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Family Circus, 4/7/16

I would feel sorry for that angel too! Imagine you’re a supernatural, superhuman being, and you suddenly find yourself in combat with a human being, of the sort that your kind hasn’t experienced since the days of Jacob — and this tiny troglodytic creature not only manages to overcome you, but through some unknown power steals your voice. Why, the whole structure of the universe must be under threat! You must warn God — but how, when you cannot speak or scream or even whisper?

Beetle Bailey, 4/7/16

For a strip that takes place entirely within the context of the U.S. military, Beetle Bailey has remarkably little to say about wars, which is interesting considering that the U.S. military has been engaging in one or more wars non-stop for the entirety of the last fourteen and a half years. So when you get strips like today, where warplanes shower Camp Swampy with flowers to let everyone know they’ve had a “successful mission,” which presumably means showering some other country with high explosives — well, it’s hard to know if this is some kind of biting commentary or rah-rah boosterism or just, “Hey, you know how planes usually drop bombs on people? Well, get a load of this.”

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Beetle Bailey, 3/7/16

So after a minute or so I gave up on trying to parse Sarge’s dialogue here as a joke, and then maybe 45 seconds after that stopped trying to parse it as actual sincere advice, and finally settled on just trying to figure the contexts — geographic, professional, social, whatever — in which today’s strip is taking place. Like we know from previous strips that Sarge has an office, though this one is looking more Endless Void-y than usual. But has Beetle just kind of … wandered in? To get weird, incomprehensible platitudes? From his commanding officer, who is reading them off a piece of paper, or possibly just holding up a blank piece of paper? I’m really going to have to grapple with the content of this joke to figure out what’s happening, aren’t I?

Mary Worth, 3/7/16

Aww, isn’t this sweet! Mary and Jeff are going to the Bum Boat … their place! And after that, they’ll be crashing every funeral they can, or at least I assume so based on Mary’s outfit. (In Santa Royale, crashing funerals is the closest you can get to hitting all the hottest goth clubs.)

Marvin, 3/7/16

Marvin’s usual M.O. is to mine laffs out of the title character’s constant pooping and peeing, which is gross but has a shred of respectability because, after all, he’s a baby! Pooping and peeing in a diaper is like a huge part of babies’ whole deal! But now we see the slippery slope we’ve been on all this time: if it’s OK to joke about Marvin and his butthole and what comes out of it, why not joke about his dad’s butthole now too, huh? Why not? Can you give me one good reason why not? Basic human decency, you say? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

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Hi and Lois, 3/3/16

A lot of the emotional impact of this strip is, I guess, supposed to come from the expression on Lois’s face, which is really too bad because any time spent lingering on Lois’s face is time spent realizing that she is a lumpy-skulled noseless horror. I guess … she’s poignantly thinking “Someday his hormones will start getting revved up and any hint of sex on screen will induce instant and humiliating erections, but for now he’s my little boy?” Dear God, I’m sorry, but does she have a … snout? I’m trying, I’m really trying, but I can’t.

Beetle Bailey, 3/3/16

It’s cool that Beetle Bailey has suddenly recognized the existence of craft beers and all, I guess? God forbid they discover home brewing. I don’t think I could handle jokes about hopped wort and such told next to extremely crudely drawn brewing equipment.

Dennis the Menace, 3/3/16

See, Marvin can talk about pooping and peeing on things all day and every day, but then Dennis comes along and shows him what a real menace is and does. “Is there someplace I can shit in here? Because that’s what I think of the financial system.”