Lock(horn) Out

There is an old saying we have in the year long daily Lockhorn comic critical analysis project business: "better to end a year long daily Lockhorn comic critical analysis project a year early than a year late". Unfortunately I should have headed that old axiom after I somehow miraculously managed to complete the inaugural run of "Lockhorns vs. Lockhorns" in 2009. Perhaps drunk on champagne and hubris or perhaps hoping to see if Leroy could mount a comeback year, I decided to tempt fate again and go for another round.

Eleven months later, with the year rapidly coming to a close, and the blog hopelessly mired all the way back in the ides of May, I'm afraid I'll have to take the decisive move of putting the blog on hiatus for the remainder of the year. I know but a mere three months and five posts ago I promised I would endeavor to see my initial mission to catch up through, but it doesn't take any complicated number crunching to realize how overwhelming a task it would be to catch up on over 6 months of Lockhorn squabbling, spite, and scorn by the end of December.

So dear readers, it appears I have let you down and for this I apologize. However, while the Lockhorn project will be scrapped for the remainder of 2010, I am currently conceptualizing a new format for the blog that I will debut in the coming year (a sort of a Lockhorns 2.0 if you will). I don't want to over hype it or anything but let's just say it'll be the best year long daily Lockhorn comic critical analysis project of 2011. Tune in next year.

Trial Separation

My dear fans of the blog and fellow Lockhorn lovers, let me convey to you may sincerest apologies. As most of you may have noticed, my daily Lockhorn commentary project "Lockhorn vs. Lockhorn" has been on an unexplained hiatus with no new updates since mid April. It has been quite a while. In the last few months I've been a bit busy with the end of law school, studying for and taking the bar exam, and a few other miscellany. As the days piled up I had said to myself that once all my major personal obligations passed I would eventually get around to doing, as I've done in the past, a mass update to get everything caught up. I now find myself a newly minted graduate (i.e. unemployed) with all my exams and tests completed with an excess supply of free time on my hands.

Even with my relatively open schedule though, the prospect of going back and spending hours upon hours updating over 4 months of daily Lockhorn strips (including those monstrous 5 part Sunday sections) totaling well over 200 panels was more than a little overwhelming (I'm pretty sure extended exposure to that much bitterness, anger, and martial dysfunction is fatal). I was actually contemplating the extremely tempting idea of calling it a year and starting fresh in 2011. However, the more I thought about it, the more I began to realize that such an action would be in gross contrast to the Lockhorns' central theme of uncompromising masochistic stubbornness. Leroy and Loretta could swiftly put an end to their eternal domestic hell by getting a divorce or resorting to murder-suicide but it is their classic, spiteful, totally psychotic, devotion to making each other absolutely miserable via the institution of marriage that has sustained the comic for all these decades. Given that, the blog must go on.

Since there is definitely too much material to safely cover in one shot without losing my mind, I'm going to attempt to gradually everything up over the next month or so. I loosely calculated that if I can average about five updates a day I could get it done in a little over a month. Whether I will actually be successful in reaching that goal after going through my 100th or so joke about Loretta's bad driving or Leroy's drinking problems will be no guarantee. But as the Lockhorns manage to continue their failing marriage, I will manage to continue my failing blog about their failing marriage.

Lock(horn)ed and Reloaded

To the dozen or so people who actually read my ongoing Lockhorns Blog regularly, your silent prayers have been answered. After falling behind for most of March and the beginning of April, I can now proudly announce that as of April 10, 2010 the site is completely updated. The last three days have been long, taxing, and the overwhelming bleakness of the material might have put me in a disturbingly dark place during the process; but what's important is that it is finished. Priority-wise I probably should have just given up on the site after fulfilling my original year long commitment and focused on pressing "real world" deadlines (finals, graduation, the bar exam, job hunt), but I found that I couldn't fully focus on any of those other activities until I took the moral imperative to continue updating, at least for this year.

Will I allow the site to lapse as egregiously as before? I'll try my best not to but probably yes. Am I still glad I didn't give up on it? Absolutely. So to help everyone pace themselves and ease on into this flood of updates, here are five standout panels (at least in my opinion) from the previous month to start off with:

March 21, 2010

"Judging by that contemplative look in his his eyes, he's probably wondering if his current saw has the tensile strength to cut through human bone and various layers of fat."

April 7, 2010
"...I really hope Leroy's mustachioed buddy is just another frustrated husband waiting for his wife to finish shopping rather than some creepy pervert who purchases women's shoes for his own sick pleasures."

March 25, 2010

"By 'increasingly judgmental' does Leroy mean 'increasingly insane'?"

March 24, 2010

"Perhaps when he's looking through the phone book Leroy can also find someone to finally install doors in their kitchen cabinets and slots in their gigantic cinder block of a toaster."

March 29, 2010

"We all know that between the bad driving and shopping addiction, Loretta is far from the contemporary liberated woman but in this scene she makes Cathy look like Gloria Steinem."

Lock(horn)ed and Loaded

Well it took a few days and quite a bit of reckless time traveling, but I've finally managed to fully update Victor Sells Out's sister blog "Lockhorns vs. Lockhorns". Unlike this blog with its relaxed lead time and spotty updating, the daily requirements of "Lockhorns" makes it quite a harsh mistress to satisfy. Everyone's free to go back and catch up on the past two weeks (but remember to pace yourself, there's only so much spiteful vitriol one can take in one sitting).

So was it worth all the irreparable damage to the space time continuum to get the Lockhorns back on track?

Well, is Loretta's cooking inedible?

As for this blog, have faith. The upcoming school year should open up plenty of time for me to slack and update...in theory.

So Keep Your Love Lockhorns

As we approach the first full week of the New Year, I'm sure many a resolutions are starting to feel the strain if not already collapsed all together. In my years as a serial resolution maker, I've had some that didn't even make it past "Dick Clark's Rockin' New Years Eve." While I've found that most promises I make with myself are inherently doomed since I have no problems disappointing myself, I still on occasion attempt a small personal challenge here and there just for the novelty in seeing how long I can keep it up. It's sort of like playing an old 80s retro arcade game like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong; there's really no end to it (outside of the game's programming collapsing upon itself), you just see how long you can maintain.

It is in that bold, kamikaze-like spirit of New Years' Resolution making that I decided to go through with my long considered plan to create a blog that tracks the daily fights and squabbles of my my all time favorite comic strip, "The Lockhorns". You can keep the eternal melancholy of "Peanuts", the office jokes of "Dilbert", the lasagna fueled antics of "Garfield", the unrelenting meddling of "Mary Worth", the edgy racial politics of the "Boondocks"; for my money the "Lockhorns" never fail to deliver. Sure it's the same 10 or so jokes about unhappy married life and the difference between men and women, but you are guaranteed to always get the joke in every panel and its guaranteed to be at least an acknowledgable joke in the traditional sense. Despite my enjoyment of "The Lockhorns'" unique, classic brand of comedy; I don't think I've ever really looked at the loveless dynamics of this miserable marriage. So for the rest of the year I will, hopefully, give a daily play-by-play look at the eternal struggle that is the Lockhorns' marriage and give a tally of who's actually coming out ahead in this unholiest of unions.

So if you're looking for the kind of laughs that can only result from watching the petty, daily arguments of two ugly charactures of American domestic married life, one panel at a time, then look no further than "Lockhorn vs. Lockhorn" during your daily journeys through the blogosphere.

Of course, half the fun is wondering how long I'll be able to keep a daily journal up before my procrastination overwhelms me.