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Slylock Fox, 9/28/08

Dum de dum de dooo, what do we have here … why, it’s Slylock Fox, engaged in light-hearted math-based banter … with a pig … who’s working at … a … deli counter? Right next to a case that’s features distinctly pork-like offerings? This … this is an abomination! You just know that our cheerful cannibal is interested in the result of this little math puzzler because it can help him figure out how much usable meat he can get out of the hobos and lost children he lures into the supermarket after hours. The lovingly detailed deli slicer sure as hell isn’t helping, either. I wonder if our deli-man-pig maintains that creepy expression, with the frozen smile and huge, unblinking eyes, as he uses the slicer to turn his hapless victims into fine sandwich-ready meat products.

Yet more disturbing is Max’s fascination with the cheese, as he’s surely imagining the lady cow who produced it, who is kept in perverted captivity, complicated machinery hooked up to her nipples.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/28/08

Snuffy Smith more or less traffics in overwrought reaction shots. Usually, as in the second of the throwaway panels, these take the form of laughter so uproarious that it dislodges the tongue, and attempt by their sheer exuberance to make the strip’s lame jokes appear funny to someone. Even in this context, though, Elviney’s look of hat-popping horror in the final panel seems a bit much; to match it, Maw Smif ought to be pulling a blanket made of human skin out of her washbin.

Panels from Dennis the Menace, 9/28/08

Hey, everybody, you know what’s really menacing? Illiteracy! Teach a kid to read, today!

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/24/08

When I first read this comic, I missed the joke, reading the dialog of the last two panels like this:

“Really? Your dad’s a traveling salesman?”

“No, just kidding! He’s just the regular kind of dad you’d find in this blighted hillbilly shantytown: a toothless, semi-literate chicken thief with no visible means of support and a terrible gambling problem! He’s never home because he’s usually in jail, or at a whorehouse!”

I did get my head around the punchline in short order, obviously, but then, because I’m a fancy east coast urban elitist (if that wasn’t obvious from my initial interpretation), I became resentful about being befuddled by a strip about rustic morons. Damn you, you clever mountain folk!

Gil Thorp, 9/24/08

You know, if Cully Vale had been caught looming menacingly over the shattered form of one of his hapless backyard wrestling victims like monstrously large defensive back (or something?) Jeff Ponczak is doing in panel two here, he’d have been put away for life. But because Jeff’s assault took place in the context of a school-sanctioned athletic competition, he gets the cheers of thousands, and everything is A-OK! Instead, it’s the third panel of today’s Gil Thorp that’s really disturbing. Let’s count the ways!

• Jeff is gazing rapturously heavenward with the sun (or possibly the stadium lights) beaming down on his face, as if he were in a propaganda poster urging the workers and peasants to redouble their efforts to meet the goals of Stalin’s latest Five-Year Plan.
• Some sort of terrifying bandage-wrapped hand is resting on Jeff’s shoulder, as if he were being accosted by a leper or a mummy or, worse, Spider-Man.
• Jeff is being showered with approbation in the form of a series of epithets that reference his quarterback-tackling prowess, all of which will unfortunately force you to contemplate Jeff’s scrotum.

Mark Trail, 9/24/08

And with the arrival of a mustache, we now have this storyline’s sinister villain, in the form of the random white dude attached to the aforementioned mustache. I can’t wait until we find out that the “right people on our side” are the lawyers who have meticulously worked with state and local governments and environmental groups to get the permits necessary to drain the grassland and build something nice on the land legally owned by Mr. Mustache and Mr. Guy He’s Talking On The Phone To Who Probably Also Has A Mustache. “But, Mr. Trail, I think you’ll find that all our paperwork is in order…” “Paperwork does not impress me! You drained a friend of mine’s land’s neighboring wetlands!” *PUNCH*

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For Better Or For Worse, 8/22/08

A lot of my readers have been appalled by Ellie and Phil yukking it up as their father lies dying, but I think you’re missing some vital context here. This is For Better Or For Worse, where all emotions are expressed over three to five panels in the form of puns and wordplay. Making a little verbal jest, as our worried siblings do here, is the highest form of concern that anyone can express in this universe’s culture.

Ha ha, just kidding, they’re obviously terrible heartless monsters. Phil would probably be angry, but as his eyes in the final panel indicate, he’s completely baked. It’s a good thing he had time to freshen up his mustache wax before he got there.

Gil Thorp, 8/22/08

I feel like every time we see Jimmy (like here and here), he’s impossibly wide-eyed, intoxicated by either absolute power or angel dust. Today is no exception, and this comes after sitting through Elmer’s attempt to produce some kind of interminable Midwestern tribute to the work of Bela Tarr. The only way he should look like that after seeing nine hours of roadsides is if this is the kind of “roadsides” we’re talking about, and even then only because of the chafing.

The payoff here — that Jimmy will go to college because an older has-been never-was also went to college before embarking on a poverty-level semi-professional sports career — makes absolutely no sense, and is therefore the perfect capper to yet another Gil Thorp plot.

Mary Worth, 8/22/08

You may ask yourself: Why would a sexy, naturally hirsute man like Ian Cameron go through the discomfort and expense of waxing his prodigious belly so it’s all ultra-smooth? So that his wife can rub her be-swimcapped head all over it, naturally! These kids like to get freaky.

The only way my brain can accommodate the sentence “It’s never boring with you around, Ian” without exploding is to imagine that Toby is saying it an extremely sarcastic tone of voice. Or perhaps she’s pretending that she’s talking to someone interesting named Ian, like Booker Prize-winning novelist Ian McEwan or deceased Joy Division vocalist Ian Curtis.

Archie, 8/22/08

Though the dialogue is ludicrous, I think the Riverdale gang’s expressions of stunned horror pretty accurately display the reaction you’d get if you brought a severed human head into a beloved teen hangout.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/22/08

This comic didn’t make me want to gouge out my own eyes at all, right up until the part where I saw the look of coquettish satisfaction on the cow’s face.