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Beetle Bailey, 7/30/11

General Halftrack’s request for a three-way has yielded a scenario that’s very, very different from his fantasies.

Crankshaft, 7/30/11

Crankshaft’s family has converted to Seventh Day Adventism, probably to provide an excuse to spend less time with him.

Family Circus, 7/30/11

Despite their parents’ attempts to teach them an orthodox theology, the Keane Kids still believe in zombies.

Gil Thorp, 7/30/11

Gil Thorp is somehow managing to make its new sexting storyline even duller than the last one.

Luann, 7/30/11

Luann and Quill have stumbled upon the world’s chastest orgy.

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Luann, 7/12/11

I’ve been reading Luann long enough to recognize that when there’s a nameplate sitting on a desk in the third panel with a name written in more or less legible Chicago font, it’s supposed to be meaningful; however, I haven’t been reading long enough to know who “Ann Eiffel” is. Quick, to the Luann Wikipedia page! Said Wikipedia page is of course ludicrously over-detailed and has already provided plenty of fodder for the Wikipedia-themed Tumblr I help run; however, I shouldn’t knock it, because it provided the crucial information that Ann is a sex predator of indeterminate romantic orientation, having been fired from her bookstore-management job because of her lustful obsession with Bernice and/or Zane (Zane being Bernice’s wheelchair-bound love interest, circa 2002). Combine that with the way she lingers over “appreciative” in panel two and I think we all know that we have Brad WeenieWorld Harass-O-Thon ’11 ahead of us, which I cannot even tell you how excited I am about it.

Opening discussion question for Brad WeenieWorld Harass-O-Thon ’11: Is it easier to sexually harass people at WeenieWorld than at other companies, because you could always plausibly claim that all your inappropriate weenie-themed remarks were in fact work related?

Blondie, 7/12/11

My favorite part about this cartoon is that Blondie is just hanging out inside, chattering on the phone, letting all the numerologically fixated lovebirds stew out in the heat. It’s even funnier because, seeing as Blondie and Tootsie are the only Blondie’s Catering employees, I’m assuming that they’re only going to be able to cater the wedding for the first couple in line.

Mark Trail, 7/12/11

See, this is what happens when you overuse bold in your word balloons: when Sheriff Whatshisface finally realizes that his son was the Moccasin Thief all along, the only way his hurt and betrayal can be properly expressed is through yellow lettering. Yellow: the color of paternal heartbreak.

Mary Worth, 7/12/11

At first I though Jeff was putting together a spreadsheet to prove with science and numbers that Mary should marry him. But in fact it appears that he’s long ago given up that hope, and now is only focused on how lucrative her meddling powers are.

Ziggy, 7/12/11

Oh, Ziggy, I think your goldfish is quite well aware of the mammalian nature of whales (or, as fish call them, “warm-blooded sea-frauds”). I think that evil grin is there because he fervently believes that the man-whale battle depicted in Moby Dick is just the opening salvo in an intra-mammal civil war that will allow the fish to pick up the pieces and rule supreme in the Neo-Devonian golden age.

Ballard Street, 7/12/11

I’m pretty sure this is the first time an actual puddle of urine has been depicted on the comics pages. I would have guessed that Marvin would the be perpetrator.

Beetle Bailey, 7/12/11

The easiest way to get me to stop making jokes about Beetle Bailey’s Beetle-and-Sarge-are-lovers subtext: turn it into Beetle-and-Sarge-are-lovers text. Boring!

6 Chix, 7/12/11

Meanwhile, in Six Chix, some lady is giving a genie a handjob.

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Crock, 7/8/11

At first I thought that this might be a joke about the recent (2005 being “recent” on the geological timescale one needs to use to assess Crock) controversy over the Muhammed cartoons in Denmark. This would be shocking not merely for its relative pop culture relevance, but also because it would mean that the Crock creative team suddenly remembered that its characters are in fact in a Middle Eastern country. However, upon reflection, both those suppositions seemed extremely unlikely, so now I’m just going to assume that the Crock creators think that people often get riled up about political cartoons in modern day-to-day life, because that’s exactly the kind of out of touch that Crock is.

