Sorry I haven't posted in a few days. I've been home with the family celebrating this joyous holiday of cranberry sauce and Native American slaughter.
I'll pick back up this week. In the meantime, here's a video made in 2001 when I was just sixteen years old. My friends and I had our own TV show and we made hundreds of short videos. In this clip, "Ho Hunting," I went to the mall in search of a lady friend.
The Pentagon's closely guarded review of how to improve the situation in Iraq has outlined three basic options: Send in more troops, shrink the force but stay longer, or pull out, according to senior defense officials. Insiders have dubbed the options "Go Big," "Go Long" and "Go Home."
The "fresh eyes" replacing Rumsfeld came up with three terms so simple a dog can understand them. Democrats, your move.
This time, I changed the text which appears on the image and left the caption the same. So instead of a joke about salespeople, the strip turns into a commentary on Bush's apparent strides to reach across the aisle over the last few days. Or maybe it is questioning the intentions of the American Voter. Are they really interested in a new Democratic leadership or were they merely reacting to scandal and corruption?
You know, maybe we should all put aside our partisan differences after this election and join together to answer the real questions facing our nation. Like how does Marmaduke paint signs in English and then attach them to the front door? If we truly want to engage in a War on Terror, isn't it time the President brought the hammer down on Marmaduke's pranks which have wreaked havoc over the entire town of... wait, where does Marmaduke live? I guess we don't really know. Unknown whereabouts just like al-Qaeda... Oh, you're good, Maramduke. You're good.
My name is Jon Katz, formerly of Kick The Leftist. And for the last eight years, I have read nearly every Marmaduke comic strip that has been published. I have not done this because I think it is a funny strip. In fact, it is not. For further explanation of this, I suggest you read my close friend Bill Benz's article So Much To See In One Panel. In it, he describes in great detail the long-standing struggle we have had with Marmaduke and his creator, Brad Anderson.
At first, I was satisfied with Bill's dissertation of the beloved Great Dane which has frustrated us for all these years. Then I came across this website, which demonstrates that the popular yet terrible comic strip Garfield is actually funny when you remove Garfield's thought bubbles. Doing this shows what life would actually be like for his owner, Jon. He does not have a witty cat, he has a regular cat. Jon is just insane.
So I got to thinking... what could make Marmaduke funny? Unlike Garfield, Marmaduke does not talk to us (though he can apparently talk to taxi cab drivers enough to tell them where he lives). Then it hit me. What if instead of being written by Brad Anderson, whose only background in comedy lies in the fact that he, too, owns a Great Dane, it was written by Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who has incorporated politics into his comic strip since 1970. In other words... what if Marmaduke went political??
What follows, therefore, is my attempt to answer this question. I will continue to read Marmaduke every day and, when applicable, I will update this blog with a new strip re-interpreted with a new tagline. I will preface this blog by acknowledging that I am a liberal, but I promise to be fair and balanced in my dog-based politics. Just like Fox News.
"Marmaduke Can Vote" is an unauthorized parody of the works of Brad Anderson. It is in no way affiliated with Mr. Anderson, the Marmaduke comic strip, or United Features Syndicate. But anyway, hey Brad, now that I have your attention, it's a joke. C'mon dontcha get it?
Hey, feel free to email me and tell me what you think of the strip directly. T M B Jon at gmail dot com. ;P