Pooch Cafe by Paul Gilligan for April 25, 2011

This just isn’t meant to be!

Things are going to go very, very wrong here.

Give Poncho up for adoption.

“I’m pretty sure one of her eyes is fake!”

“One of her eyes is NOT fake, Poncho!”

“Aha! So you admit that the other one IS…!”

You can come and live with me Poncho. No cats but no Chazz either.

uh oh, what just fell on the floor and broke?

I dunno, I’m sure Mr. Gilligan thought this Year One thing was pretty funny when he was writing it but all I’m getting out of it is that Chazz is a clueless jerk who adopts a seriously neurotic puppy and traumatizes him even more with stories of his “cooler” previous dog and expectations of “radness”, before running off and marrying some annoying crazy cat lady with no fashion sense who has so many cats that she doesn’t remember their names. Even a normal dog in this world would be seriously confused if you let them sleep on the bed until one day where you suddenly kick them off onto the floor without warning. When it focuses on Poncho meeting his friends for the first time or other new-dog related things like the barking addiction it’s pretty funny but the Chazz and Carmen story just makes me cringe. And the “dogs have no sense of time” excuse isn’t working for me either.

Geeze, I thought it was hard to get my Dachshunds to cooperate. Chazz has to be a better pack leader.

Wow, yet again, it’s a comic strip, not real life… I don’t know about any other dog “owners”, but my dog can’t speak english let alone be traumatized by a cat-lady with no fashion sense…

The last panel has a good solution. Get smashed and problems have a way of softening around the edges.

…but she DOES smell like Tender Vittles

Was that Fish that Poncho just knocked on the floor??? It looks like drops of water are splashing upward. Could this be how Poncho meets Fish? If so, talk about a bad first impression …

We had to find out WHY Chazz is the way he is, which was obvious from the regular strip. But it would be nice to wrap this up soon.

wwwcameralab my dogs couldn’t “speak” English but they certainly made thier opinion, wants and feelings known in no uncertain terms.

They understood a huge amount of English, more I am certain that a lot of people I have known. In fact we had to start spelling certain words because they knew instantly what the spoken words meant. Sometime that was good, sometimes it precipitated a scramble to catch them so we could go to the vet or give them medicine or something similar.

Eventually they learned the spelled words. Then we started having to use substitute words and phrases. “Do you want to take the dogs for a ride”? became “Shall we take the canines for an excursion in our auto?”

As for knowing time….boy did they have a good grasp of time. How they knew what time it was as accurately as they did without the aid of clocks or watches always astounded me.

Don’t underestimate the dogs (or for that matter any animal) just because you can’t understand what THEY are saying. They have a lot more going for them than many people even guess.

I had thought that Pooch Cafe is a comic strip, one with clever humor of many shades. However, I am getting a little scared that some are so embroiled in how “real” it is. You are pulling our collective leg, aren’t you? Please say yes.

The problem here is that it’s not being written very well (in my opinion). I always considered this to be a more light-hearted, funny comic strip. Poncho didn’t like living with cats and mostly doesn’t like Carmen for appearance sake. You get the feeling that he really loves his whole family anyway, like the strip where he gets stuck in the tree on her birthday so the studly firefighters come to the house. Most of the focus was on funny things like the cat catapult, Plankie, and canine rehabilitation. Now it’s “Year One” with a more dramatic storyline and… ick. Poncho’s selfish and demanding in a comedic way. Chazz is not… he forgets the doggie bag, he forgets to bring any meat to the picnic, brings the dog to a house full of cats without mentioning it, from our point of view he doesn’t warn Poncho that they’re moving in with Mrs. Cat Fancy and if it’s “Year One” that’s a pretty fast move-in even if dogs don’t have a sense of time. There’s no punchlines to any of these situations… it’s just Chazz ignoring Poncho all the time. Before it was Poncho being overly demanding (in humorous ways) and Chazz and Carmen good-naturedly putting up with his antics… now I feel like the future Poncho is 100% justified in acting the way he does.

It is just a comic strip……….