Bonus

I liked today's Dilbert. It reminded me of this story NPR did a few months ago.

The story looked into how people in various occupations are compensated and contrasted it with the huge bonus culture on Wall St. that has been all over the news for the past year. Most jobs don't pay out large performance-based bonuses because it would be counter-productive. I'd argue that it's also been quite counter-productive on Wall St., but that's another story. Since most people think that they are above average (I know I am), close to half the of the office would be pretty disappointed if a large percentage of their compensation was tied to individual performance. The other big problem, which this cartoon illustrates perfectly, is that if individual performance is the only thing that is considered when paying bonuses, interoffice cooperation is seriously devalued and employees start behaving like freelancers at best and competitors at worst.

Beethoven's Last Symphony

Taken out of context, this panel from today's Hi and Lois is probably the funniest thing that has come out of that comics page institution in decades.

h/t: The Comics Curmudgeon

America's Finest Editorial Cartoons

How is it possible that I just found out about The Onion's weekly editorial cartoon today? Here are some of my favorites.

Men of Tomorrow

I just finished reading Men of Tomorrow, a book about the birth of the comic book industry. As usual, I stumbled upon it while wandering aimlessly though the library, though I do remember hearing good things about the book when it came out and may have even given it to a friend as a Christmas gift a few years back. While I found some of the writing a bit labored, the book presents a ton of information in a well-organized and coherent way. You don't need to be a comic book enthusiast (or former enthusiast) to enjoy the book, but it certainly would help. Still, there's enough really interesting stuff about the socioeconomic history of comics, especially in the first half of the book, to appeal to anyone who is interested in the history of mass media, business, entertainment, labor, or politics.

Peeping Hi

Poor Hi - it looks like Lois has thwarted his favorite Saturday afternoon activity - sitting around the house "reading" his porno mags. I guess "Peeps" could be interpreted as a play on People Magazine instead of a stag rag, but sitting around the house reading People is arguably an even more depraved activity for a wholesome family man like Hi. A final possibility is that he subscribes to some sort of weird underground Mashmallow Peeps fetishist magazine, which is certainly the most depraved interpretation of them all.

The Milford Academy

Gil Thorp is one of most delightfully absurd comic strips out there. I've been reading it off and on for as long as I've been reading the comics and I've never noticed anything that tied the fictional town of Milford to any particular location. Out of the blue, the past two installments of the Gil Thorp have featured the Mudlarks playing softball and baseball games against two fairly recognizable New York towns, Binghamton and Chenango. Out of curiosity, I checked to see if there is a town named Milford nearby and sure enough, there is. The creator of Gil Thorp hailed from New Milford, CT but never referred to any particular state in the strip. Perhaps his successor is trying not-so-subtly to position Milford somewhere in New York State's Souther Tier.

The Queen of Mean

Today's installment of Mother Goose & Grimm is too strange not to comment on. After reading today's cartoon, I went back and read all of this week's strips to see if this was a one-off gag or the culmination of a plot that had been building all week. As I had suspected, it was a one-off, and my failure to find it funny had nothing to do with a lack of context. The strangeness of this strip begins by building a joke around Leona Helmsley. This might be the least timely comic strip ever penned. Helmsley was convicted of tax evasion back in 1992 and she died last year. Why did Mike Peters wait until now to joke about it?

As I've mentioned before, comic strip writers often times resort to tortured setups in order to cram a desired punchline into the final panel. Peters is going for an Exorcist/repossessed-possessed play on words joke, which is bad enough in and of itself, but using a reference to Leona Helmsley's putative dog to make that joke is stretching artistic license well beyond the breaking point. As if all that wasn't bad enough, the sloppy grammar in the first panel introduces an ambiguity regarding whose car was repossessed by the IRS. I realize that dogs can't own cars, but neither can the deceased. It's not like this joke would make any more sense if it was clear who the car belonged to. It's just another piece of evidence to suggest that Peters really mailed it in on this strip.

Garfield Gets Meta

As both I and other more astute readers of the funnies have noted, comic strips often go through impossibly strange and/or implausible set-ups in order to include aG punch line that the artist was unable to shoehorn into his strip through conventional means. This generally doesn't work very well because the punch line usually isn't even all that funny to begin with.



Today's installment of Get Fuzzy is essentially a joke about this shtick. It mixes a contrived set-up (Bucky's sudden interest in religion, or at least, religious hucksters) with a lame punch line (Garfield is a sell-out) and yet it's still funny. I'm not as big a fan of Get Fuzzy as some, but it's certainly one of the better comic strips out there.



In other comics-related news, thanks to the gross negligence of his "friend" Herb, Dagwood is now a quadriplegic.

Sikh and You Shall Find

Due to the limitations of the form and the drudgery of churning out one strip after another each day in perpetuity, comic strip artists will occasionally (some more occasionally than other) craft a comic strip whose joke requires such an obvious set-up that any humor that may have been there is sucked completely out of the page. Today's installment of Curtis, a comic that is rarely funny even when such shenanigans are not being used, demonstrates a textbook application of this technique.



Ray Billingsley achieves a rare two-fer in this strip, he constructs a joke that requires knowledge of eastern religions and underground artists (knowledge that as far as I know has never been required to understand Curtis) and links it together in such a contrived fashion that it is painfully unfunny.