PvP Online presents: The Ombudsmen

[_deft_o_k.insanejournal.com]

All this week PvPOnline has been running a series of strips called The Ombudsmen, a parody to The Watchmen but with Syndicated Comic strip characters.

The strips actually follow the Watchmen story kinda close but gives it that comic strip character twist, so it appears to be very serious but it actually has some very subtle jokes.







OH SNAP DILBERT!



I still don't recognize what comic strip is the one at the end though...

If you don't want to click the cut, you can start reading from here:
http://www.pvponline.com/2009/03/02/ombudsmen/

Comments

[kamino_neko.insanejournal.com]

Love is...kind of fucked up, really... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Is...)

[_deft_o_k.insanejournal.com]

Thanks. (to all you)
And yeah it's really fucked up indeed.

[icon_uk.insanejournal.com]

I recognise "Love is....", it's a series of one panel, sickeningly twee observations about love and relationships with a frighteningly ever-smiling pair of naked people.

It really is the sort of comicstrip that encourages you to buy a flamethrower and start torching newspapers.

Jon's Garfield costume is worrying on any number of levels, but I have no idea who the Silk Spectre parody is.

[kamino_neko.insanejournal.com]

Ack! It's Cathy! Ack! Ack! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy_(comic_strip))


(I suspect Cathy is a Martian.)

[icon_uk.insanejournal.com]

Somehow that one has managed to completely pass me by all these years.

[gargoylekitty.insanejournal.com]

It's for the best. How that strip managed to last as long as it has is beyond me.

Worse

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

Pardon me: naked CHILDREN.

Family entertainment freaks me out.

[ebailey140.insanejournal.com]

OK... Didn't laugh until the very end, which made it all work. :)

My favorite description of Love Is... was from The Simpsons, when Homer describes it as "about two naked eight year olds who are married."

[thexenomorph.insanejournal.com]

Now that I've finished laughing, I'll go show this to my father and watch him go red in the face from laughing so hard...

[hikkichan.insanejournal.com]

oh god
this is win

[ar_feiniel_.insanejournal.com]

Haha, awesome.

[sherkahn.insanejournal.com]

Holy cripes, I know all these characters!

This was so funny and so well cast!

[cmdr_zoom.insanejournal.com]

Every now and then, Scott'll do something that reminds me why I used to read his strip every day.

(And then he usually follows up by reminding me why I stopped.)

[besamim.insanejournal.com]

I've never followed PvP to speak of, but this is brilliant.

Love Is may be better known in the UK where, for example, it's licensed for use in London Underground public service ads. ("Love Is...Picking up after yourself" and such.)

[filbypott.insanejournal.com]

I've never cared for Scott Kurtz, but this is classic.

[mysteryfan.insanejournal.com]

That's pretty awesome.

Also, Homer Simpson on Love is...: " it's about two naked eight-year-olds who are married."

[mullon.insanejournal.com]

I'm just surprised that Scott actually made jokes about comics.

[foxhack.insanejournal.com]

Somehow I think Kurtz is about to get in a lot of trouble over that last panel.

A lot of trouble.

[kijikun.insanejournal.com]

Why?

[foxhack.insanejournal.com]

Because, obscured or not, it depicts the Love Is... kids engaging in sex.

Key word being kids.

[kijikun.insanejournal.com]

The Love Is 'kids' aren't kids so unless the writer/artist decides to say something. I doubt it. Scott has done racer shit and probably want's a reaction.

[kamino_neko.insanejournal.com]

The Love Is... characters are married and have kids, so they're clearly not kids.

[foxhack.insanejournal.com]

They still look like kids, so I'm still expecting a lot of overreaction. :p

I don't care either way, I sure as hell did NOT expect that last panel. *shrugs*

[halloweenjack.insanejournal.com]

At first, I thought that Popeye was Henry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_(comic)), but then the can of spinach gag wouldn't have worked.

[drsevarius.insanejournal.com]

How does that "we're protecting them from letters" joke work?

[galateus.insanejournal.com]

The 'letters' are apparently the Righteous Angry Letters from the concerned parents / moral guardians / culture warriors of society, who would decry the decadent newspapers if they strayed from the safe bland humor of the Syndicated.

Yeah, that part's not really that funny without the context Dilbert gives in the *next* day's strip. So it works... very poorly.

(Great username there.)

[(Anonymous)]

And thanks to the avatars, I heard Severius asking that and Xanatos answering.

[(Anonymous)]

Nah, I think he meant the comics these days are just filler, meaning it's one extra page or half page they don't have to fill in with other content (and I think both are pretty highly read sections).

The Blondie gag is so sad and true. He will never, ever die.

[zegim.insanejournal.com]

Awesome. Charlie Brown as The Comedian made my day.

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

These are funny, but I actually found that second strip to be... oddly profound. What WOULD it be like for a character who has been in syndication for seventy-odd years to look back on his life? His endless, almost unchanging life, filled with the same basic situations, the same basic jokes. What would it be like to look back on all that? I found the concept strangely moving.
(This is helped, of course, by the fact that I actually LIKE Dagwood. 'Blondie' is one of the few 'been around forever' strips that I actually enjoy - sure, it's old and creaky by now, but I can still see what made it popular in the first place.)
Oh, and that first strip would make a lot more sense if Popeye and Garfield had actually had some traditional association with one another.