joke that they always piss of the minister at Sunday school. This strip is more than meets the eye.

 
Worst: WuMo

Alright this wasn't nearly a smidge as heinous a joke as yesterday's but if I'm gonna have to talk about WuMo right from day one I'd like to prove to you guys that my claim about it being literally nothing but "what if ___ was today" jokes is true by sacrificing the whole first week or so of "Worst" to it. Let's see how many days in a row we can get where the joke is just "the past would be different if we had the advancements we do today". 

The joke isn't worth any analyization beyond the points I touched upon yesterday (and hey literally anything beats mansplaining jokes) so let's get to the artwork:

First of all, we addressed yesterday this art style. This art style that makes all the humans look like the Cartoon Network Noods contracted rheumatism and developed a crippling addiction to wax lips.

(Oohh mama, you'd better believe I'm giving them a new description like this everyday I have to look at the little antichrists again)

It turns out the rabbit hole of the lips as I addressed in yesterday's strip actually goes even deeper.
I didn't pay enough attention yesterday but it turns out the black woman had brown lips.
Bond himself was the only character without them or even drawn in a tolerable style, which I originally assumed was to contrast him from the setting, but now that I see what I'm seeing today, was most likely only because they were directly using an image of a Bond (man, I hope it wasn't Moore) for reference.

Let us analyize the lip ratio of people:

• Only the women even have them. Already this is damn unfortunate because...well fellatio. (As well as making the fact that yesterday was most likely a pro-femenist joke damn tragic). It gets worse though....
• The white (or rather albino) woman is the only one with human lips, the rest as we observed yesterday sync to their skin tones.

...wow it was just a joke yesterday using "minstrel show" as part of my description but....

Also, just putting a phone in the hands? Could it have killed you to actually draw the Mona Lisa in the actual position a selfie creat-oh yes that requires forced perspective. Even you wouldn't stoop to having the whole painting be uncolored in to "simulate" perspective.