If you have not yet encountered the wonder that is Joe Mathlete Explains Today’s Marmaduke (in 500 words or less), you owe it to yourself to go there immediately. I discovered it a few weeks ago and immediately dropped everything I was doing to read every post back through last summer. It may be the best thing ever created.
Some of my favorite explanations are from March 19: “Marmaduke swallowed Sarah’s wristwatch and he’s sick to his stomach. Marmaduke’s owner-girl makes a watch-related pun so asinine it takes at least three months off of my life every time I read it,” from February 8: “Marmaduke prepares to devour a porcine houseguest’s piece of cake, then rape her in the missionary position. His owner-girl explains to the woman that this is all perfectly acceptable, because Marmaduke can have anything he wants, and right now Marmaduke wants cake and non-consensual sex with a pig-lady,” and from May 11: “Marmaduke is a terrible fucking comic strip.”
What? You say this is a music blog, so I should be talking about music? Well, fortunately, Joe Mathlete also happens to be The Mathletes, with some pretty awesome They Might Be Giants v. twee songs, with all the cleverness of the Marmaduke blog, and a bunch more. As someone who thinks far too much about whether humans really have a better claim to moral worth than robots, this song is right up my alley:
Pinnochiobot – The Mathletes
This talk of Marmaduke also reminds me of a great scene from Buffy, season 3, when the Mayor and Mister Trick are talking:
Mayor Wilkins: Do you like Family Circus?
Trick: I like Marmaduke.
Mayor Wilkins: Oh! Eww! He’s always on the furniture. Unsanitary.
Trick: Nobody can tell Marmaduke what to do. That’s my kinda dog.
Indeed. Also, while I was exploring internet comics, I also came across this thread at Truth and Beauty Bombs which reveals that Garfield is actually a brilliant comic strip if you simply remove all of Garfield’s thought bubbles. It transforms a silly comic about a vaguely witty cat into a dark comic about John slowly losing his mind and succumbing to his pathetic existence. As one poster says, “now its just a sad man talking to his fat cat.”
Great stuff. And as a number of people there point out, it’s almost impossible to imagine any of these strips with more comments, proving that less really is more, especially with comics. Check it out, and you’ll never look at Garfield the same way again.
And finally, what would a post about comics be without a link to my favorite recent xkcd, on hypotheticals:
