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Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Those damned Calls

What's Mallard raving about today?

Butt Calls.

That's because when anyone calls you, they quickly remember what an insufferable jerk you are and hang up.

By the way, approximately two weeks ago, Mallard first heard the phrase "Butt Call." He's probably still giggling about it. For the rest of humanity, it lost it's power to charm us 5-6 years ago.

12 comments:

Kip W said...

I can see how Mallard would be able to appreciate someone who makes calls with the same place Mallard gets his footnotes.

Steve-O said...

Because Chet's a filthy hippie therefore uninteresting, amirite?
Apparantly not nearly as interesting as seven hours of daytime television a day anyway.

dlauthor said...

Fun fact: that rustling sound of a phone in someone's pocket, combined with distant, indistinct mumbling voices and occasional inexplicable bursts of loudness, is actually an accurate depiction of what it sounds like inside Bruce Tinshley's brain.

At least until the sweet, sweet grain alcohol makes the voices go away.

Rootbeer said...

Why would Chet, the penis-chinned WFDR news anchor, still have Mallard in his phone this many months after he was made redundant...?

Unless maybe the two of them were making "sweet chin music" on the down-low, and "butt call" is an attempt to get a reference to "booty call" past the syndicate editors...

rewinn said...

How many ways does the "writing" in today's "comic" fail?

1. Wordy. "Chet's one of those people whose" should be merely "Chet's".

2. Esoteric. The "humor" here is that "Chet" is supposed to be a dolt. But Chet appears maybe once a quarter for no other purpose than to be pointed at and accused of being a dolt. New readers are mystified and steady readers don't care.

3. Depressed. I was going to say "mean" but actually the tone is more clinically depressed; Mallard is not capable of any joy in life, even the joy of a "butt-call" that is "more interesting" than talking to an actual human being.

A competent cartoon writer (...or one with a caring editor...) could do a lot with this premise, but a hack can't.

Frank Stone said...

I'm going to give Bruce the benefit of the doubt and assume he was attempting to draw Mallard with different facial expressions. Unfortunately, he still gets a D for effort and an F for execution.

Michael Foley said...

I'm reading a book of Little Lulu cartoons. Going from a cartoon so inspired to Mallard Fillmore almost makes me want to cry.

Kaitlyn said...

I could see this working if he said the butt call made more sense than the intentional ones.

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

Hey, a fellow Stanley fan! Sweet! If you haven't yet, check out the omnibuses of the earlier material Dark Horse is releasing--it's all good, but at the beginning it was truly the ne plus ultra. The Tubby spin-off (also getting the Dark Horse treatment) is also awesome.

Michael Foley said...

Thanks! This is the first time I've heard of Stanley, via the twitter recommendation of Tom the Dancing Bug creator Ruben Bolling. I'll definitely be buying more of Stanley's stuff. Bolling says he prefers the Tubby series.

Tog said...

I'm more of a Harvey junkie myself; in fact, I'm reading The Harvey Classics Vol 5: The Harvey Girls (Little Dot, Audrey, & Lotta) right now.

Want a yuck, Lulu fans? Google Image 'lulu brazil.' (Notice I didn't say what KIND of yuck.)

Kip W said...

Big Stanley fan here! My personal favorite is "Thirteen Going On Eighteen." There are a couple of collected volumes of that. Must have. Must have. He wrote and drew the series (except, I think, very early on), and it's pure genius.

Not that Lulu wasn't genius. One of the stories in the Smithsonian collection is worthy of Poe, even if they did print two of the pages out of order.