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Slylock Fox
Funky Winkerbean, 7/25/10
It seems my earlier suspicions — that this strip’s implacable torment has shifted from Les to Funky — has now been confirmed. Thus Les’s sheepish smirk in the final panel: he knows that every car accident or cancer diagnosis Funky is involved in means one less pregnant daughter or dead spouse for him. Holly is grinning like a maniac mostly because she knows Funky will be dead soon, and then she’ll be free, free.
Family Circus, 7/25/10
I think my favorite of the “Ma Keane is irritated by her children” panels here is the one at the lower right. In most of the other ones, she’s just intervening in momentary crises so as to prevent her arrest for child neglect and/or public nudity ordinances. But it’s when she’s forced to play some stupid ball-toss game with her feeble little daughter that the rage lines really begin to radiate from her head. “Damn it,” she thinks, “Does she never get bored with this inanity? I’ve been trying to work my way through this damn novel for the last eight years!”
Slylock Fox, 7/25/10
I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve ever seen Slylock mediate in a human vs. human dispute. It goes to show how low the status of H. sapiens has fallen in this nightmare world of bipedal talking animals that the Josh family would be willing to turn to a canid law enforcement. If I were Slick Smitty, my defense would be that I was trying to protect the boy’s delicate mental health, as waking up every morning to find that piggy bank grinning at you like that is a guarantee of nightmares and insanity.
Meanwhile, in the six differences, a little boy has extorted some free cake out of the local diner by bashing one of the counter’s stools with a baseball bat. “Hand over the cake or this clown in the hat is next,” he growls.
Beetle Bailey, 7/25/10
As part of its atonement for years of making light of sexual harassment, Beetle Bailey has begun putting out a series of PSA pamphlets on social and relationship issues. This one is called “How to tell when you’re in an abusive relationship.”
Apartment 3-G, 7/10/10
OMG YOU GUYS TRIPLE MAKEOVER! At long last, the A3G girls will be returned to their sexy, sexy glory days, after they are transformed into such visions of fashion-forwardness as … uh, Kat and Kitty here.
Seriously, this would actually be a pretty intriguing way to transition to a new artist, one with a sexier, more modern style. But I can’t find any information about such a shift of personnel online. Surely King Features would at least put a press release out about it, right? Or just hand-deliver it to me, since my blog is probably the only “media outlet” that would care?
Funky Winkerbean, 7/10/10
Aw, it looks like Funky isn’t dead or traveling through time to harass his younger self after all, just hallucinating from the agony of his body being shattered in a car wreck. “You’re going to be okay, buddy,” the paramedic says, knowing that in Westview, having your deluded mind living out fantasies within your mangled physical form is as “okay” as it gets.
Slylock Fox, 7/10/10
I’m a non-driver and a firm advocate for public transit, but even I will admit that taking the bus reduces’s one’s pimp-cred considerably.
Slylock Fox, 6/10/10
Ed Power of My Cage has frequently teased us with hints that someday we will learn what happened to all the humans and how his strip came to be populated entirely by anthropomorphic animals. But Slylock, with its more atomized narrative, just sort of takes the new biosphere as a given. Still, today’s Six Differences could be offering a glimpse at the precise moment when the dominance of H. Sapiens over the planet began to falter. A cheerful bird began to attack a gentleman’s newspaper; a freakishly huge spider terrified a nearby child; another bird sat on a rooftop, watching, waiting; and, before anyone could really understand the hows or whys, canines were in charge of law enforcement and Slick Smitty and his few remaining fellow humans were reduced to running petty scams in order to survive in the New Animal Order.
Archie, 6/10/10
What was the cause of humanity’s decline? Panel one of today’s Archie may have an answer. Can you explain what exactly is going on anatomically between Jughead’s feet and his head? Human civilization presumably collapsed either because of rampant genetic abnormalities or pervasive hallucinogenic use.
Spider-Man, 5/24/10
The final deadly confrontation between Spider-Man and Sabretooth that we’ve all been waiting for has at last arrived — only to be derailed by the appearance of Wolverine. Since Sabretooth was only harassing the web-slinger to find his brother, I assume that Spidey and Mary Jane can now quietly leave the theater and let this family spat work itself out. Whew, another opportunity for superheroics thankfully avoided!
Note that Wolverine learned a little about living the good life from his earlier encounter with Spider-Man: his villainous brother was apparently unable to track him down because he’s been spending his time in his apartment, watching television. I am impressed that he’s no longer sneaking into the back of trucks and instead is flying commercial when he needs to travel long distances.
