Double shut out

So I just might be shut-out for two days straight. This is unprecedented for the watch.

Today's Betty shows how to create awkward silence without using an SPP.

The blank spot over Betty's head in the second panel creates the comic beat.

Yes, and Mark Trail just gets awesomer.

Shut out

I think we have a shut-out today.

The closest I found was today's Monty with a silent third panel. And after that, there are still three more panels to go. If anything, Jim Meddick can draw more squares in a single daily strip than any other cartoonist.


Meanwhile, in Lost Forest, we have been stuck in one of the most interminably boring storylines ever. For about the past eighteen years now, there's been nothing in Mark Trail but people talking about birds and airports (all sentences exclamation-pointed, of course.) Today, after decades of inaction, something finally happens. And it's awesome:

I notice these things.

Two for this Wednesday:

Blondie by Dean Young, Inc.
Mutts by Patrick McDonnell

Blondie may not count:

It really isn't a silent panel. The punchline--Dagwood's hair going crazy--actually occurs in the second panel, it's just obscured from us and Blondie. The second panel delays the punchline. It's delayed not by awkward silence but in a slightly different way.

I don't know what it all means, or if it's clever or not. I just notice these things.

Cellphone talking

Only one today. Things have really slowed down since my break.

Overboard by Chip Dunham

Meanwhile, this week in Rex Morgan is non-stop cell-phone action.


Graham Nolan at least tries to make things a little exciting with extreme angles and close-ups. If this conversation continues any longer (and in standard serial comic strip time, this could go on for months,) it will be interesting to see what Nolan does next--maybe a panel from the point of view of an ear canal?

Very silent.

Two silent penultimate panels today:

Bo-Nanas by John Kovaleski
Frazz by Jef Mallett

For some reason, both of these panels seem more silent than normal. They might actually be well done depictions of awkward silence.

And again, I get a little silly with the photoshop (or GIMP, actually)