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Shoe and B.C., 3/26/13

Elementary school test questions as setups to jokes in comic strips: most played out cliché on the comics page, or mostest played out cliché on the comics page? I guess I shouldn’t complain about accuracy when the students being tested are anthropomorphic bird-people and/or sentient ants, but I do question the quality of instruction in the bird and ant educational systems. In Shoe, Skyler’s cynical, heavy-lidded expression in panel two shows that he understands what a bizarrely open-ended and unanswerable question he’s been presented with, presumably by whatever over-eager art teacher also thought that art puns based on a catchphrase from a 17-year-old movie would get elementary school kids enthusiastic about learning. The ant-child, meanwhile, in an act of defiance over what appears to be a test of his knowledge of old sayings that are actively incorrect, fills in the blanks with a plea for death. Frankly, these questions are both making a good case for a uniform, standardized testing regime with questions developed by government bureaucrats, if these are the locally-directed alternatives.

Mark Trail, 3/26/13

Maybe Mark does love Rusty after all? In order to perpetrate his completely misguided rescue scheme, he’s been forced to not verbalize a sentence he’s formed in his mind and confine it to a thought balloon instead, in what must be a superhuman effort on his part.

Spider-Man, 3/26/13

DAREDEVIL: “And that’s where attorney Matt Murdock comes in!”

SPIDER-MAN: “Wow! This I gotta see!”

[SEVEN HOURS AND HUNDREDS OF LEXISNEXIS SEARCHES LATER]

SPIDER-MAN: “Oh, man, was I ever wrong about this.”