Christmas Holiday Yuletide Comics Roundup Spectacular!!

No, that's not Paulie Walnuts! It's Mary Worth!

Christmas is mere days away, and I have nothing to give you except some comics parodies. Try not to look disappointed. It's been a lean year.

Oh dear. It's time for another comics roundup.

"Take that, you judgmental old biddy!"

The comics, like the waterfalls, never stop. That's a big part of their charm, the constancy. Sure, the newspaper industry died at least ten years ago, and the last non-ironic reader of Judge Parker died twenty years ago. But does that mean King Features Syndicate should just stop paying people to write and draw Judge Parker? I hope not.

Anyway, I haven't done one of these comics roundups since February, and they've been building up on my computer, so I figured it was time. Past time, really.

Let's have fun with the funnies! Part One: The Random Stuff

This is your cultural legacy, America. Don't neglect it.

It's been a while since I've done a post like this. As you know if you follow this blog, I do a lot of parodies and remixes of newspaper comics. Occasionally, I like to collect these and post them here so I can delete them from my hard drive in good conscience. That's what this is: another collection of random junk headed for the incinerator.

Let's go.

Disintegrating 'Blondie'

Three takes on today's Blondie.

I am no longer satisfied with merely discussing or even deconstructing the comic strip Blondie. Now I want to completely disintegrate it. I want to watch it devolve into chaos in front of my eyes. This strip has been running continuously since 1930, and there's a good chance that it was never once funny in all those 86 years. But there's an eerie kind of perfection to Blondie. It seems to take place in this vacuum-sealed Pleasantville reality that stopped evolving sometime during the Eisenhower years. Every once in a while, they make some cosmetic change to the strip to keep it up to date, like giving Dagwood Bumstead a computer at his desk or letting his wife Blondie start her own catering company, but the DNA of the strip does not change. Look at the way Dagwood and his boss, Mr. Dithers, are dressed in the strip up at the top. Where do you even buy clothes like that, except at some vintage resale shop in Brooklyn? And look at their anatomy. Why are Dagwood's shins so short? And why do Dithers and (I think) all the male characters bend their knees like that when they stand? Being a Blondie character would be so uncomfortable. The clothing looks itchy, and the poses are unnatural.

Presented here are the original strip, plus two of my variations on it. In the first, Dagwood has been removed, and it is suggested that he might be Mr. Dithers' own personal Tyler Durden. But then, I wanted to take it a little farther and get rid of both Dagwood and Dithers. Look at that third version of the strip, beautifully depopulated. It's subtle, but the camera angle actually changes from panel one to panel two. And yet, the shine on the floor is in exactly the same spot. The floors in Blondie tend to be very, very shiny indeed. It's one of my favorite visual elements of the strip. I prefer the floors to the human characters.

Fun time with the funnies! For fun!

I've actually made this cartoon less depressing than it normally is.

Have I ever written about Pluggers here before?  It's a syndicated newspaper cartoon feature by Gary Brookins, the same guy who draws Shoe now. It's a one-panel deal, like Ziggy or Dennis The Menace, so it's technically not a comic. Anyhoo, Pluggers is about the daily trials and travails of  aging, out of shape, working-class white people, except all the parts are played by animals like cats, dogs, rhinos, and chickens. Most of the punchlines are phrased in the form of "You're a plugger if..." so it's kind of like Jeff Foxworthy in cartoon form. What's weird is how relentlessly bleak it is. The average plugger is morbidly obese, depressed, sedentary, and stuck in an inescapable rut. Their lives suck. So naturally, it's a good fit with the modern day comics section, a veritable all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of misery. I've referenced the dour Funky Winkerbean here, you may have noticed.

One of the least depressing of the so-called "legacy" or "zombie" strips -- those titles that continue for decades after their creators die -- is Blondie. The strip's protagonist, suburban dimwit Dagwood Bumstead, is so relentlessly upbeat that he cannot fathom real-world problems, like the ones that plague pluggers ever day. He is a real Pollyanna type. I mentioned that this week over at Josh Fruhlinger's blog, The Comics Curmudgeon, and for my troubles I was awarded the coveted "Comment of the Week."  Enjoy.

“How wonderful being Dagwood must feel. Imagine seeing the world through his sclera-less eyes and processing it with his Dippity-Do-covered brain. When a homeless panhandler mysteriously disappears from the streets of his hometown, Dagwood’s assumption is: ‘Oh, he must have found gainful employment at a place that treats him like a human being of value. What a rich, fulfilling new life he must be living now.’” –Joe Blevins

And, just because I thought it was funny, here's a mashup of "Rex Morgan, MD" and Reservoir Dogs.

And here's a special Garfield ghostwritten by Dilbert creator Scott Adams:

Maybe it's more legible at this size?

David Lynch's "Blondie"

David Lynch's Blondie

Ever wonder what would happen if director David Lynch were a guest writer on the comic strip Blondie? Probably not. But I have. Specifically, I was inspired by this utterly bizarre installment of the long-running family comic. Presented above is my estimation of what Lynch would do with this venerable strip. It seems like it's been a while since David's had a new feature. If he can't get the financing, maybe it would help if he would agree to do an adaptation of a familiar cartoon... like, say, Blondie. Scoff if you must, but I think it would work.

Mill Creek comedy classics #11: "Hollywood and Vine" (1945)

If you like the intersection, you'll love the movie.

