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Archie, 7/3/07

I’m sure that somewhere out there, there’s a whole community of folks whose main sexual kink involves watching footage of teenage boys eating out of feed bags. Presumably they’ve got a Latinate name for themselves and a Web site, and have worked out the details of how a flat-faced human can actually get food out of an apparatus designed for long-nosed horses. You’d think that today’s strip would be heaven for these folks, but I’m guessing that seeing everybody’s crown-hat-wearing asexual member of the Archie gang going to down on those oats, while the oddly realistically rendered Butterfly looks on stoically, might actually bring on a hint of shame. I can’t exactly put my finger on why, but I think it might have something to do with the creepily unpunctuated “MUNCH MUNCH”.

The Phantom, 7/3/07

A while back, the Phantom went through a quasi-interesting storyline in which he attempted to prepare his whiny, spoiled kids to take over for him after he passes on to the Big Skull Cave In The Sky. Mostly this involved a series of Survivor-style physical challenges, overseen by the peaceful Bandar, who are always around to save the bacon of spandex-clad white superheroes. At no point did he offer his own flesh and blood any advice nearly as helpful to a future superhero without super powers as he does to this random girl he just fished out of the ocean. As anyone who reads this strip regularly can tell you, the Phantom mostly defeats his enemies by being kind of a dick. I look forward to the next few days, as he gives a clinic on the subject.

Blondie, 7/3/07

If only there were some kind of magical telephone that would allow Dagwood to speak to Mr. Dithers and still stay in the tub! One that — and I know this sounds like some kind of crazy magic that you would read about in Harry Potter — isn’t tethered by a cord of any kind, but transmits its signal through some kind of wireless technology. Wouldn’t that be something?

Dagwood’s bath water is a shade of pale yellow that makes me kind of uncomfortable.

Apartment 3-G, 7/3/07

What is there to say about this except: Margo, we love you! Don’t ever change!

Margo has no compassion for Lu Ann’s carbon monoxide poisoning because Margo doesn’t require oxygen to live. Her metabolism is powered by pure, unadulterated spite.

Family Circus, 7/3/07

“Or we’ll shank you, Mommy! We mean it. Hand over the fucking cookies.”

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Archie, 6/29/07

When I was a little kid, one of my favorite comic series was Richie Rich. I loved how ridiculously and cartoonishly wealthy he was; there was one particularly memorable sequence in which Richie and his family wandered through a wing of their freakishly huge mansion that they had forgotten existed, and found among other things a bathtub full of jewels. Archie’s Lodge family’s plutocratic status never quite reaches that level of caricature, but sometimes it comes close. The enormous gap in wealth between Veronica’s family and everybody else in Riverdale does lead one to wonder about the community’s economic structure: perhaps it’s all a company town owned by Mr. Lodge. The absence of a community of fellow-billionaires at least explains why Veronica goes to Riverdale High with the plebes: there aren’t enough rich kids to sustain an elite private school, and education at home with a governess has sadly fallen out of style.

At any rate, you’d think that the Lodges could at least afford a secluded private beach that wasn’t within binocular-viewing distance of the grubby seashore where the masses hang out. From the looks of it, they can’t be more than a hundred yards or so from the public beach; maybe there’s just a velvet rope separating the two or something. The weird target thing in the background might explain the proximity, though: perhaps the Lodges like to pick off plebian beach-goers with a high-powered rifle for sport. Since Riverdale law enforcement consists entirely of Lodge hired goons, they can hunt this cunning human prey with impunity.

The little girl at bottom right, who is at most knee high and yet appears to be about eight, is freaking me out. MAKE HER STOP STARING AT ME!

Gil Thorp, 6/29/07

The immature among you will no doubt latch onto the phrase “I pumped you full” and have your jollies at the thought of ol’ Clambake sodomizing the student-athletes of Milford. Maybe you’ll even use it in your own classless double-entendres (“Yeah, I’d like to pump her full of misplaced confidence, if you know what I mean!”). For my money, though, the funniest thing in this strip is the narration box in panel three. If I had my druthers, every single Gil Thorp strip would include a panel that contained the phrase “Also down on himself: [Insert name of indistinguishable Milford resident here].” Soon the strip will be so consumed with self-loathing that it’ll make Funky Winkerbean seem like an Ecstacy-fuelled rave.