Apartment 3-G, 7/8/11

Palpably scheming Margo is of course the best kind of Margo, so I’m very eager to see what kind of money-making plan she comes up with for the under-renovation Mills Gallery. I’m thinking either “hollaback reverse harassment center, where New York women can come and pay money to sexually humiliate construction workers” or “stash house.”

Luann, 7/8/11

The sad thing is that Brad doesn’t really have the people skills necessary to be a good restroom attendant.

Herb and Jamaal, 7/8/11

Jamaal’s date is concerned that he may have the clap.

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Luann, 6/21/11

Uh-oh, looks like the DeGroots are on a collision course with wackiness — TJ-flavored wackiness! So, wait, is TJ not capable of paying rent on his own? Doesn’t he have a job? Wasn’t there some whole plotline a few years back that centered on the family trying to figure out what TJ did for a living? Did they ever find out? You know, it’s times like this, when I realize that I actually don’t have some bit of Luann ancillary character trivia at my fingertips, that I realize that maybe I’m more mentally healthy than everyone says. I could just look up the answer, but it would ruin my feeling of triumph and well-being.

Anyway, the fact that TJ will be required by economic and/or narrative necessity to move back home with Brad only strengthens my suspicions that “TJ” is actually just a projection of Brad’s troubled subconscious, and that his entire family has been urged by Brad’s team of psychiatrists to play along with his delusion, a role they’ve tackled with an unsettling degree of gusto.

Apartment 3-G, 6/21/11

You know, if the A3G girls were so keen on getting a psychic reading for Lu Ann, why not just go with Margo’s mother Gabriella, who’s been known to dabble in the mystic arts herself? Of course, since Laura Lea is drawn exactly like Gabriella, that may be what they’ve done, and just asked her not to lay on the accent to so thick for a few minutes. At any rate, Margo’s sweet smile in panel one shows that she’ll always love how easy poor dumb Lu Ann is to fool.

Judge Parker, 6/21/11

Worried that the strip’s core audience of aged shut-ins might find the current storyline involving potential suicide too exciting, the Judge Parker creative team has decided to ratchet things back a notch and are now only showing Abbey and Sophie watching the situation unfold via a no doubt low-quality webcam. Still, they are narrating the action, which might cause stray amounts of dangerous drama to enter the consciousness of readers. Just to be safe, the rest of the week will consist of the two of them staring silently at the screen.

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Funky Winkerbean, 6/17/11

Oh, look Les’s mopey romantic life has been derailed by comical misunderstanding! Sure, if you actually go back and look at the Les-Susan smooch strip (which I did, because I have a professional obligation and/or hate myself) it doesn’t seem very likely that anyone would have had an opportunity to snap this little pic, but I say if Les is humiliated, all the better. Maybe Keisha was stalking him, in order to defend her mother’s honor, or just because everyone is obsessed with Les for no reason. Maybe Susan had a hidden camera set up for just this reason, and she sent the pic to Keisha when the time was right. The important thing is that finally someone in this strip is going to be suffering in a way that I find enjoyable.

Luann, 6/17/11

Speaking of enjoyable suffering: ha ha, Brad is about to be fired! I’m sure they’ll explain it as “budget cuts,” but it would be great if he were let go because of incompetence, or just because his personality is considered generally unpleasant by the other firefighters. I’ll bet those checks Toni’s brother gets for being in the Le Mis touring company look pretty darn steady now!

Ziggy, 6/17/11

Ziggy’s brought his pet to a restaurant, and his pet has brought vermin into that restaurant, and now that pet is going to disembowel and eat that vermin right at the table. I’m beginning to understand why the waiters in this strip are always so hostile towards Ziggy.

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Panel from Archie, 6/16/11

I’m terrible for not bringing this news to you earlier, but Henry Scarpelli, who for a long time was the artist of the Archie comic strip, died a couple of months ago. (UPDATE: Uh, as many people have pointed out, that article is from April of 2010 — so I have no idea why the art only changed a few months ago. Maybe he had drawn comics months in advance? Som artists do!) I will always have a warm spot in my heart for him because it was he (I assume) who inserted the occasional Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000 gag into the strip, possibly without the writer really knowing what was going on.

