Slices of Life and Other Issues o' the Week

This week in Questionable Content: Marten realizes he must be... a townie. I'm not sure why that matters, and I came to ponder on how often QC actually does strips where Marten says he's not something and the others say he sure is.

If Jacques wanted to do something fun and new, why not go meta? The kids love meta these days. Watch an episode of Community and learn! Make fun of why Marten goes out for coffee every day. Make him question the need for such a routine. Have him pick up some new hangout and be all "Hmm, this doesn't really fit this strip". It's the lack of taking this sort of risk that makes the strip boring to me.

Edit: revising this post, I realized the strip kind of went meta with introducing the "bizarro coffee shop". Not only do the employees look like the regular cast, they also act the same. So Jacques kind of is making fun of his own concept. It was fun - for one strip. But making them regulars, which seems to be happening, kind of kills the joke.

Edit 2: flipping back through the strips to find the first bizarro coffee shop one - I realize many, many strips start with the word "so". As in, "so you really lived on a space station", "so I think Cosette will move in with me". It kind of suggests this constant stream of dialogue and events, but I suspect Jacques uses it to remind his readers of story strings he hasn't addressed in the last few months.

Slice of life must be hard, because picking the slices to present is the biggest problem. Which brings us to  American Elf: Uh, yeah, people have dreams about other people's genitals. It's just a little creepy if you dream of your kid's penis and then tell the whole world. Or is it? Kochalka seems to have this childlike innocence about genitalia, poop, and various other things that grown ups generally don't talk about. I love his childlikeness, but I guess I draw the line at these taboo topics. Should I? Am I being a prude? Why do I always question myself when I criticize Kochalka? He's not a god. Please don't show your kids' genitals in your strip, people. I know it's not meant sexually, but eww, and what if some kids from his school read it? Moving on.

After such deep and disturbing pondering, Buttersafe gives us more Robot Cat, and I really don't have more to say than - hee, so cute! He looks just like my kittywitty! *coos* (Is being a pet owner mushing up my critiquing skills?)

Marc Johns gives us 100 % natural arm hair. I... :D Johns' talent is, above all, relating random things to each other in a funny way. Not a lot of comic artists know how to do this. It must mean his brain is a little weird and jumps into weird places all of a sudden. I love that.

..while Sinfest's strength is making fun of cultural phenomena and people's silly beliefs. "I'm back. And I'm buff." is so perfect.

At Abstruse Goose, we have a very sad bee story. I love the level of detail their language has.

Question Duck finds his match: Answer Chick! Awesome. Ah, I see this is in fact a guest strip by the author of Roby's Sprites! I realize I don't know what sprites are. I'm such a comics noob. I should look into this and make a separate post. Maybe the sprite-related Question Duck gives some clue.

This Week in My Favorites

Marc Johns waxes deep and somewhat political: we are all holding the spear. So true. I think he should do more texts in the illustrations.

Sinfest warns us against letting the cat sleep on the laptop! I especially liked "aaaaasssss". Unfortunate keys to step on, indeed!

Continuing with the cat team: the legend of the turbo cat! Bravo, Buttersafe, you've done it again. Utterly surreal yet so good. Surreal stuff+serious/dramatic tone = WIN.

And still more cats! American Elf can hear Spandy's angry motor. I heard my cat's angry motor this week at the vet's, when a dog tried to say hello to him. I also loved this strip, where the boys imagine they're ghosts. A big snowfall can make you feel pretty invisible. And while I'm at American Elf, I must comment on this strip. It's beautiful - the idea that you shouldn't delete your least favorite artworks, because they may be someone else's favorites. What's more important - the artist's own opinion or the audience's right to have the art? It's actually a very deep discussion to be having with a seven-year-old. I love that Kochalka doesn't talk down to his children.

T-Rex is excited about the snowmageddon - time to reinvent society in our own living rooms! This is actually amusing from a Finnish point of view. Granted, we've also gotten more than our fair share of snow, but the plow trucks are going early every morning and the roads are always clear. No cancelled school or work here. It's just par for the course. (The trains can't handle it, though.)

Isaac Newton sits under the tree - and down falls a squirrel! What would have happened? Abstruse Goose gives us the answer.

Here's a Finnish comic in English! Rather chaotic and very true to her style, a travel diary entry from Norpatti at En Vaan Osaa!

Tuesday Notes: My Favorites

Lovelace and Babbage Against the Organist - the Finale!!! Very exciting. (I love how Babbage doesn't mind notes, as long as they're not expressed in noise form.)

Guy friendship can be odd and painful, at Sinfest.

