Panda "Attack"

Alright, so Cole just looks weird in that first panel. Maybe it's just because we don't see the legs very often, much less in motion. But his shirt looks like a thick sweater or something at the bottom. That's my only art nitpick.

So yeah, it's a panda strip. I sort of thought we were done with these since the "panda-chun" storyline but I guess not. And this is a clever twist on the usual gag, I admit. 

I didn't find it especially funny, but your milage may vary.

This is. my post.

It's sad that my first post back has to be about misplaced punctuation. It's barely worth mentioning.

So I won't. (It'll probably get fixed anyway.)

The Day After

Hi, it's me, your long-missing founder and crank-in-chief.

We haven't really talked about politics here, and for good reason. This is a trite diversion devoted to meta-commentary about a single web comic. But I've been living and dying with the American election for the past few months, and now that it's over, I realize I simply haven't had any room in my brain for anything but hope. Hope that intelligence would overcome pandering, hope that broad ideas would overcome single issues, hope even that hope itself would defeat fear. And it has.

---

If you're not an American, you probably can't understand what last night meant to many of us.

At first glance it seems like we have overcome the last eight years of inept governance, an impressive feat in and of itself. But in truth it's bigger than that. For almost a generation, American politics have been run by ideologues -- decisions on who to vote for and what issues to talk about have been made based on personality and narrow interests, meaning more and more that the whole point of being in office was to maintain the power, rather than actually use that power.

The Republican party, long the home of social and fiscal conservatives, finally painted itself into a corner. Through extreme incompetence, and (ironically) by both adhering to and straying from their fiscal ideals, they finally managed to thoroughly trash the economy so badly that they've alienated even the conservatives in America. And that is no small feat.

---

I laughed at today's strip. Being a Bloom County fan from way back (wayyy back) I immediately recognized it, and I appreciated the effort.

Being an American for the past 10 years has felt a little like being in the Meadow Party -- not that I'd compare Al Gore or John Kerry to Bill the Cat, but we have struggled for so long, not understanding why our message didn't get out, playing against opponents who far out-weighed us and were willing to use any trick in the book to defeat us.

---

I have no illusions that our next president is not a politician, with many of the things that that implies, but the nature of his campaign, the nature of his supporters, his own unflappable temperament and nature tells me that we have turned a big corner.

I have heard it said that wealth is still a divisive issue in European politics. For whatever reason, Americans have overcome that for the most part -- we fancy ourselves a classless society. What we have instead is a less-logical fear of intelligence and a fear of "elite" which is not the same as "elitist."

Our new President-Elect is intelligent, hard-working, intellectually curious, charismatic, and seems to truly care about us and the job that has just landed on his shoulders.

He has a big job ahead of him, an amazingly big job, but he is exactly the kind of person we need working for us.

Thus endeth the election.

The Day After

I don't really get this one.

I guess it's a reference to some political comics...but this doesn't even feel like a PvP strip. This feels like a random drawing that Kurtz stuck Skull into so he could call it a PvP strip.

Also, could someone tell me what Skull's dialogue means?

Edit: For the record, when I was a wee lad, my paper didn't carry Bloom County.

Smith/Jones '08

Once again, I feel like Kurtz is using his cast as finger puppets for a personal joke.

Brent has never shown himself to be a fan of Doctor Who. In fact, the series has never been mentioned in the comic before. So why reference it now? Oh, right...because Kurtz has suddenly become a fan and thus one or more of his characters are now fans by proxy. /sigh.

Now, if the strip were Kurtz himself voting for the Doctor, that'd be a horse of a different color.

The old woman's dialogue feels pretty forced in the second panel as well. Is there really a reason for her to tack on "...for president of the United States?" to that sentence?

The punchline fell pretty flat for me as well. I mean, there could have been some witty comment but instead we get a very tired (if you're a who fan) "just The Doctor" joke.

Election Carol '08

This a cute little strip.

The art looks...well, fantastic really. Maybe it's all the costumes? Brent has a case of mitten-hands in the first panel, though that's hardly a new thing.

Not a nitpick, but an observation: Skull looks smaller than usual in panel two. It's either a trick of the perspective, or black is much more slimming than I've realized.

Monster Hunters, Finale

Sorry about the delay in getting this up folks. I got eaten by a grue last night and there's no wifi in those things stomachs.

Thus it ends.

I thought this was a clever way to wrap up the story arc.

I'm a bit torn now that the arc is over though. I feel like there was a lot of missed potential here. Now granted, there's only so much ground you can cover in eight strips.

On the other hand, it was enjoyable as a lighthearted halloween story. Which is all Kurtz intended, I think.