RETOONING ROUND 4: THE 3RD REVENGE

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I was hoping to get at least 2 or 3 consecutive posts into my 14-or-so part epic before deviating to a side project, but I just got this absurdly fashionable new digital camera the other day and to be perfectly honest I'm terrified to take it out of the box until I get the whole thing covered in protective clear plastic sheets. Like any rational human being, the last thing I want to do here is destroy the device's intrinsic sexiness by slathering a greasy thumb print all over the viewing screen thingy, so I've really got no choice but to present a camera-free, scanner-intensive post this evening.

That can only mean one thing my friends - it's time for some retooning.

Oh, and just for the record, I realized the other day that the "14" estimate in my proposed "14-or-so part epic" on the subject of refurbishing my old speaker storage cabinet is nothing short of a gratuitous exaggeration of the truth. If that epic (and it WILL be epic, I can assure you of that) makes it past part 5 I'll see to it that a pig actually does fly AND I'll stop sending Phylicia Rashad naked pictures of myself on a bimonthly basis.

Keep those fingers crossed all you want Mrs. Cosby, it ain't gonna happen.

Back to the matter at hand... I sincerely doubt I'll ever top the retooning effort I put forth a few months ago (an entry that met with ravenous critical acclaim, as evidenced by the whopping zero comments left on that post by my loyal readers), but I think I've come up with a pretty decent batch here today, especially considering the fact that I only had 4 days worth of newspapers to work with (normally I pick and choose the best targets out of a couple weeks worth of casual comic browsing).

As always, the rules here are simple: Get your hands on a decidedly unfunny newspaper comic strips (this shouldn't be difficult, as these type of comics make up roughly 97.8% of the so-called "funny" pages), erase the captions with a normal pencil eraser, then fill in the caption spaces with something that might actually be considered somewhat humorous. The possibilities here are endless... well, at least until the whole of the newspaper industry collapses upon itself and takes the comic illustrators of the world down with it, at which point the possibilities will instantaneously become quite limited, so get in on this hot hot comic-modifying action while you still can.

We'll begin our retooning adventure today with that lovable little scamp Dennis the Menace - a young man whose un-funniness has sullied the reputations of literally millions of newspaper puzzle pages and Dairy Queen cups over the past half century.



An unfortunate twit of a human being once told me that Dennis the Menace brings out the kid in all of us. Well I don't know about that, but he certainly brought out the sex-joke-obsessed middle schooler in me. God bless you, Dennis!



For those of you wondering at home: No, the mental image that comic now provides could not be any funnier. Thanks for asking.

We'll now be moving along (with substantially less laugh-soliciting success, I assure you) to everyone's favorite four legged troublemaker, Marmaduke. Now, I'd always been under the impression that every Marmaduke comic followed the same formula: Marmaduke is knocking something over or has already knocked something over, mustachioed man or waifish woman screams "Marmaduke!", and... that's it. Repeat for 50 or so years, and/or until gratuitously wealthy.

I'm sure you can imagine my surprise upon learning that this isn't the case at all. As you'll clearly see below, sometimes instead of knocking objects over Marmaduke just oafishly rubs himself against people, and almost always the people involved say something other than simply "Marmaduke!" I know, I'm as shocked as you are.



While I normally revel in being proven entirely wrong, I think I'd honestly prefer the comic to be constructed in the manner that I always thought it assumed. Wouldn't it be a grand showing of creativity to always have the caption be the same word? I mean really, how long could a comic strip writer keep something like that fresh? A week, a month, perhaps even a decade? I'm not sure, but I know I'd read it every day to find out.

Witness this very old dog's new trick: Mind blowing trisyllabic versatility.



As you can clearly see, in panel 1 we have the murder mystery-esque "...Marmaduke?!?!", followed by the timeless classic "Marmaduke!" that we've all come to know and love, and then my personal favorite, the simple and understated yet confusing and excellent "Marmaduke." The last one's a curveball. You throw something like that in there once every 2 months or so just to make sure the readers are still paying attention. It's called good journalism, look into it.

In our final stop tonight, we'll be paying another visit to the Family Circus. They're our first repeat customer in the world of retooning, but what can I say? The fam makes an easy target.



This modification hit a little close to home for me, and I'm sure it would have hit close to home for Mother McHanslaw's army of cats as well were it not for the fact that they're incapable of reading and (on a somewhat unrelated note) unwilling to stop throwing up all over the goddamn house.



I couldn't agree more.