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Mary Worth, 7/8/14

Say, what’s been going on with Mary Worth? Oh, you know, Olive demonstrated the ability to predict the future, or at least predict when branches are about to fall off trees onto Mary a few seconds in advance. And also, she’s got a cyst on her torso? Probably it’s cancer, giving her the second sight that comes just before death, or the egg of a terrible hell-demon that’s possessing her, or something. The important thing is that Olive’s parents are continuing to give in to their physical lusts for each other, just lounging around touching each other’s exposed flesh and having a little light torso-cyst talk, when they should be daughter-centering their lives and tearing that cyst out with their bare hands, immediately.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/8/14

Oh, well, I guess Bizzy Buzz Buzz is a character whose gimmick is that she … likes to clean things? I guess that explains what the deal was with yesterday’s strip, except in the sense that the deal apparently is that Loweezy brought a child over to clean up the Smiths’ filthy house, and that seems like it can’t be right. The question is also open as to whether Snuffy Smith readers were willing to wait a day for this payoff. Meanwhile, I’m really loving Jughaid’s furious expression in panel three. “No, that … that’s not what the expression means at all! God damn it, I’m getting displaced from my slot as the cute little kid in this strip by this?”

Archie, 7/8/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because Archie and his girlfriend are of different economic classes, and the imbalance fills him with anxiety!

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Mark Trail, 5/18/14

According to Wikipedia, Jack Elrod has been involved in Mark Trail in one capacity or another since 1950. But only now, in one of his last Sunday strips, has he managed to live out his lifelong dream of getting hardcore seahorse pornography in newspapers across the country.

Archie, 5/18/14

Dear comics artists who forgot to submit their Mother’s Day strips in time: I have some good news for you!

Blondie, 5/18/14

Look, I’m just going to come out and say what we’re all thinking: this sounds like a really shitty play.

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Heathcliff, 4/21/14

The defining feature of Heathcliff’s universe is unrelenting low-grade surrealism. And the human residents of this world seem pretty inured to it all at this point: whether we’re talking about fish used as sporting equipment or word-helmets or balls of string with faces or the Garbage Ape, it’s just not anything to get worked up about. So I’m glad to see that the fishmongers, at least, are offended by this unicycle-based theft. “Oh come on this … this is absurd. Wouldn’t it have been actually faster and easier for him to grab it and run away on foot? Plus, that unicycle doesn’t even have any pedals! You’re just kicking your paws up and down in mid-air, on nothing! Damn you, Heathcliff, and your unstoppable reign of mild whimsy!”

Archie, 4/21/14

This Archie strip is clearly a modern-day joke grafted unsuccessfully onto an old one: the corny Archie versions of an iPad and Netflix and Mad Men prove that someone involved is aware of cultural developments of the ’10s, and yet the core gag makes absolutely no sense, unless some people get a secret “Netflix remote” that doesn’t let you actually look up shows by name but does let you scroll through them endlessly at random until you find the one you want. Anyway, when do you think the art from this strip originally ran? I’m thinking Jughead’s inexplicable Yankees shirt places it around 9/11, when the awful attacks on New York meant that we all had to pretend to like their sports teams, for some reason.

Dennis the Menace, 4/21/14

Ever since those hippies Woodward and Bernstein managed to screw over Nixon, Henry Mitchell has managed to blame the Washington Post for just about everything, so don’t doubt that this little fender-bender is also going to turn out to be the liberal media’s fault.

B.C., 4/21/14

Here is today’s B.C.! It’s about eating rabbit turds.