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Heathcliff, 8/2/13

People, I have been terribly remiss in not informing you about an amazing live performance that you can see if you live in or near Baltimore! It is a water ballet based on Moby Dick, and it is being put on by Fluid Movement, the wacky Baltimore performance art troupe that I am occasionally affiliated with. I’m not in the show this year, but my lovely wife is, and I’ve seen the performance and it’s fantastic. There are shows at 5 and 7 p.m. this coming Saturday and Sunday nights at Baltimore’s Patterson Park pool. Behold the amazing poster!

You can buy tickets here and find out more information here and maybe see/say hi to me because I’ll be volunteering in some capacity. I can’t believe it has taken a Heathcliff cartoon to prod me into promoting it here! For real, though, I’ve known people who have performed in peg legs and Heathcliff’s is pretty hardcore. Based on the leg we can see, it’s clearly not something hollow that he’s stuffing his leg into. Is he walking about with his leg uncomfortably strapped behind his back? Or did he actually amputate his leg, just to pull off a flawless sight gag that barely impresses our fish merchant? He might’ve. Heathcliff doesn’t do things by half measures. Heathcliff keeps it real.

Apartment 3-G, 8/2/13

Hey, remember when this Apartment 3-G plot was going to be about the psychological trauma that combat vets face when they return to civilian life, and that could’ve been timely and important but they could have also screwed it up pretty badly? Well, now it’s about brain tumors. Can’t go wrong with brain tumors, right?

Mark Trail, 8/2/13

I am of course duty-bound by my Comics Summarizer’s Oath to let you know when violence breaks out in Mark Trail, so here you go! We all know Mark traditionally wears pants that are too short, which becomes pretty obvious when he kicks someone, but instead of wearing khaki socks like usual today he’s just showing off his sexy bare ankles, the tease.

Spider-Man, 8/2/13

Ever since Spidey’s daring/cowardly escape from his plane, much of his time in Costa Verde has been taken up by him loudly remarking to nobody in particular that he doesn’t speak the local language. This will definitely make him beloved when he meets up with his allies! There’s nothing Latin American revolutionaries like more than being shouted at in English.

Wizard of Id, 8/2/13

I guess the Wizard of Id takes place in some pseudo-medieval era when even the basics of rudimentary statescraft were poorly understood, but still: ethics and accounting are not the same thing, guys!

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Mary Worth, 7/26/13

Sorry I haven’t been keeping you up to date with Mary Worth Brings The Healing, but … it’s been mostly like this? Mary wants to be remembered well after her death, like her husband, who I’m reasonably sure hasn’t gotten more than a sentence or two’s worth of attention in this strip for more than ten years.

Apartment 3-G, 7/26/13

“So you resisted all treatment from medical professionals for your debilitating mental illness and then … things got better? That’s a scenario that plays out all the time, right?” Man, sometimes Lu Ann really works to make sure we all remember she’s the “dumb one” in this strip.

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Crankshaft, 7/9/13

One of Crankshaft’s go-to humor-producing techniques is “olds say the darndest things,” which I’m assuming is what this is supposed to be. Or maybe it’s “Grandma Rose is heartless and cruel and always will be,” another classic Crankshaft comedy gold mine. Whichever it is, though, today I approve of it, because it produced “Your father puts ketchup on so many inappropriate things,” which is surely the greatest sentence that will appear in the comics all week, and perhaps all month. It’s positively poetic. In fact, I urge all of you poetically inclined folk to make it the first line in a poem of your own design in the comments. I expect Pulitzer Prize-winning greatness.

Spider-Man, 7/9/13

Holy crap, you guys, today’s Spider-Man pulls back the curtain on a White House scandal worse than the IRS + Benghazi + NSA spying times one billion! First we learned that the President answers each and every phone call from befuddled TSA agents nationwide, which surely isn’t an efficient use of his time. And he uses this bureaucratic power that he’s arrogated to himself to allow whatever liberal masked hoodlums he holds in high esteem to board our nation’s otherwise well-secured aircraft. But most damning is the fact that hanging in the Oval Office is a ghastly, miscolored parody of our national flag. That flag is red, white, and black — the same colors of the banner of Nazi Germany. WHEN WILL YOU WAKE UP, SHEEPLE?????

Apartment 3-G, 7/9/13

Well, I guess I was wrong about us never seeing any of the fancy clothes that Lu Ann is being forced to try on by the creepy governor’s creepy svengali! Here she is wearing a fancy new gown. That’s what a fancy new gown looks like in real life, right? With a lacy collar? And a belt? And it’s all the color of Pepto-Bismol, including the collar and the belt? And it covers every inch of flesh below the collarbone and (I assume) above the wrists? This is high fashion?

Gasoline Alley, 7/9/13

Oh, goody, idiot man-child Slim, having been abandoned by his wife and obviously being unable to fend for himself in any way, is descending into catatonic depression. He’s already had one brush with insanity that he bounced back from, but we can only hope that his current downward spiral is permanent.