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Mark Trail, 5/14/10

Even I’m not so heartless as to crack wise about sassy getting hit by a car yesterday. However, now that we know Sassy is STILL ALIVE and about to be taken to the vet by this overalled hero, I do want to hold up for derision Mark’s increasingly callous dismissals of Rusty’s wholly justifiable fears. Could this storyline finally reveal Mark as the unfeeling monster that he is? “Relax, Rusty, she’s probably trying to dig that old rabbit out of a hole! Or digging her own grave, because she’s going to die soon, alone and in pain! One of the two. Ha ha, this horse has a soft nose!”

B.C., 5/14/10

This might seem hard to understand in the setting of the strip, but remember that this is caveman times, and the tiny band of eight or so human characters we see in the strip are the only representatives of H. sapiens on the planet. Britain hasn’t even been invented yet, so pretty much all you have to do to create it is write “British pub” on a rock.

Luann, 5/14/10

“Come on, you don’t plan a thing like that! You just push down obsessive, intrusive thoughts about it and swear to yourself and everyone else that you’ll never do it, until you finally just let yourself get carried away in the moment and do it without protection with someone you’re not really comfortable with! It’s like you don’t know anything about how sex works, Tiffany!”

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Hi and Lois, 4/23/10

Comics aren’t just casual fun entertainment; they can also help you grapple with everyday but still painful life dilemmas. For instance, what if your son, who you love very much and who you only want to help succeed in life and be happy, turns out to be a terrible, miserable failure? Worse, what if he’s unable to recognize his own incompetence, and runs to you, his loving, nurturing parent, for the emotional affirmation that he’s learned to expect from you? How do you react? Hi and Lois doesn’t claim to have the answers, but Hi’s frozen, heartbroken expression in the final panel at least assures you that, if you’ve ever found yourself face to embarrassing face with your useless hump of an offspring, you’re not alone.

Dennis the Menace, 4/23/10

Making sex-themed jokes about cartoon kids is a little discomfort-making even for me, but then I’m not the one who used as the punchline for my child-populated comic a Las Vegas marketing slogan carefully constructed to evoke images of binge drinking and strip clubs, am I? Anyway, the most icky thing about this comic is the contrast between how pleased Margaret looks and how angry Dennis is at the thought that the smooching news might get out. Looks like he’s gearing up to be Dennis the emotional menace, am I right?

B.C., 4/23/10

Totally not at all discomfort-making or squicky to me at all is this apparent depiction of one reptile paying another for some kind of emotiono-sexual service. It’s like he’s a dominatrix, but with cuddling? And also he’s a turtle? Anyway, it’s all good clean fun!

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Funky Winkerbean, 4/21/10

Funky Winkerbean’s trip to New York featured a few moments of publishing hope for long-suffering victim Les (though surely we’ll see those dreams get squashed later), but we’ve quickly moved back to familiar territory: impotent, misplaced rage. Actually, “rage” is the wrong word: the dialogue seems rage-y enough, but the slouchy body language and numb faces denote a total absence of the passion that is rage’s necessary prerequisite. I stand by the impotence, though.

And the misplacement. There are any number of greedy, amoral morons who can be blamed for our current macroeconomic state of affairs; but, assuming that Funky is maundering about the failure of the Montoni’s franchise in New York to take off, I think it’s unlikely that, even in the best of economies, crappy midwestern pizza would have been a big hit in a city well known for its many well-established and much-loved pizza vendors. It’s not like Goldman Sachs was nefariously creating synthetic CDOs based on pizza futures and then betting against them.

Beetle Bailey, 4/21/10

Towards the end of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, God is briefly depicted as an enormous flaming aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The God of Beetle Bailey is much less impressive, consisting merely of the tiny and non-fiery Name of the strip’s creator. Today, God is attempting to make Beetle sound like someone you might actually want to go on a date with, with mixed results.

Mark Trail, 4/21/10

From my long and dedicated observation of the fauna in this strip, I’ve learned that when a senator starts emitting visible sweatballs, he is on the verge of a heart attack. This is a good illustration of the moral difference between our two rival lawmakers: Senator Good Senator only suffered a cardiac event after engaging in righteous fisticuffs with some longhair, while Senator Bad Senator’s heart is going south as soon as he realizes that arrest and/or punching might be in his future.

B.C., 4/21/10

Ha ha! The bird is afraid of being killed and eaten, but the snake thinks that the bird is afraid of being sexually assaulted!

Marmaduke, 4/21/10

Yeah, so, uh, this happened. Let’s never speak of it again, shall we?