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Family Circus, 4/10/09

Don’t believe her, Jeffy! She claims that the mystical orb she holds is the key to spiritual enlightenment, but its roiling inky blackness tells a very different story.

Luann, 4/10/09

I don’t know if I’d call a guy who can however briefly be in two places at once “pathetic.” “Unsettling,” maybe.

Ziggy, 4/10/09

I was pretty shocked to see that Ziggy has a vanity plate that reads ZIGGY, because I always assumed that he lived his life under the constant, crushing burden of the shame of being Ziggy. If he doesn’t, he should.

Spider-Man, 4/10/09

The Spider-Man comic strip in a nutshell: Our terrifying supervillain, concerned about his son and determined to wreak revenge on the city, takes some time out to hang out in somebody’s cubicle and eat a sandwich.

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Apartment 3-G, 4/9/09

This, combined with this, makes me think that we should add “outfits that people wear while cleaning” to “drug paraphernalia” and “men who don’t look like the two or three dudes that every dude in Apartment 3-G looks like” on the list of things for which the Apartment 3-G team could use some reference photos. My alarm bells are pinging, of course, as to why Ruby might be in desperate and immediate need of some industrial-grade solvent. “Hey, look at that lady over there in that vacant lot! It sure looks like she’s burying someone in a shallow grave and then using some sort of potent cleanser to accelerate the corpse’s decay, doesn’t it? But that can’t be right — nobody dressed like a Colonial Williamsburg re-enactor could possibly be involved in anything shady!”

Family Circus, 4/9/09

I’m all for Billy rotting his mind with comic books, as he’ll clearly never amount to anything anyway, but can’t we expect him to pay attention to the details? As far as I know, Peter Parker doesn’t even have a mother; he was merely created spontaneously when Aunt May and Uncle Ben came down with nephewism, a common affliction in fictional characters. But maybe I’m being too hard on Billy; his larger point — that it would be amusing to see one of Peter’s loved ones beat him to death with a shoe or a rolled-up newspaper — is one that I can heartily endorse.

Mary Worth, 4/9/09

Oh, look, I guess I was wrong: it seems that Ted really is a scammer, and now we’re going to get to watch the Spanish Prisoner con in action, for certain limited definitions of “action.” Meanwhile, I’d just like to offer this bit of advice to noir-aspirant villains everywhere: though it is important to keep your victim in your sexual thrall in order to prevent her from thinking too much about the details of your fraudulent scheme, creepily drawing her onto your lap in public and gently caressing her cheek, all the while telling her how much she reminds you of your sister, is not the best way to go about doing that.

Shoe, 4/9/09

There is exactly one character in Shoe at whose antics I laugh in a non-ironic fashion, and that is Buzz, the elderly dyspeptic bird. Today, he’s spent hours wandering around aimlessly, angry and confused, because he’s old and losing his mind! Ha ha! Oh, I’m going to hell.

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Gil Thorp, 4/8/09

Yesterday I was mildly amused by Gil getting hit in the head with a pop fly, but nothing could prepare me for the sheer awesome madness of … this, whatever this is. A baseball improbably rapping our favorite flattopped coach in the flattop twice before landing neatly in his hat? It’s one of those terrifying moments when you suddenly realize that the safe narrative confines to which you’ve grown accustomed have fallen away and ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN. Perhaps Gil will be on the receiving end of any number of bizarre events, good and bad and escalating in oddity, with the spring storyline turning into some kind of Latin American magic realist novel. Of course, everything after that first whack on the noggin will be just a dream percolating in Gil’s polyhedronical skull; in reality, he’s lying unconscious on the field, and his players are trying to figure out if they can get his wallet out of his pocket without waking him up.

Beetle Bailey, 4/8/09

You know, sometimes I have little moments when I think to myself “Maybe it’s gone a little too far with this whole comic strip thing.” Those moments come when I, for instance, spend fifteen minutes poking through my archives trying to figure out the deal with Beetle Bailey’s hats. Someone once told me that the hats the soldiers in this strip wear are a mishmosh of different uniform styles from different decades (which is true for just about any visual cue in a Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Enterprises LLC strip, I suppose); while everyone else seems to get just one designated bit of headgear, though, Beetle actually gets to change hats now and then. In the iconic image of Beetle that I have in my mind, he’s wearing this mushy baseball-cap-type thing, but lately he generally wears a slightly more military looking cap. The hat he’s wearing today is the one I usually associate with Killer, though perhaps it is the Army-approved lady-sexing cap, because Beetle seems to wear it on his dates with Miss Buxley and other environments where ladies might be romanced.

In other news, Miss Buxley apparently lies around her house disheveled and wearing only sleepwear in what I assume is the late afternoon or early evening. This is also true of me, but I’m guessing nobody gets all hot and bothered about that.

Marvin, 4/8/09

Good lord, what is that inky black puddle Marvin’s mom is cleaning up? Does the awful tyke piss out pure evil?

Momma, 4/8/09

Wait, did that guy just offer to donate a kidney or something to Momma? Because I can’t see what else he might mean about Momma needing a couple of orgAUGH UNTHINK IT UNTHINK IT UNTHINK IT