Since his passing, the syndicate apparently came to the conclusion that, what with the huge backlog of timeless Archie yuks available there’s no real reason to pay anyone to create new ones, and has, I believe, been running older strips from the ’90s, which explains why they’ve been even less in touch with today’s youth than usual. (Please correct me if I’m wrong on this point!) Anyway, the older version of the strip was not created by a cybernetic intelligence, but an all too human individual who, if this panel is any indication, spends his days in an isolated cabin, preparing for the day when he will lead the righteous cleansing of our degenerate nation.

Luann, 6/16/11

Yeah, Toni’s brother sure is flake and a jerk! He’s not a fine, upstanding, responsible person like Brad and Toni are. You can tell they’re upstanding and responsible because they do upstanding and responsible things, like trash Toni’s brother constantly, right in front of his daughter.

Apartment 3-G, 6/16/11

Aw, isn’t this nice, Tommie’s mom has come to visit! Too bad Tommie didn’t get some advanced notice; it’s little embarrassing to have her arrive at 3 p.m. and find her daughter and her roommate lying around in an opium haze.

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Apartment 3-G, 6/1/11

When Scarlett O’Hara wistfully announced that “tomorrow is another day,” the great love of her life had just walked out on her, and she was trying to figure out how she would win him back. When Tommie says it, it’s because she failed to deliver a CD to her aunt. She could probably try to just slip it through the mail slot, but then what would she do for excitement tomorrow?

Judge Parker, 6/1/11

Oh, hey, have you been wondering how Judge Parker Emeritus’s attempts to talk a defense contractrix out of suicide are going? Apparently he’s decided that the best way to get her to step back from the ledge is to describe how empty and meaningless his own life is. He’s thinking outside the box!

Luann, 6/1/11

I’ve never been an exchange student, but I’m reasonably sure that they know pretty far in advance when they’re going to return to their home country. Do Australians do things differently? Does the government in Canberra have the right to call young men home for national service at a moment’s notice, for emergency shrimp-on-the-barbie placement or something?

Beetle Bailey, 6/1/11

“Are you ticklish?”

“No.”

“Would you be unsettled if my head started spinning around on my neck like the demon-girl from the Exorcist?“

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Luann, 5/27/11

Ha ha, can you imagine an “urgent, passionate” “rap” set to Luann’s poem of self-loathing, “I’m A Snot”? You don’t have to, because you can go to the URL in the third panel and listen to it yourself, in all its glory! But don’t feel obliged to do so. I think we all remember the “Hey Boy” debacle of 2010. Maybe it’s better to hear the passionate, urgent rapping, in your mind. Maybe if you heard it in your actual earhole, it would be so passionate and so urgent that your passionate urges would get the better of you and then who knows what would happen next? Probably some pulsating of some sort, that’s what! So, in conclusion, barf.

Crankshaft, 5/27/11

What must it be like, being a prisoner of the Funkiverse, where every depressing, emotionally loaded conversation (and lord knows there are plenty of those) must be accompanied by smirking? And, in Crankshaft, puns? I think Jeff in today’s strip made some kind of bargain with his cruel God: “Look, I’m trying to share some really heavy stuff with my wife here, OK? I’ll smirk, or I’ll pun, but please don’t make me do both. Let me keep a shred of dignity!”

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Gasoline Alley, 4/12/11

Let me tell you a little story that has something to do with the genesis of this blog. In 2002, I moved to Baltimore and, as was the style at the time, got a print subscription to the local paper. The early ’00s Baltimore Sun had four glorious pages of comics every day, including relics that I had heard about but never seen — Mark Trail, Rex Morgan, Apartment 3-G, and, of course, Mary Worth. The last strip was in the midst of a plotline involving a cantankerous old cuss named Smitty Smedlap, and I came in the middle of a dinner he was having with Mary (and maybe Dr. Jeff too? can’t remember now) at the Bum Boat — a dinner that lasted weeks, and that seemed to me to be extremely awkward, and yet day after day it continued, with no reaction from the other characters indicating whether that was the intended reading. By the end of the dinner, I was hooked, and there’s pretty much a straight line from that joyful discovery to these words you’re reading today on the Internet.

