It is the end of one year and the beginning of another. (Uncanny grasp of the obvious, eh?) And with 2006, the comicstrippy world must say bye-bye to two different, but oddly related institutions:

The Daily Foxtrot

It’s better for everybody than quitting completely for Bill Amend, but if he truly spent as much time on the comic as he said for the last umpteen years, the change must be somewhat traumatic for him. But he addressed everything near-perfectly in the last week of strips. Highlights:

I had never noticed that the Foxes and the Lockhorns had almost identical hair. Freaky.
Narbonic

Shaenon Garrity is like the Queen of Webcomics and Narbonic was one of those freaks of creative nature that told a helluva story while delivering a daily gag as reliably as FedEx. The characters were delightfully unique (as opposed to some other strips where the characters are disturbingly unique), starting with the semi-eponymous Helen Narbon, a strong female character who’s brilliant, cheerful, utterly insane and self-proclaimed evil. But then, Narbonic had a unique way of dealing with so many big-deal issues: good and evil, life and death, genius and madness, love and sex and violence and science and family and gerbils. And instead of a “Sunday-sized” comic, there was always a cool and often surprising feature (many of which highlighted the strip’s fanbase, which was large, fervent and included a lot of other artists). I never got into it until the archives were opened up in the middle of ’06, but once in, I was trapped. Some highlights from the Final Year of Narbonic:



If you can name all the webcomics these “dramatic revelations” were borrowed from, then you are a true Webcomics Nerd.


I’m 100% with you, Shaenon.


And I will not apologize for my love for “Foot”.

And they lived madly ever after. (But they did prevent the apocalyptic future shown in the obligatory Time Travel storyline – not that they’re not capable of creating another one)

It made me mucho happy when webcomickers Kris Straub and R. Stevens wrote comments for this third-rate D-list part-time comics blog, but nothing compared to the honor of getting dissed by a professional newspaper comic strip creator, at least one who was in the papers before Stevens and his Sweeties. Disclaimer: this may not actually be Scott Nickel, co-perpetrator of “Triple Take”, since the email address shown is on every Triple Take comic. But I really hope it is.

Well, you’re no “Josh.” But keep it up. Maybe you’ll eventually be only sort of unfunny.

Now, I could comment that being “only sort of unfunny” is the standard for newspaper comics these days, but I won’t.

Instead, let me offer some of my favorite Triple Takes from the weeks since the offending “Snakes on a Plane”. (And I was dead serious when I wrote that, allowing for normal comic strip lead times, there was no excuse for SoaP jokes after it became clear that the movie had bombed) Since the whole premise of the comic is ‘three times the punchlines’, I have “edited” the content of any strip where only two of the three jokes really worked.

In this one, the “Blue Man Group” was barely passing but Margaret Thatcher raised the LOL level of everything.

In this one, the premise carried it, but I thought the actual lines could’ve been punchier…

Come on, using “Tickle” as an alternative to “Kill”? Besides, you get the comic benefit of alliteration in “Punch a Pelican”, and everything’s funnier with a flamingo!

If Mr. Nickel or Mr. Clark, see this, I hope you’ll take this for what it is: a totally unsolicited attempt at constructive criticism from someone whose only qualification is having spent the $15 for “Daily Ink”.

Sorry I haven’t been updating regularly. I’ve been working on a scholarly analysis of Christmas-themed comic strips, and now I can officially report the count at 361 for “the number of comic strips that used a ‘Christmas Presents/Christmas Presence’ pun to make a sentimental point” and 286 for “the number of comics that showed a house decorated with a single massive Christmas light bulb” (247 of them red, only 39 green).

Meanwhile, a bearded webcartoonist posted some “‘facts’ that you may not know about Christmas” …

…and I felt challenged to contribute a few of my own.
Oddly enough, there is no record of anybody ever asking Jesus: “Were you born in a barn?”
Then there is the old Amish tradition (now being covered up by the Ocean Spray people) of molding the gelatin-style cranberry sauce into large penile shapes in a kind of fertility ritual. It must work, because 72% of all Amish living today have birthdays in September or October.
The “Frosty the Snowman” story was actually the taming-down of an old legend about the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas attacking a haberdashery shop and getting surprisingly docile afterwards, due to those infamous “Mad Hatter” chemicals.
The “kissing under the mistletoe” tradition was based on a misunderstanding at an 1874 Christmas party where drunken revelers started chewing on the poisonous berries and their mouths swelled up into a permanent pucker.
The whole “Jingle Bells on the sleigh” idea was originally devised as an early-warning system for unwanted Christmas visitors, who, like the Belled Cat of the Aesop’s fable, were fooled into thinking they were ‘festive seasonal decorations’ and never figured out why nobody was home when they showed up.
And the reason Charles Dickens’ classic story was titled “A Christmas Carol” was because it was originally intended to be sung. Unfortunately, for the first performance, Dickens hired an unknown performer named Ezekiel Federline and the performance was a disaster.
I know I am going to Hell for this, but at least I will be in pleasant company.

I was going to wait until I had more, but these are starting to grow old…

Is that “White Collar Crime” or “White Castle Crime”?

My Spittle Pony

Luann‘s Ass:

Because it is “the comic strip with 3 punchlines, Triple Take earns THREE demerits for breaking the “it’s too late for Snakes on a Plane jokes” rule: