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Saturday, December 06, 2008

That damned Roger

What's Mallard raving about today?

Free-floating hatred or Roger Ailes.

I can offer only two possible, although flimsy explanations for this.

Possibly, when one is completely consumed with hatred towards everyone and everything, it actually does seem as if you are thinking how much you hate someone just before they call you.

Alternately, Mallard is really pissed at Roger Ailes.

13 comments:

GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

I laughed at this, but only because it's so surpassingly stupid and non-sequiter-y even by Mallard standards. I ask you: shouldn't conservatives be demanding more--or at least SOMETHING--in their political cartoons. Crikey

Word verification: "fungeds." Which sounds like it would be a funnier comic strip than this one.

Anonymous said...

What I'm getting from this is that Tinsley had a bad relationship in the past that stuck with him, and he's trying to vent about it in some incomprehensible way.

All in all, it's probably just another one of those "it made sense before I sobered up" comics.

Anonymous said...

[Again, just posting to have a chance to use the Word Verification: "tophousy"]

Anonymous said...

If that's Roger Ailes, worst caricature ever.

No, I think that Tinsley has just run out of post-election ideas. He has likely surveyed the political landscape, along with the number of newspapers who have dropped him in the last year, and decided that the market for crabby, incoherent wingnut comics is not large enough to keep him in Karkov through 2009, so he's transforming Mallard Fillmore into a strip about relationships, a kind of "Women are from Champagne, Men are from Jack Daniels" for the twenty-first century.

Anonymous said...

So, wait, the woman's mad at him, because... why? Who is she anyway? Why would she be getting a call from him? Why not have his duck doppelgänger shooting the darts?

I know we've established this before, but this dude has problems.

rewinn said...

"...Why not have his duck doppelgänger shooting the darts?..."


Perhaps today's strip illustrates another of Tinley's alter egos. Everyone wants to be a skinny blonde, and there's nothing WRONG with that.

Or maybe it's supposed to show Ann Coulter blaming Fox for the collapse of conservativism? Because, you know, if Fox hadn't been so blantantly pro-Obama, the Republicans would still control the Senate.

In a sane world, conservatives would be doing some serious soul-searching right now. I see Prickly City's making some gestures in that direction.

Anonymous said...

Several people have made suggestions as to who these might be caricatures of (Roger Ailes, Ann Coulter, etc). OTOH, as others have pointed out, they don't really look like any of the suggested people.

Ya' know, as sad as it sounds, the longer I look at this the more I'm convinced, that these are not supposed to caricatures.

That is, I think 12xuser is correct. I think it's more likely that this is just Tinsley's weird attempt at a straight, run-of-the-mill, apolitical "relationship gag". You can almost imagine "Cathy" or "Rhymes with Orange" making a joke (sort of) like this --although, it would no doubt be much better....

(I suppose there's one bit of solace here for the reader: If this is any indication, it's clear that it's not just the dreadful politics that drives Tinsley to be such a bad cartoonist.)

Kaitlyn said...

So it's not Roger Ailes?

Anyone want to send this into Comics I Don't Understand? I don't see any politics here, just gibberish.

She was thinking of him, see, because she was throwing darts at his picture.

Right.

Kaitlyn said...

Wait - who's Roger Ailes?

I got him mixed up with Bill A..yers?

Ailes works for Fox, right?

We'll never know, tomorrow's sunday.

Erich said...

I could see this working as a straight gag cartoon in a magazine, but Tinsley ruins it with his trademark verbosity. Keep the image of the woman answering the phone while throwing darts at the picture, but the only dialogue you need is "Oh, hi, Roger! I was just thinking about you!" Also, most cartoonists would trust their readers to figure out that the picture on the dartboard is the guy she's talking to (because SHE JUST SAID she's thinking of him!), so the "Roger" label on the picture is unnecessary.

Verification word: "press." I don't normally take note of the verification word, but this is one of the few times I've seen a genuine word appear.

GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

I'm surprised people are having this debate. From the moment I saw this strip, it was self-evident that these weren't meant to be actual people; that this belonged in the "stupid but anodyne" file of MF strips. Sure, it's not funny, but it's not-funny in a very Tinsley-esque, "oops I forgot to tell a joke" way.

Word verification: moblesse. What do you call it when the peasants with torches just raise the king's taxes instead of hanging him from a lampost? Moblesse oblige.

Toots McGee said...

12xuser: I had Tinsley figured for a Relska man, myself.

Michael Foley said...

Everyone else has pointed out how freaking dumb this cartoon is, so I'll just add this: the picture of Roger has a reflective glass surface on it, yet darts are piercing it without having shattered the glass.