Give me Red and Rover any day

I'm a pretty faithful comics reader. I read pretty much all of the comics in the Washington Post; in thinking about it, one of the reasons I still subscribe is because it's so much easier to read things like the comics in paper form than it is to read them online. (I admit that I do read Mary Worth online, but that's a subject for another post.)

One of the strips I find most frustrating is Mutts. It follows, not surprisingly, a couple of dogs. The thing that makes it so frustrating is that it can be a quite good strip. The artwork is great, for one thing. And there are sequences like the current one, with a bunch of Beatles puns (starting on Monday). I can't resist Beatles references. A recent sequence played off of The Big Lebowski. It's cute, and inoffensive, and funny enough.

But it has a tendency to try to pull the heartstrings, with weeks of "shelter stories"--animals asking for homes (example). I understand that it's an important cause, and the thought of animals in shelters totally gets to me. (I'm not even going to mention that commercial with Sarah McLachlan that plays the song "Angel"--ack! Nothing makes me change the channel faster.) Do people actually change what they're doing because of this comic, though? It makes me feel oddly guilty, which is both stupid and annoying, because I can't adopt any more animals, and I already give money to animal shelters. And I just have this image of people being guilted into adopting a pet that they shouldn't have.

I don't know. Maybe I'm overthinking it. But it doesn't make those "shelter stories" weeks any easier to deal with.