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B.C., 4/12/13

Poetry is in essence an auditory medium, meant to be heard, and if that means that sometimes you have to sacrifice ease of comprehension to euphony, so be it! In unrelated news, the poem that Wiley is writing in today’s B.C. is confusing and also sounds stupid when you read it aloud. Anyway, ladies, don’t look get all uppity and dress too sexy at the gym, or you’re a whore who’ll lose your boyfriend, I guess? You don’t want to lose your boyfriend! He sounds like a real prize, what with all his opinions about your sexy gymwear.

Shoe, 4/12/13

See, because “carbon footprint” is a thing, but what if it were … carbon buttprint, eh? Wouldn’t that be funnier? Because of butts? I actually am enjoying Shoe’s violent temper tantrum, so it pains me to point out that any joke about “carbon buttprints” that doesn’t involve farts is garbage.

Spider-Man, 4/12/13

Kingpin is a busy CEO who doesn’t have time to travel to every dark alley in the city to personally taunt every superhero dosed with his terrifying mind-control gas. That’s why he turned to Cisco’s range of innovative telepresence solutions! Cisco’s Autonomous Hovering TerrorScreen® will navigate city streets along with your henchmen, beaming video and audio over encrypted private networks to your office/lair. You’ll be able to issue commands to your new willing slave and then get back to managing the rest of your diverse enterprise — all without stepping outside. Cisco: Tomorrow Starts Here™!

Funky Winkerbean, 4/12/13

Ha ha, Les got a big check because his sad book about his dead wife is going to be turned into a movie on basic cable, and then he got a boner! This plot is already so much more traumatizing than I could have possibly imagined.

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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!