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Shoe and B.C., 3/26/13

Elementary school test questions as setups to jokes in comic strips: most played out cliché on the comics page, or mostest played out cliché on the comics page? I guess I shouldn’t complain about accuracy when the students being tested are anthropomorphic bird-people and/or sentient ants, but I do question the quality of instruction in the bird and ant educational systems. In Shoe, Skyler’s cynical, heavy-lidded expression in panel two shows that he understands what a bizarrely open-ended and unanswerable question he’s been presented with, presumably by whatever over-eager art teacher also thought that art puns based on a catchphrase from a 17-year-old movie would get elementary school kids enthusiastic about learning. The ant-child, meanwhile, in an act of defiance over what appears to be a test of his knowledge of old sayings that are actively incorrect, fills in the blanks with a plea for death. Frankly, these questions are both making a good case for a uniform, standardized testing regime with questions developed by government bureaucrats, if these are the locally-directed alternatives.

Mark Trail, 3/26/13

Maybe Mark does love Rusty after all? In order to perpetrate his completely misguided rescue scheme, he’s been forced to not verbalize a sentence he’s formed in his mind and confine it to a thought balloon instead, in what must be a superhuman effort on his part.

Spider-Man, 3/26/13

DAREDEVIL: “And that’s where attorney Matt Murdock comes in!”

SPIDER-MAN: “Wow! This I gotta see!”

[SEVEN HOURS AND HUNDREDS OF LEXISNEXIS SEARCHES LATER]

SPIDER-MAN: “Oh, man, was I ever wrong about this.”

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Gasoline Alley, 12/21/12

As usual, I haven’t been keeping you up on Gasoline Alley’s desultory antics, so let me just do so now very quickly: li’l Boog has been persecuted by bullies, including one nicknamed “Bear,” and they lured him out to the woods to beat the crap out of him, but then an actual bear showed up, and now we get to today where, it is revealed, Boog speaks the secret language of bears, and can command them to do his bidding. Did he learn the ursine tongue when his neglectful grandfather let a bear carry him off, years ago? Probably! But rather than satisfyingly going all 2 Kings 2:23-25 on these kids, Boog the Bearomancer just urges this vicious grizzly to make nice with his “friends”, who have been nothing but mean to him. Unless a crippling sense of shame is a crueler punishment than bloody dismemberment?

Spider-Man, 12/21/12

Do I have an unreasoning hatred of Newspaper Spider-Man? Maaayyyybe. I was all set to go on an unhinged rant about this strip’s dastardly use of “heist” as a transitive verb — a usage I had never heard before — but fortunately I looked it up first. Turns out the use of the word as a verb actually predated its use as a noun, by about 10 years! It’s a variation of “hoist,” and was first used as a slang term for shoplifting in the 1920s. So even the world’s crappiest superhero comic can still teach me things about etymologies, which are among my favorite bits of language trivia. Thanks, Newspaper Spider-Man!

Better Half, 12/21/12

Harriet’s friend is way too sleepy for sex.

B.C., 12/21/12

Having trouble getting into the Christmas spirit? Here’s a cartoon about Santa having trouble not pooping his pants!

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Crock, 12/9/12

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think Crock is being portrayed as too cartoonishly evil here. I mean, obviously it’s well established that he’s a villainous, petty dictator, but surely he’s enough of a realist to know that the local religious authorities aren’t going to be actively preaching sin and filth like they’re the Church of Satan or something. Shouldn’t he be pleased that the local priest is going old school and promising to use his money to punish and degrade the church’s enemies, instead of going in for some kind of touchy-feely love-thy-neighbor crap like feeding the poor or something?

B.C., 12/9/12

Plans for a lucrative B.C. Babies franchise where abruptly scuttled when the terrifying character designs were revealed. “So, if we make their arms and legs even stubbier, and glom them onto impossibly squat torsos, and remove their necks, that’s cute, right? Kids will want those dolls?”

Garfield, 12/9/12

You know, Garfield gets a bad rap among comics snobs, but anything that teaches kids that Santa is really a terrifying demon-thing waiting to grab you from behind and drag you down into a terrifying hell-dimension is all right in my book.

Luann, 12/9/12

Left to their own devices, Brad and TJ have turned their backs on God and started worshipping Mammon full-time.