This Abstruse Goose took me a while to get. It might be because I'm drunk. But then my boyfriend isn't, and he didn't get it either. I think I get it now - he wants to see the stars better, so he leaves the party. Which is kind of awesome.

At En Vaan Osaa!: I loved this little thing, it's like old-timey photos turned into a manic comic. Norpatti, the author, is a vegetarian; I'm not, but I still think people who call vegetarians childish are LAME.

American Elf is back to really cute childlike strips. I really liked today's strip where Oliver, quite nonsensically, decides to trample over his daddy's drawing in the snow. Awww. I also love his doggy hat.

The farmer's pride doesn't depend on the farm size, at Buttersafe.

And Ursula V has some flower seed ideas:
Berserker Bluebelles
Delerium Daisies

What can I add? Awesome, awesome, awesome.

Purely Visual Notes.

Sinfest: I love the thought (speech?) bubble with the shocked pig.

QC: Child-Marten doesn't really look like a child. I like his crazed look in the dinosaur costume though. It's interesting how masculine his father looks, but then even his mother looks more masculine than him.

Hanna V gets ready for a dangerous climb - to the bus stop. I can tell you it's only a slight exaggeration. Lots and lots of snow this winter.

Marc Johns has a very sad Christmas tree.

Abstruse Goose is so nerdy, even a Christmas tree is a mathematical concept.

Quality beats quantity, at Stuff No One Told Me. Just because it's so cute. I must say, those clouds or puffs of smoke always remind me of farting. I'm sure they're not meant to represent farting, but if you live in the same house with my father for a while, you will see this sort of thing everywhere.

Friday Nerd Special.

2-D Goggles discusses measurements. If Ada Lovelace is 5 heads tall, then so is Tintin! Tiny Asterix is only 1,5 heads. Awww. :D Also: chibi versions of Lovelace and Babbage! If you haven't read the comic yet, READ IT NOW. Especially for nerds.

In the vein of nerdiness: the definition of a mathematician at Abstruse Goose.

Calamities of Nature warns against being a thermodynamist. Or a logician. Dangerous fields, those.

Xkcd shows us how nerd love dies: with a graph. An overly simplified one. Have I ever discussed xkcd here? It's the ultimate simply drawn strip: stick figures, graphs and pie charts, computers and wires. I frequently find it funny, and I equally frequently have to ask my nerd boyfriend about the references. It's interesting that I'd much rather look at this than a poorly drawn but colored Paint comic. Stick figures can be pretty OK, but when almost-cartoonish-looking humans have outlines of squiggly Paint lines, and everything is neon green and pink, it's just visually ugly. I think more online comic artists should go for black-on-white and stick figures.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has employed a xkcd-style graph, but also drawn characters. In this case, a winning combination. I also love all of the little details about how the human eye works. A pretty original look on the old "why?" conversations with children. (I'm linking to the gif image because the latest comic doesnt' seem to have an individual link that will work later. Just enlarge it. The main page is here.)

Then, to digress slightly, a nod to the Christian comics I posted about yesterday. Rock music: of the devil, see previous post. Here evidenced by Buttersafe.

A Completely Regular Post.

(No, this is not a Thanksgiving special. Finland doesn't celebrate thanksgiving, so I refuse to give thanks for anything and will just resume as usual.)

For some reason, I can't see the last few days' American Elf. Maybe it's taking a hiatus or just acting up for me. But I keep seeing this strip and I love it so much. Oliver is now three. He thinks - or jokes - that this will make him a Daddy. As if all "big boys" are Daddies. So cute! Also, I've been reading the strip about since Oliver's birth or a bit before. I think the pregnancy and birth were a part of what sucked me in, actually. It's strange to see him grow, because it marks how time passes. Yet it's such a short time and that's his whole life. I have these same feelings about relatives' kids, but it's strange I feel the same about a child I've seen in pictures maybe twice. Yet I've watched him grow. I feel like I know James and Amy, Eli and Oliver, but I may not recognize them if I saw them somewhere in person. What an odd feeling.

Dora and Marten broke up. It might or might not be permanent. To be honest, I don't feel much. Marten and Dora - meh. Marten and Faye - meh. Marten and Hannelore? Now that would be something! I just think the girls on the strip are habitually mean, dominating, and hard on him. Hannelore may be the only one who's truly kind. Marten deserves better than Dora. OMG, I'm talking like I actually care about these people. Maybe my cold, hard QC hater's heart is actually red hot lava from the inside?
..Nah. Moving on.

