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Dennis the Menace, 5/24/07

Dennis’ black, shriveled heart does not understand this feeling you call “love.”

Gil Thorp, 5/24/07

The Lady Mudlark softball team ought to forget about breast cancer and get Brynna Antenna to a reconstructive surgeon who can do something about her leathery mask of a face.

Family Circus, 5/24/07

Billy will go far.

For Better Or For Worse, 5/24/07

April can destroy things with her mind.

The Lockhorns, 5/24/07

The Lockhorns’ marriage is so depressing that it defies all human understanding.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/24/07

Child labor is alive and well in Appalachia, or the Ozarks, or wherever the hell this strip is supposed to be set.

Pluggers, 5/24/07

Or died. He may well be dead.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/13/07

For reasons I can’t explain I find the hillbilly library in panel one of this strip incredibly charming. It’s not just a thatched-roof, ill-built wooden shanty — it’s a thatched-roof, ill-built wooden shanty with a wooden monumental neoclassical entrance, complete with columns, which are presumably the trunks of local trees. It’s like the cargo cults of New Guinea: these poor mountain folks, having once been exposed to book-learnin’ during the heyday of the Tennessee Valley Authority but unable to produce any themselves, built this shell of a library and filled it with fake books in hope of recapturing the city slickers’ magic.

For Better Or For Worse, 2/13/07

In the interest of keeping foobish vitriol to a minimum, I am only going to discuss Weed’s dialogue in the second panel here; frankly, it arouses quite enough vitriol to go around. Mainly it strikes me as a particularly egregious example of Things Nobody Actually Says, to wit:

• “B.Y.O.B., right?” As the lead-off to his party description, this makes it sound like “B.Y.O.B.” is shorthand for something awesome rather than something tight-fisted that 22-year-olds do. It’s possible that it means something else in Canada, though. Like, since everyone drinks domestic beer all the time up there, this is going to be an all-import party, featuring Budweiser, Yeungling, Old Milwaukee, and a variety of beers from Belgium.
• “We line up a food trough…” Dear God, if these party-goers arrive at this party to discover to their horror that the only food available is a six-foot long, three-foot deep box of Chex Mix, I will be very, very happy.
• “…score some seats…” It’s true that Weed’s bizarrely spacious loft seems to remarkably free of sitting surfaces, other than some uncomfortable-looking ultramodern couches. However, the verb “score” conjures up a pleasing image of Weed and Mike driving in to the seedy side of Toronto, looking for this guy a friend of a friend of guy they work with knows … “Yo, I got Eames, I got Barcoloungers, I got Aeron, check it out … hey, you guys aren’t narcs, are you?”
• “…wind up the tunes…” Yes, we’ll gather ‘round the Victrola! We have the latest Dixieland platters! It will be delightful!
• “…an’ ta-daah!” I’m willing to accept dropped “d”s as a fundamental aspect of the Patterson patois, but somehow I expected better from you, Weeder.

Mary Worth, 2/13/07

Take a good look at Jeff’s facial expressions in these two panels. In the first, he’s actually grinning a little, as if he’s pleased that Mary, to the extent that she’s capable of expressing human need, is begging him to come home with her. Then she reaches out to touch his face, and he recoils in anger and disgust.

Pluggers, 2/13/07

Generally speaking, a plugger will barricade himself in his bedroom, shrieking about how he’s not going to turn his motherfucking back on you for one God-damned second, you cocksucker, on the sixth day of his meth binge.

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They’ll Do It Every Time, 10/28/06

TDIET exists to give whiny, petulant voice to the sort-of-but-not-really voiceless, and thus I always assume that whatever character is best expressing that classic look of quizzical put-upon-ness is meant to stand in for whoever sent the idea in to Mr. Scaduto in the first place. Today’s episode is an elaborate fantasy in which helpful teenagers are constantly thwarted in their attempts to pull their weight in the household; thus, we can only assume that “A. White” is the helpful baseball-cap flipping, vest-wearing cool cat. The idea that a teenager might be a regular TDIET reader is truly horrifying, however. Please, please tell me that, like David Tarafa, A. White is a plucky young Curmudgeon reader. PLease?

Another possibility is that A. White is actually the silent but clearly horror-stricken mother in this scenario. She’s too terrified to stand up to her obviously rage-filled hubby on her kid’s behalf in person, so she’s hoping that his favorite cartoon feature in the Boston Herald will show him the error of his control-freakish ways.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith and Mark Trail, 10/28/06

“Yeah, Andy, we’ve got to find Molly! And by ‘we,’ I mean ‘you.’ Go find our friend! I’ll be here with the gun … you know, if you need me … or whatever.” This strip just further illustrates that there isn’t a single featherless biped in Mark Trail who’s worth a damn. I hope that after Andy and Molly take care of the brothers -ake, they turn on Mark and his friends, and then rule over Lost Forest like the King and Queen of the Beasts that they are.

I offer this Snuffy Smith for comparison, to illustrate how Mark Trail is hopefully going to play out in a few days. That “Grr!!” coming out of the bear is meant to be menacing, but comes out just sort of cute and Molly-like.

The Phantom, 10/28/06

The Ghost Who Walks Very Uncomfortably In His Tight, Tight Pants is offering a lovely ass shot in the first panel (this one’s for you, bootsybrooks!), but I’m more looking forward to next week’s thrilling factory tour! “And in here is the break room … you can see we just got a new refrigerator … now down here is the factor floor, and here’s the conveyor belt … an interesting thing about this model is that it was first designed to accommodate a five-foot-wide belt, but they’ve been able to expand it to accommodate our shipping containers, which have had to get bigger because of changing packaging regulations…”

Judge Parker, 10/28/06

God damn it, is this strip going to be about not making assumptions about people based on first appearances, and about how people who seem very different might have a lot in common, and could even become good friends? Because that’s going to blow.

For Better Or For Worse, 10/28/06

Oh, 4Evah and Eva’s public humiliation is going to be delicious.