Family Circus, 6/29/07

Since PJ is the fourth child, if we were being realistic his baby book would actually contain his crumpled-up birth certificate stuck between two random pages and nothing else. The kids seem to have the right idea, as they clearly think of him as one of the pets.

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That promised weekend wrap-up metapost will be coming soon, but I thought you might enjoy, you know, some comics commentary or something. I had originally planned to skip over the comics from the days I was away, but of course I had to read them to catch up, and some of them just called to me, so here are the highlights of all the stuff I missed. (Sorry in advance if I step on anyone’s snark, I haven’t had time to go over the weekend’s 1000+ comments in depth…)

They’ll Do It Every Time, 6/22/07

Yeah, I know, this one’s from Friday, but faithful reader anne failed to tell me in advance that “Anne D.” was her! So, enjoy another moment in Curmudgeonly TDIET domination.

Archie, 6/23/07

You know, I don’t think we give the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000 enough credit. If you gave a mere human the task of of creating a comic strip in which a teenage boy sprays a sexy teenage girl with a hose but which is nevertheless entirely homoerotic in subtext, he or she would invariably stalk off, proclaiming loudly that such a thing is impossible. The AJGLU 3000 merely churns through data and chugs forward implacably to its programmed destination.

Crankshaft, 6/24/07

“Yeah, see, we call them that because sooner or later one of them is going to have a massive myocardial infarction right there in the booth. Ha ha! Hopefully I won’t be on duty when that happens, ’cause they’d probably make me help move the corpse.”

Mary Worth, 6/24/07

This may be the most frankly sexual Mary Worth (and is there a more disturbing four-word sequence in the English language?) in the strip’s long history. Dr. Jeff’s attempts offer up his son has a substitute object of Mary’s affections are quickly quashed. Mary then goes on at great length about her plans to pimp the junior Dr. Corey out to every woman at the party; she’s so excited at the prospect that her ascot has been knocked askew. Dr. Jeff, while obviously proud of his son’s virility and sexual fitness, expresses his concern over the young fellow’s man-whoring. To cap things off, we get the image of a bee pollinating a flower, soon to fly off to another, illustrating Drew’s “love ’em and leave ’em” policy in one of the most discomfort-inducing metaphorical fashions possible (presumably instead of spreading pollen from blossom to blossom, he brings chlamydia instead). Will Vera’s womanly parts be the hive that will trap this bee with its sweet, sweet honey? Stay tuned!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/24/07

The most awesome thing about this Rex Morgan is that every single thing that Hugh is saying is in fact 100 percent demonstrably true, and yet he’s being drawn like a paranoid lunatic drama queen. Panel four, in which he waves his highly trained pointing figure around while he stares goggle-eyed and shouts accusations at nobody in particular, with June rolling her eyes in contempt, is particularly choice. Heather can only defuse the situation by again busting out the “Boo hoo my poor rich husband is dead or possibly floating in the icy North Atlantic” waterworks, which strategy will presumably have diminishing returns.

Gil Thorp, 6/25/07

OH MY GOD CLAMBAKE IS A FRAUD! I’m more than a little embarrassed to admit that I didn’t see this coming at all. I’m looking forward to the shocking revelation that not only was he never in the Negro Leagues, but he’s really just a Greek guy with a good tan!

Sally Forth, 6/25/07

I swear to God, the first time I looked at this, I though Sally’s thought balloon read “I wonder how high I could get before losing my job.”

Ralph, meanwhile, is fooling nobody by poking at a keyboard that isn’t attached to anything. “Easy Ralph … easy … she’ll forget you’re here in a minute … then uncross her ankles … that’s right … any minute now…”

Wizard of Id, 6/25/07

Ha ha! Id is an absolute monarchy and the king’s power isn’t checked by any other institution or law, so he can order the gruesome torture of any of his subjects for the slightest of insults! Ha! The press secretary’s arms have probably both popped out of their sockets, and he’ll die in agony over a series of days! Ah, whimsy.

Gasoline Alley, 6/26/07

Gasoline Alley has been so breathtakingly dull lately, what with plots about sleep apnea and tinnitus by turns, that I haven’t felt the urge to note its continued existence for the last seven months. Today looks promising, however, as it seems to herald the beginning of a new story about how awful it is when black people move into the neighborhood.