Saturday

Three silent penultimate panels to wrap up the week:

Dog Eat Doug by Brian Anderson
Garfield by Paws, Inc
Peanuts (1960 reprint) by Charles Schulz

And Dog Eat Doug will be the champion of the week.

Feature length update tomorrow.

How long?

Three for this Friday:

Cow and Boy by Mark Leiknes
Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau
Cow and Boy by Darby Conley

At one point, just the gutter between panels was enough to create a comic beat. Then came the silent penultimate panel, and now not even that is enough.


Beats just get longer and longer and weaker and weaker. And they'll just have to get longer to have any sort of impact. How long?


























































Very long.

The Duck

Only two silent penultimate panels for Thursday:

Humble Stumble by Roy Schneider
Piranha Club by Bud Grace

At some point last summer, this blog came dangerously close to being nothing but a daily complaint about Mallard Fillmore. I just couldn't help myself. Then DaveyK started Duck and Cover, and lifted my burden. I was able to return my focus back to pacing-device esoteria.

In recent weeks, however, Mallard Fillmore has fallen into such a deep chasm of nonsense and delirium, I just can't let the plunge go by without mentioning. After two months of complaints about cranberry sauce, Ted Kennedy and Bowl Games (all in rhyming iambic craptameter,) he has now spelunked to uncharted depths.

Yes, it is time again for a double edition of the Silent Mallard Fillmore Game. Where we take out all the words,


And try to guess what the hell the duck is complaining about now.

Genetic research? Liberal indoctrination? Don Ho?

All wrong. The answer appears below.

(For even more in-depth duck analysis, see What's Wrong With Mallard Fillmore.)

Artificial

Silent penultimate panels for Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Garfield by Paws, Inc.
Overboard by Chip Dunham
Sally Forth by Francesco Marciuliano and Craig Macintosh
Sherman's Lagoon by Jim Toomey

Overboard uses a SPP following two other silent panels. Almost clever.

But still unnecessary.

And for an entirely artificial pause:


*sigh*

A whole bunch.

Wow, what a a day.

The Other Coast by Adrian Raeside
For Better of For Worse by Lynn Johnston
Monty by Jim Medick
Mutts by Patrick McDonnell
Shoe by Chris Cassatt and Gary Brookins
Red and Rover by Brian Basset

And that's not even counting the controversial maybes:




These things just come in waves, and it's high tide.

Changes

Four for the watch this Monday:
Bo Nanans by John Kovaleski
The Buckets by Greg Kraven
Wizard of Id by Brant Parker and Johnny Hart
Heart of the City by Mark Tatulli

Wizard of Id may not count, but there is something interesting about self-righteous, born-again Johnny Hart making a "my wife has a fat ass" joke.


Today's Doonesbury may not have been the funniest ever, but it does demonstrate how far Garry Trudeau's draftmanship (or the quality of his assistants) has come.


He was once the Scott Adams of his day, derided for his lack of chops and accused of lowering the artistic standards of the daily comics page.

Times have changed.

Pink Panther

It looks like four silent penultimate panels for this championship Sunday:

Foxtrot by Bill Amend
Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis
Piranha Club by Bud Grace
Dog Eat Doug by Brian Anderson (four in a row!)

Darby Conley shows how to stretch a one panel gag across four:


For unknown reasons, the L.A. Times dropped the Sunday Heathcliff. No real loss there (one can only stand so many reader-submitted clever cat stories,) but the chosen replacement is very puzzling:


Pink Panther? A comic strip based on a forty-year old cartoon based on a movie's opening credits? Is there any one who would be interested in this? The reason's for this strip's existence can't be based in nostalgia. The only thing the Pink Panther reminds me of is insulation commercials. There is one possible explanation for its appearance in the L.A. Times--it is syndicated by Tribune Media, the mega-company that owns the Times. This is probably just another cost-cutting measure designed to homogenize together the worst aspects of the Times, Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun into one third-class budget newspaper. But, really, could the fees for Heathcliff really have been that high? Puzzling, very puzzling.