Slylock Fox, 5/24/10
I’m not sure if we’ve ever seen Dumpy Dog before, and thus the strip doesn’t trust us to automatically assume he’s guilty, even though he displays the poor posture and grooming endemic to the Slylock Fox rogues gallery. “Look, we’ve already done the legwork on this one, OK?” the strip is essentially telling us. “Just count the damn spiders.” I guess this is how Max feels, all the time?
Archie, 5/24/10
Archie’s dad remembers a day when youth were afire with literary passions! They stayed up late at fashionable salons, smoking and drinking wine and arguing the merits of the latest Booker Prize winner until the wee hours. They really believed that prose could change the world, and thus it’s terribly depressing to him that the next generation sees in printed matter only utility. There is a cold majesty to the practical advice in the books Archie reads, but the magic that once animated his father’s days is long gone.
Family Circus, 5/24/10
Speaking of the death of enchantment, the Keane Kids are so crushed by omnipresent corporate culture that their very souls are stunted. The transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly, once a source of such wonder to so many generations of children, has in their minds been reduced to an act no more interesting than the elevation of a group coordinator to an assistant regional manager. One imagines the chrysalis bursting open and the butterfly shaking its wings free, only to settle into a cubicle just slightly larger than the one it left, under the glow of the same harsh fluorescent lighting, wondering if this was really worth all the striving.
Jumble, 5/24/10
Now here’s a kid who hasn’t lost his belief in magic. “Remember, if you see your presents before your birthday, they’ll vanish into the ether! And mommy will know you’ve been naughty, and will kill you with her mind.”
Slylock Fox, 5/5/10
Boy, Slylock sure is grim this week. First it’s animals getting maimed in car wrecks, now it’s “which of these adorable beasties is closest to death”? The short lifespan of the opossum actually fits in nicely with the little story being told, too. The villain of whatever petty mystery Officer Turtle is trying to solve isn’t the accusatory raccoon, the terrified beaver, or the obviously stoned bear. No, that angry opossum did it, because when death is always hovering right over your shoulder, you do some crazy things just to feel alive. What’re you gonna do, copper, throw me in jail for life? Doesn’t matter to me, I was never going to get to see my kids grow up anyway.
Mark Trail, 5/5/10
With Cherry abandoning him to gussy herself up, Mark has been left with Doc and Rusty, truly the dregs of the Lost Forest social scene. The final panel illustrates why Rusty won’t be allowed out in the barn: his hideous visage will panic the horses.
Dennis the Menace, 5/5/10
Those terrifyingly thin ankles indicate that Dennis has managed to induce a serious eating disorder in his mother with his little bathroom pep talks. Menacing factor: +1.
Slylock Fox, 5/3/10
Good lord, what sort of grim PSA is this? “Forest animals who would have normally gone off to their sweet reward in Death’s friendly bosom must now live on for decades inside their broken, shattered mortal shells, thanks to the tyrannical Forest Government and its so-called public safety legislation!” Of particular note are the expressions on the faces of our paramedics; the haunted eyes and spontaneous perspiration are presumably a horrified reaction not to the bear’s mild head injury, but to the condition of whatever poor beast is still trapped in that car. (Sorry, colorists: you can’t convince me that the fluid pooling around the overturned vehicle is motor oil.) Once the the jaws of life extract the mangled form of the gorilla or crane or what have you, the poor soul will have years in a hospital ward getting nutrition through a straw to look forward to, rather than Heaven. Thanks a lot, seat belts!
While the dull-eyed pink bunny is clearly just a run-of-the-mill accident gawker, I’m betting that dog in the suit is a lawyer with a pain and suffering case on his mind.
Mary Worth, 5/3/10
I hate to actually agree with Mary for once, but … has Bonnie actually heard from Ernie that he’s staying away from her neatly stacked clutter? I mean, she’s just narcissistically assuming that his decision-making is all about her. Maybe he just met some other woman during his business trip and has fallen in love and run off! Or, maybe he wasn’t wearing his seat belt and was killed in a terrible car accident, and right now his corpse is waiting unclaimed in some far-off morgue, just because Bonnie was too full of self-loathing to make some phone calls! Won’t she feel bad then, hmmm?
Say, you know what could really soothe those bad feelings? A little retail therapy, if you know what I mean!