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Family Circus, 9/8/12

Oh, God, something horrible happened outside, didn’t it? Those aren’t the faces of little kids who were having some fun out in the yard; those expressions are of illness and queasy terror. And then there’s Dolly, standing in the doorway, staring at them, marking their words. “Are they telling Mommy? They were specifically ordered not to tell Mommy. They know the punishment for telling Mommy: More mud pies. More mud pies. You don’t know the meaning of the word ‘filling,’ Jeffy.”

Apartment 3-G, 9/8/12

Hey, everyone, the Professor’s back! Back from … I dunno, did he go somewhere? I guess he did, they made a big deal out of his return earlier this week. Anyway, now he and Greg are bonding over their shared heritage, which seems to be causing a stone-faced Margo to vibrate with hostility in the final panel. Is she about to unleash a series of vicious anti-Greek ethnic slurs that will result in her being forever blackballed by the cabal of Hellenes who pull the strings of New York’s PR industry?

Wizard of Id, 9/8/12

The moral of today’s Wizard of Id: Don’t be lured into complacency by the false promise of nonviolent agitation for radical change! Violent expropriation of the rich’s wealth is the only path to successful class war.

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Apartment 3-G, 9/1/12

After enduring a comical series of interruptions, Greg Cooper finally gets the interruption he wants: the hot roommate! Yes, transparently angling for a three-way with your new publicist is totally 100% professional behavior for a … guy who … needs a publicist … and has a “manager” … and … uh … have we ever figured out exactly what it is that Greg does? Is he a handsome actor or maybe a literary bad boy? If so, this could all be part of the marketing plan, with Margo leaking word of his inappropriate advances to the press to cover up his boring, monogamous personal life.

It’s also worth noting that Greg wasn’t wearing a tie at the beginning of this meeting. He knows the way to a lady’s heart, or possibly to multiple ladies’ hearts: dapperness.

Gil Thorp, 9/1/12

We here at the Comics Curmudgeon would like to sincerely apologize for using linguistic markers to misidentify the Irish family in Gil Thorp as English; we realize that this is rather rude, for obvious reasons. Anyway, we would now like to revise the joke about what weirdo sports this family will demand from the Milford athletic department to include hurling and Gaelic handball.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/1/12

“Haw haw, I do enjoy a good bit of wordplay! But seriously, my baby is going to be born into abject poverty due to my husband’s shiftlessness.”

Beetle Bailey, 9/1/12

OH MY GOD THEY CLONED GENERAL HALFTRACK

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Mary Worth, 8/28/12

You know, there’s nothing like leaving town and not reading the comics for a week and then coming home and reading the comics to really put into focus how little happens in the average week of, say, Mary Worth. As I left, Wilbur and Dawn where being heli-lifted to safety from their terrible cruise wreck ordeal, and in the interim … Ian angrily watched a news report about the crisis, and Wilbur and Dawn re-enacted it with hand puppetry over dinner with Mary, and that was it!

But now I have come to believe that Mary Worth was holding off on its big guns just for me, waiting until I came home to serve up this, because yes, when we talk about Mary Worth and “big guns” obviously we are talking about Wilbur making jazz hands and burbling merrily about how he is a living, breathing refutation of Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest. “Life is brutal,” Wilbur will tell those residents of the Santa Royale micropolitan area who get their news from the dying print media, “and yet I, Wilbur Weston, still breathe air and eat mayonnaise, while so many stronger and smarter and less sweaty souls drowned in terror in the balmy, calm Mediterranean waters. I stand before you as proof that there is no justice in the universe, alive through no virtue of my own. You cannot kill the ultimate mediocrity, my friends! I am unstoppable.”

Apartment 3-G, 8/28/12

Meanwhile, in Apartment 3-G, Margo the publicist has managed to land a client who literally refuses to tell her what he’s doing that she might publicize. It’s OK, though, because he’s a hot piece of ass (or at least we assume that a shapely bum lurks forever just below the bottom of the panel) who is also conceited and arrogant. What would be the fastest way to convince him that Margo would be a suitable sex partner? Would seeing her imperiously dress down a subordinate do the trick? Done and done! Added bonus: this episode also serves as part of Margo and Evan’s dom-sub play. Girlfriend is nothing if not efficient!

Blondie, 8/28/12

All right, let’s ignore Alexander’s woefully sexist views of how polyamory should work and instead focus on the real important story here — namely, the insane layout of the furniture in the Bumstead living room. I’ve commented on it before, but it’s only now occurred to me that it can be explained fairly easily as just Dagwood’s attempt to keep any of his family members from trying to interact with him while he watches TV. Usually, as we saw just yesterday, there’s a sofa turned away from Dag’s sittin’ chair, so that he can maintain the illusion of spending quality time with his loved ones without actually having to look at their stupid faces. But as we saw, even then people expect to talk to him and have him respond to their word-noises, and so now he’s gotten rid of the couch altogether, leaving Alexander nothing to sit on but the ottoman. His icy silence as his son blabs about his relationship problems says volumes.

Spider-Man, 8/28/12

“It’s almost as if he wanted to gather a large group of people together so that he could threaten them with violence and rob them, as he’s done in the past! Anyway, this should be quite a spectacle, I’m glad we came.”

Momma, 8/28/12

Momma may have come down some in the world, but she certainly isn’t about to engage in any tawdry sex-for-lamp-discounts schemes.