I bring this up only because this awkward dinner in Gasoline Alley seems to me a a pale shadow of the depth of awkwardness that Mary Worth is capable of. Still, you have to kind of respect the strip for its current metahumorous gambit, in which we have a character whose sole identifying characteristic is that he tells bad jokes, and yet each day his unfunny gags are presented as the strip’s punchlines. Still, a little of this goes a long way, and it’s already gone quite far enough.

Luann, 4/12/11

Like all artistic geniuses do eventually, Gunther has left behind conventional notions of what his chosen medium should do and has gone full-on into his experimental phase, just in time for Luann to be the most avant-garde contestant in Tiffany’s sham beauty contest. I like the fact that Luann begins the strip screaming in horror/aesthetic confusion, but by the time her parents arrive on the scene has settled into a state of droopy-eyed ennui. For is there anything more truly banal than a new artist’s first heavy-handed attempt to shock bourgeois sensibilities?

Crock, 4/12/11

I don’t think I’ve ever met this bugilist before, but since he’s a character in Crock I assume he has an entire backstory established over the course of the strip’s 109-year run, which is now mostly forgotten by everybody but can still be glimpsed in some of his characteristics. For instance, that round red blob on his head: is it supposed to be a beret (indicating that he’s a jazz-trumpeting hepcat) or a turban (indicating that he’s a cobra-charming fakir)? Fortunately, this is Crock, so we can move on with our lives safe in the knowledge that this character will not reappear for decades and we’ll never really have to worry about it again.

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Gil Thorp, 3/28/11

It’s never a good sign when Gil Thorp openly admits it’s recycling plot ideas. Hey, remember alt-country sensation Slim Chance from last summer? Well, this is just like that, except that it’s, uh, a chick! Yeah, that’s it! And nobody seems to like her music. Nobody except Mr. Preppie in the front row there, who looks like he’s very interested in what Woody Guthrie and this hippie-musician-ballplayer have to say, much to the consternation of his girlfriend. “Chad, I’m already sitting in your lap and thrusting my ample bosom up against you! All you have to do to look at my cleavage is just lower your eyes! What’s it going to take to get you to pay attention to me? Chad, stop looking at the open mic night girl! Chaaaad!”

Apartment 3-G, 3/28/11

We can’t say for sure because the lettering here is all in capitals, but I’m definitely detecting an upper-case “H” at the beginning of Blaze’s “Him” in the third panel. This makes sense, as we’ve gotten plenty of hints that Dan Diller isn’t the hobo Iris has mistaken him for, and the only non-hobo with that kind of hair/beard combo is obviously God himself. “Iris?! What’re you doing here with YHWH, the Creator of the Universe? We all know you’re ritually unclean!”

Momma, 3/28/11

Normally Momma jumps on any opportunity to denigrate her daughter-in-law and encourage her son to divorce her, so it’s kind of surprising that she isn’t more triumphant over Thomas’s suspicions about her infidelity. It’s not surprising, however, that she has some kind of sick posture fetish.

Luann, 3/28/11

I’m not a parenting expert, but I’m pretty sure that in this scenario you’re supposed to at least pretend to think that your daughter has a chance to win the beauty pageant.

Marmaduke, 3/28/11

“The first barbecue is like Christmas for Marmaduke! That’s because he doesn’t worship Jesus; he only worships delicious, cooked animal flesh.”

Slylock Fox, 3/28/11

Yes, we all know that silk is created by animals, not plants! That how we can suss out the lies of Shady Shrew … who lives in a world of … anthropomorphic … animals … OH MY GOD SHADY SHREW IS ENSLAVING SENTIENT SILKWORMS AND FORCING THEM TO CHURN OUT SHIRTS FOR HIM TO SELL ON THE ROADSIDE