The flick: Hollywood and Vine (PRC Pictures, Inc., 1945)

Current IMDb rating: 5.8

Director: Alexis Thurn-Taxis (A Night for Crime, The Yanks Are Coming)

Actors of note: 

• James Ellison (I Walked with a Zombie)

• Wanda McKay (The Lady Eve, The Great McGinty)

• Franklin Pangborn (All Over Town, Now Voyager, The Bank Dick)

• Ralph Morgan (The Life of Emil Zola, first president of the Screen Actors Guild)

• Prince Michael Romanoff (restaurateur and "professional impostor")

• Daisy (twenty-seven Blondie movies between 1938 and 1950)

• Emmett "Pappy" Lynn (Night of the Hunter, The Ten Commandments)

Intersections of note: Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, Los Angeles, CA 90028, today the location of a sushi restaurant, an Irish pub, a parking lot, and an empty retail space.

The gist of it: Martha (McKay), a pretty young lass on her way to Hollywood, stops for lunch at a little hamburger stand operated by the eccentric and talkative Pop Barkley (Lynn). There, she attracts the attention of successful playwright Larry Winters (Ellison), who follows her to Tinseltown, where he's working on the adaptation of his Broadway hit, Grandfather's Follies. Thinking it belongs to Martha, Larry brings along a talented little stray dog (Daisy) whom he dubs Emperor after Strauss' Emperor Waltz, which was playing on Pop's jukebox when he and Martha met.

Martha eventually does reconnect with Larry, who passes himself off as a newcomer named "Larry Summers" and takes up residence in a modest bungalow near Martha's. Soon, Larry's bosses and his snooty fiancee are searching frantically for him. Meanwhile, Emperor becomes a big Hollywood star whose overnight success leads to a zany custody battle involving most of the other characters.

"Uncle Carl."

My take: I wonder when Hollywood started turning its cameras back at the movie business, realizing its own industry was as bizarre and fascinating as any scenario a writer could dream up. One of the little joys of this movie is the chance to see a now rather quaint-looking version of Hollywood, a place where people still went to the Brown Derby and the Trocadero.

Watching this movie in 2013 was like seeing the innocent first draft of Barton Fink or Mulholland Drive with all the surrealism and seediness taken out. The "pretending to be poor" thing, too, seems like a harbinger of John Landis' Coming to America. While he's pretending to be a pauper, Larry takes a job at a drugstore, where he works for fussbudget Franklin Pangborn who does his trademark "prissy queen" routine again. The movie never comes out and says it, but I'd like to think that the place is Schwab's Pharmacy.

The studio in the film is called Lavish Pictures, where the members of the Lavish family all have phony-baloney jobs (like "Assistant to the Assistant Story Editor") and phony-baloney offices (with numbers such as "7 and 3/8ths"). I'd imagine this was a swipe at the Laemmle clan, whose founder inspired this famous quip from Ogden Nash: "Uncle Carl Laemmle/Has a very large faemmle."

Sharp-eyed MST3K fans will note that this film was released by the poverty row studio called PRC Pictures, which stands for "Producers Releasing Corporation" and not "Penile Replacement Corporation," as Tom Servo had it.

By the way, I wonder if any scenes from Hollywood and Vine wound up on the cutting room floor because there are some subplots which never get wrapped up. One running gag, for instance, has tough-looking gangster types come into the drugstore and cryptically request a "banana surprise," which makes Franklin Pangborn very nervous. Nothing ever comes of this, though. And there's a wraparound story in which Pop Barkley tells some reporters how he came to be enormously wealthy, but I don't think this was adequately explained either.

Daisy the dog, the actual star of this movie.

Is it funny: Occasionally. As a satire of the motion picture business, Hollywood and Vine is fairy toothless. Studio chiefs are penny-pinching blowhards who keep their whole family on the payroll. Romances are manufactured for the benefit of the press. Directors are temperamental divas. Aspiring actors are likely to end up working in drug stores. I knew most of that.

Because of Daisy, Hollywood and Vine has plenty of bark, but the script has no bite. The movie lavishes much more attention on the dog than it does on the rather dull human love story supposedly at the center of the plot. I guess it's funny watching the talented pooch roll over, play dead, bark on command, close doors, and hide objects when necessary, but it's obvious that the animal is waiting for cues from a handler who is just off-camera. At the time, Daisy was in the middle of a very hot movie career, playing the role of the Bumsteads' dog in a series of cheap-but-popular comedies based on the Blondie comic strip. What's really funny in this film is the "star treatment" lavished on Daisy/Emperor, including lawsuits and charges of tax evasion. I chuckled quite a bit during the Empreror Goes Hollywood montage. After all, like Elvis Costello once said, "You're nobody 'til everybody in this town thinks you're a bastard." Or a bitch, so to speak.

Ellison and McKay play their parts straight down the middle, so most of the comedic dialogue in the film is given to the supporting players like "Pappy" Lynn, whose crazy old coot character quickly wore on my nerves. I did like the way his character wound up figuring into the film's longest-running gag at the very end, though.

My grade: B-

P.S. - Not a Negro stereotype in sight here. No minorities of any kind, in fact.

The Funday Sunnies! Comics for the terminally depressed!

Celebrating America's richest vein of laughter and despair: Newspaper comics!

Hello, everybody!

My main man, Zomby, has been on a vision quest in Nepal these past few weeks, which explains his near-total absence from the blog. When (or if) he gets back, I'll be happy to bring you his further exploits. In the meantime, I thought I'd bring you a variety of Sunday comics, each one with the subtly dispiriting, downbeat antihumor of Zomby!

Enjoyment is not the proper reaction to these comics, per se. You really should be shaking your head and sighing deeply after each one.

Capitalist Cut-Ups

Ruprecht, The One-Armed Cat

Dennis the Fundamentalist

Only One Punchline!

The Dullards

Suburban Ennui

Creepy Love