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Gil Thorp, 1/4/12

So far this basketball season storyline has been all about the epidemic of tattoo-getting among Milford’s student-athletes at a sketchy tattoo parlor that occupies the extremely small part of the Venn diagram where “Pays rent on a downtown storefront” and “Will tattoo minors without parental permission” overlap! It promises to be the most laughably ham-handed look at serious teen issues since The Great Sexting Hilarity Of Ought-Nine. Today, Coach Kaz makes a desperate plea for sanity by pointing out that his own barbed wire tattoo is a constant embarrassment to him and everyone around him. The biggest tragedy about it is that its presence makes him conflicted about rolling up his sleeves to show off his awesome biceps, so he only does that about 60 percent of the time! But anyway, he’s neglecting an important point, which is that barbed wire tattoos are tacky and gross, while getting a tattoo of your high school’s old-school sports logo is cool. Sorry, Kaz, you’re just humiliated yourself for nothing!

Crankshaft, 1/4/12

I’m pretty sure that Rose (mother of Jeff) was introduced to Crankshaft when Crankshaft (father of Pam) accidentally became marginally likable, thus offending the strip’s core anti-old-people fanbase. I’m not sure how exactly her complaining about her new bedroom smothers out anyone’s joy, but maybe Jeff just hears “something something your mother is terrible something” and goes into his rote, dead-eyed spiel.

Hi and Lois, 1/4/12

Oh, look, Lois the Realtor was just about to close a sale — not an easy task in the wake of the housing bubble bursting — when Ditto just had to talk to her about, I don’t know, his homework or his feelings or whatever. Hope you enjoy generic mac and cheese and community college, Ditto! His sister is much more practical and cold-blooded. The sight of her narrowing her eyes and muttering “She has business to do” ought to terrify you.

Ziggy, 1/4/12

Uh oh, looks like the Ziggy’s fish is finally launching his long–awaited war against the wretched air-breathers that he hates so much! I thought we had a chance, but that was before today, when we learned that the tentacled and terrible Great Old Ones were on his side.

Dick Tracy, 1/4/12

Ever since the Dick Tracy reboot, we’ve been forced to contemplate whether it’s been true to the spirit of the strip’s history, and today we have our answer. The Dick Tracy I know would never follow up “Spike Jr.’s different from most” with anything other than “and that makes him a dangerous subversive who must be neutralized.”

Archie, 1/4/12

As Archie Andrews awoke one morning after disturbing dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect.

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Crankshaft, 11/30/11

Once upon a time, the Funkyverse strips were actually whimsical and funny and not at all depressing, and you can find evidence of this embedded in some of the strips’ running gags, which now seem deeply horrible wrenched out of their original context. Remember how teenage hall monitor Les used to guard his station with a machine gun? In the old days that was just cheery absurdism, but now it would probably set up a story about a Columbine-style massacre — or, no, that’s too flashy, it’d probably actually be about how the gun went off accidentally and hit an innocent student-athlete in the leg, ending the Scapegoats’ chance for a championship and the poor kid’s promising career, leading to a downward spiral into alcoholism, suicide, etc.

Anyhoo, Crankshaft constantly destroying mailboxes out of some combination of incompetence and spite and Lena’s inedible and possibly poisonous brownies both had a similar sort of innocence about them back in the day, but in the modern Funkyverse we get to see the emotional devastation that they cause. Ha ha, that man is legitimately furious because Crankshaft ran over his mailbox, and neither Crankshaft nor the bureaucrats who employ him care, which just makes him madder! The best part of today’s strip is the expressions of genuine horror on the ’Shaft’s fellow drivers’ faces, as if somehow they’re only now realizing what a colossal dick he is.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/30/11

Speaking of the Funkyverse, today’s second panel could pretty much be its mission statement.

Six Chix, 11/30/11

It probably says something about me that this is a cartoon featuring the evil queen from Snow White talking about freezing her eggs and the thing that most baffles me about it is the setting. Is she on a date? Isn’t this talk a little heavy for a date? Or has she replaced her magic mirror with a nebbishy personal assistant, and this is the two of them unwinding after work?

Spider-Man, 11/30/11

“Yes! I finally got a staff job in the lucrative, growing print media business! And all I had to do was give my tyrannical boss a picture of my superhero identity consorting with a known criminal! I’m a genius!”

Archie, 11/30/11

Archie’s I Love The ’90s week continues! Today’s flashback memory: Remember when they started giving talk shows to ethnic people?

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Mary Worth, 11/29/11

So, whatever the Mary-gets-her-purse-stolen plot lacked in action or interest of any kind, it made up for in brevity. Mary gets her purse stolen, Mary and Toby prattle on about fraud alerts and lists of credit card numbers for a few weeks, and now we’re apparently done. The whole thing only took a month! Remember, a month in real time generally covers a period of Mary Worth story time so short that it can only be detected with extremely precise scientific instruments.

And now we’re on to a heartbreaking missing child plot, as Mary stares at poor Emily’s poster, heavy-lidded and smug (“Well, at least I didn’t have my child stolen. Really, these Smith people ought to have been more vigilant”). Personally, I’m hoping very strongly that the purse-snatching was just the set-up to the real action. What if Emily has been kidnapped by the thieves who stole Mary’s purse, because they’re assembling a Dickensian child-pickpocket ring? That sounds pretty dastardly, but you have to admit that people who dress like this are capable of anything.

Archie, 11/29/11

Oh, man, I sure hope that these ’90s Archie reruns continue to be our window into the sort of things out-of-touch adults thought kids cared about, in the ’90s! Yesterday it was teen pregnancy, and today it’s parental advisory labels on music. Just as young people say “bad” when they mean “good,” they also take warning labels as an indication that music is worth listening to! Also big with the youth in the ’90s: mullets, and t-shirts that use transitive slang verbs intransitively.

Six Chix, 11/29/11

Ha ha! It’s funny because these birds will freeze to death, because they’re poor!