I loved this Abstruse Goose, but it bugs me that the dogs look so much like Dogbert. Is that intentional?

Ascension 3000 Cross Jetpack. Sinfest is usually fun, but when it gets truly blasphemous, it's amazing.

Question Duck reminds us that even while doing charitable work, there's room for questions. (Also, I like that one of the charity people is black. It's not like "white man helps poor black people.)

I'm confused by Selkie. Apparently it's a girl who's alos some kind of animal who was adopted by a human vegetarian. But she doesn't eat any plants and only eats meat. Hmmm. I flicked back quite a few strips and still not sure what I think. I'ts a very intriguing idea. I find Selkie's way of talking a bits annoyings, because ofs everys words endings withs s. It stops being cute after one strip. But I'm not sure if it's meant to be cute. An interesting strip.

Wombania: like the art, very cute. Besides that - jokes that fall flat, fat jokes... Sigh. What's the point of cool art if you're just going to do general three-panel pun stuff?

What You Don't See: another mixed review. Beautiful. Sooo cute. Huh? And the latest one - kinda forced dialogue. I tend to prefer dialogue where there are silences and things you don't say. I didn't get a very good feel of the characters on a quick flick, but this might be a good thing. Will check it again.

Tweep. Looked at several strips, didn't get it. It seems like it might be a cool, creative strip. But I'm not SURE. It seems to deal exclusively in snapshots, with no text at all. Intriguing.

Doing It Wrong vs Doing It Right

DOING IT WRONG 

(x, why?) has a strip on the miners who were underground for two months. "It was just a miner incident." Eh. No. That's not funny. It's not an amusing pun or an amusing situation, and this comic just rubs me the wrong way. Puns don't really work in comics anyway. A pun is essentially a textual joke (usually an unfunny one), and if you might as well write it in text, why have any drawings at all?

I Fell Down the Stairs demonstrates making a visual joke instead. So here the drawings are essential. However, the joke doesn't really work. It's a nice idea, but it's just not funny enough. It might be in the delivery - I just don't buy a teacher saying "here concludes our lesson at [lesson topic]". Feel free to spam me with angry comments if American teachers actually say this. It just sounds like a clumsy way of saying "This is the joke. Now laugh."

The good side of a randomly hilarious comic is that it doesn't need a conclusion for every story. Sadly, today's Sinfest tries to conclude a story that has already run its course. It's beginning to seem like the evil fork will chase them forever and they will patch the hell roof forever. I love the strip in general, but sometimes it seems out of ideas. Like all strips that run daily.

I love the title of Gentlemen's Beards Monthly, and I love the intentionally simplistic art. And it's funny. But DON'T KILL THE SNAIL! Snails are your friends! *sniff*

DOING IT RIGHT 

I didn't get today's Abstruse Goose, but I still loved it. It's an unusual angle and a funny joke, even to non-nerds. It's probably funnier to a nerd.

Buttersafe urges us to get over it!

Crowbar Benson instructs us at how to stay regular.

IDGet  seems like a fun strip in general. But I especially like the text bubbles - it seems like the author actually took the time to make the text tidy and readable while it still looks original. Um, and I really love the content and drawings too, but that just stuck out. (Is that as bad as saying a movie has "local color"? I do think it's a good comic. Really.)

Nerd Recommendations

This post is mostly brought to you by my very nerdy girlfriend. She loves Brown Sharpie and I do urge you to check it out, at least if you know something about math. I found these a lot of fun, even if I didn't get all the mathematical implications:

Sigma Freud: functional analysis
Sigma Freud: motivational speaking 
Sigma Freud: couples therapy

One of my new favorites, Abstruse Goose, shows us what exactly happens in our brains during the average phone conversation. Awe-inspiring or kind of disturbing? I'm not sure. Probably both.

Meanwhile, xkcd continues to make graphs about topics that are too often ignored by science.
Frequency with which various adjectives are intensified with obscenities. It's also good to include some unusual words, like peristeronic. On the other hand, if you have to define them, maybe the answer is obvious. At least I learned another new word through xkcd.

Last but definitely not least, if you're a fan of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace's work, do check out 2-D Goggles. The ongoing saga of Lovelace and Babbage vs. the Organist has reached episode 7. In reality, Babbage was an avid hater of street musicians. He even had a chapter in his autobiography called "Street Nuisances". You can read more on that here. The comic's depiction of him as a crazy-eyed organist hater who's trying to end all music as if it's a battle of good and evil - is really pretty close to the truth, if you read his book. What I love about this comic is that it makes superheroes out of math geniuses. It's also damn funny.