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Momma, 9/27/14

Today’s Momma is a master class in whiplash, moving from clunky, painfully artificial dialogue clearly meant to set up a joke in the first two panels to gibbering madness in panel three. I guess Momma is doing an exaggerated “hands up” gesture to make it clear she’s responding to Francis’s monetary request neither freely nor cheerfully. But what are we to make of the young men’s dialogue? Francis is only thinking his, and with the darkened bottom of the thought balloon that designates gloom in this strip. “Never mind, Normy,” he muses. “I never wanted you to see this. I didn’t want you to know that this is how things really are in this house.” Normy, meanwhile, similarly troubled, mutters “I dig you…” presumably in reluctant admiration of Francis’s elder-terrifying fundraising techniques.

Mark Trail, 9/27/14

You might think Mark is being awful cold to the obviously smitten Lori, looking at her expressionlessly as she weeps and telling her that he really has nothing to do with her situation and that she should “take care of herself.” But that’s pretty much how he treats his wife, so!

B.C., 9/27/14

Remember when Johnny Hart was alive and B.C. did strips mocking the concept of evolution? I guess you could say that under new management, the strip has … evolved. UGH NO SORRY I EVEN SAID THAT IT WAS TERRIBLE

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Mark Trail, 6/30/14

Whoops, looks like I misinterpreted the relationship between Lori and Chris earlier — they aren’t a mismatched good gal/bad guy couple, but rather a good gal/bad guy safari buddy pair, in which the bad guy wants more, probably because he’s bad. Tonight Lori is letting Chris down extremely not-easy: she’d be perfectly willing to look past his ruined finances and his life-destroying gambling problem if only she felt even the slightest bit of romantic attraction for him, which, she can’t emphasize enough, she does not. Ha ha, Chris, feel free to think that Lori has “fallen” for asexual weirdo Mark Trail over the past six hours that she’s known him and that’s why she doesn’t want to be your girlfriend! But that’s not it at all. It’s you! It’s just that you’re terrible and nobody could possibly love you!

Shoe, 6/30/14

While traditionally birds and reptiles have been seen as different classes within the animal kingdom, over the past few decades biologists have redefined their taxonomies based on evolutionary descent rather than physical characteristics. Since birds are descended from dinosaurs, the distinction between birds and reptiles is thus false. Crocodiles and alligators, for instance, are more closely related to birds than they are to lizards or turtles. What I’m trying to say here, lady, is that you’re a bird and your feet are scaly and clawed and maybe you shouldn’t be so self-loathing about it.

B.C., 6/30/14

He’d never been fishing before, so he didn’t really know what to expect. Certainly he wasn’t anticipating that he’d get to sweet-talk and then make love to a fish. Not that he was complaining, mind you.

Heathcliff, 6/30/14

The cat wig business is great ha ha ha I have literally no idea what’s happening here or what it could possibly mean

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Mary Worth, 6/18/14

Oh, hey, here’s a real thing that’s happening in Mary Worth: neglected little Olive is, we are told in the words of the omniscient narration box, literally receiving a revelation from a shining angel of the Lord. I mean, sure, we could’ve dismissed the pagan vision of flower fairies as just being a product of an overactive imagination, but this seems pretty straightforward: Olive is the instrument of God on Earth, come to deliver us His message. The main drama of this storyline will thus be Mary’s seething resentment over not being the Chosen One. One assumes that she will eventually take on the role of St. Paul to Olive’s Jesus, doing the work to found an organization and massaging the original message to her liking once the Prophet has been conveniently taken out of the picture.

Beetle Bailey, 6/18/14

On first reading this thoroughly baffling strip, I guessed that “Queen of Hurleyburg” was some kind of archaic idiomatic phrase describing a stuck-up person, like “Queen of Sheba,” that would be familiar to the 70-and-up crowd that makes up Beetle Bailey’s core readership. But “Queen of Hurleyburg” resulted in zero Google hits; instead, it seems (according to this four-year-old Usenet discussion thread) that Hurleyburg is the town that is immediately outside the gates of Camp Swampy, and, though I would have thought it was under the jurisdiction of the United States, it has apparently set itself up as an independent monarchy. General Halftrack is now on foreign soil, and without a status of forces agreement in place between the U.S. and Hurleyburg, he may find himself quickly tried and summarily executed for lèse-majesté.

Apartment 3-G, 6/18/14

Because I read the comics so you don’t have to, I went back and checked: we haven’t seen Tommie since June 6, haven’t seen Margo since May 10, and haven’t seen Lu Ann since April 29. Will any of the inhabitants of the titular Apartment 3-G ever appear again? Will they eventually fade into the strip’s history, making occasional appearances like Barney Google in the strip that still bears his name, while the main drama focuses entirely on Carol, and her love for absent Jack, and her sidekick Freddy who is a … possum? Let’s say possum.

B.C., 6/18/14

Unlike Mary Worth, B.C. does not see employee-employer relationships as mutually beneficial.