Deflocked (10/27/09)

I’ve always struggled to come up with clever Halloween costumes. As a child, I dressed up as Homey the Clown from the TV show, In Living Color, but was unable to adopt a gruff, cynical demeanor to go along with my multicolored wig. As an adult, I fashioned myself after a Red Eye newspaper box but nobody except me found the commuter rag’s soundbite-driven style of journalism to be particularly scary. Needless to say, I’ve never come up with anything as cool as Captain Bubblewrap. I suppose I could steal the costume from the dog in this strip, but I’m sure my only reward would be an evening of pinching and giggling at the hands of friends and acquaintances.

Deflocked (8/8/09)

When I was a teenager, I helped my grandfather renovate several rooms in his house, including the upstairs bathroom, the downstairs bathroom and two bedrooms. We also worked on a lot of smaller projects around the house. Whenever my grandfather needed a hammer, however, he would as me to hand him the hammerfore. “What’s a hammerfore?” I would ask. “For hammering nails,” he would say with a smirk. You might think the joke would have gotten old after a while, but to this day I refer to my hammer as a hammerfore without the slightest hint of sarcasm.

Deflocked (8/2/09)

At the risk of sounding cynical, there are more damning lessons that this strip could have imparted about how our economy really works; more damning than “negative advertising is an effective way to drive your competitors out of business,” that is. For example, Mamet the Dog could have been forced to borrow $20 to buy lemons for his lemonade stand, only to realize that it was not enough to buy quality produce from a grocery store. The end result? Probably a $3 glass of lemonade made from shriveled lemons bought out of the back of a truck and sweetened with ungodly amounts of sugar in an effort to attract customers. And even that probably wouldn’t have brought in enough money to pay back the initial investor.

Deflocked (6/21/09)

I’ve become accustomed to a certain amount of bitter irony on the comics page (and in culture in general) but today’s Deflocked still made me wince. I understand that a lot of fathers haven’t lived up to their responsibilities, but I also think it’s cruel to point that out on father’s day. My dad did pretty well by me as I was growing up, and there are a lot of other fathers who do right by their children today. Seeing a strip that casts a father’s role as worthless would undoubtedly take the wind out of their sails. So here’s hoping that the dads who take time to parent their children can take this strip with a grain of salt and that all the new and prospective dads out there can take it as a challenge, lest they end up like the estranged papa sheep.

Deflocked (6/10/09)

I’m confused. Why would the government pay a pretty penny for footage of decapitated crop zombies jumping through a turbine? Is the sheep in this strip betting on his young friend becoming a criminal and that hoping that the footage he shoots will catch a handsome reward as damning evidence of the boy’s psychotic personality? Couldn’t the government simply demand that footage as part of a criminal investigation? Let me step back for a moment. What are decapitated crop zombies, exactly? Are they scarecrows without heads? The whole setup seems too reminiscent of the tortured snowmen in Calvin and Hobbes to pass the originality smell test.

Deflocked (12/8/08)

I’m a big fan of strips that fully define their characters within three or four panels. Thanks to some sharp characterization and compelling comflict, this installment of Deflocked tells us everything we need to know about both the dog and the sheep. And while their relationship seems to be a carbon copy of the one that Pig and Rat enjoy in Pearls Before Swine, this strip does benefit from some nice writing. I’m particularly fond of the “big sunny blooms of joy and prosperity” that the dog hopes to spread across the land.