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Website technical thingie note: Hey all, I’ve tweaked the formatting for the site again, so if things look really wonky, you may need to reload the page while holding down the shift key, and if that doesn’t work, you might need to clear your browser cache.

Dennis the Menace, 4/7/14

OK, so I get that if you came up with a joke about “what if the Venus de Milo wanted to do some texting, but she couldn’t? eh? eh? because she hasn’t got any arms? eh?” and you had a nationally syndicated comic panel where your jokes could go, this would be hard to resist. That said, there’s a lot of setup to this joke that has to be glossed over, with the most important aspect being that the Venus de Milo is in the Louvre, which means that the Mitchells, who have never been seen before doing anything more exotic than driving to tourist traps in their station wagon, have packed up Dennis and taken him to France. I feel like we were deprived a number of potential gags of various menacing levels here — Dennis sullenly resists Margaret’s attempt to teach him even a rudimentary amount of French, Dennis announces at the TSA checkpoint that he’s packed something dangerous and/or alive in his suitcase, Dennis loudly says “But dad, he doesn’t look like a frog at all!” in front of a Frenchman Henry is trying to impress, etc. Honestly, the fact that they’re standing in front of a topless statue means that a Dennis-makes-reference-to-human-sexuality-and-everyone-is-uncomfortable is a much more likely and entertaining scenario here than some dumb texting joke.

Hagar the Horrible, 4/7/14

So it appears that, while concubinage was common in early Norse society, Vikings didn’t really practice polygamy except at the very top of the social pyramid, and certainly Hagar, the leader of a smallish and incompetent war band, doesn’t qualify. Nevertheless, this strip is an interesting look at how attitudes might differ in a culture where marriages are thought of not primarily as a romantic attachment between two people but as a basic unit of economic production.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/7/14

Oh, it looks like Jess is going to take another stab at making a movie about her dad, John Darling! She has to refer to him as “my dad, John Darling” whenever she brings him up, because she only brings him up every year or so. Anyway, today she acknowledges that all human endeavor is basically a race against the final destruction of our planet, a race that can seem easy to lose when you’re smothered under a heavy blanket of depressive torpor.

Better Half, 4/7/14

At last, Stanley has found a phone sex line that caters to his fairly specific needs.

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Shoe, 4/3/14

The workings of the human mind are mysterious and arbitrary. My own particular mind, for instance, struggles to remember the identities of the advanced hominids in B.C., but uses valuable neurological space to retain the names and schticks of each and every one of the bird-people of Shoe. Loon, for instance, is a sort of noble fool character whose jokes often revolve around his simplistic misunderstandings of life events. Thus, despite Roz’s Goggle Eyes of Murderous Rage here, I think we’re supposed to read his statement not as cruelty but as a harmless literal interpretation of a metaphorical product name. Still, he seems awfully sanguine for someone who casually believes that a substance exists that makes face-flesh invisible and, when applied properly, leaves its wearer’s brain and sinus cavities visible to anyone who wants to take a look.

Beetle Bailey, 4/3/14

I’ve never been in the military and I’m not a gun guy, so I could be wildly off-base on this, but my guess is that Sarge is less mad about Gizmo’s unauthorized but high-tech modifications to his rifle and more about his appalling attitude towards weapons safety, since he appears to be casually pointing the barrel without really looking in the direction of his fellow soldiers (and, more specifically, in the direction of Sarge’s crotch).

Funky Winkerbean, 4/3/14

Last year we breached the narrative space-time barrier between Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean, two strips existing in the same universe but 10 years apart, and reality wasn’t torn to shreds, so we have more of that to look forward to, I guess? It appears that the current dullsville “Cory’s mom looks is trying to complete his comic book collection while he’s in Afghanistan” plot is going to dovetail with the even snoozier Crankshaft “Jeff finds his beloved comic books in the attic” storyline (for certain limited definitions of “story”) from earlier this month. Glad you enjoyed those comics again, Jeff! In ten years, your daughter is going to sell them to some lady. Anyway, for everyone who reads Crankshaft and hates its title character, the good news we get today is that 10 years in his future he’s ranting and raving in a squalid old folks’ home somewhere, where nobody’s listening to him.

Pluggers, 4/3/14

PLUGGERS WERE USED TO THINGS BEING ONE WAY BUT NOW THEY’RE ANOTHER WAY WHY ARE THINGS ALLOWED TO CHANGE WHHHYYYYYYY

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Beetle Bailey, 3/9/14

Today’s strip is a harrowing tale of what happens to a character stuck for more than 60 years in the highly structured and repetitive world of a peacetime military base/a comic strip. Offered the opportunity to spend some unstructured time without his commanding officer, there’s literally only one concrete idea Beetle can come up with: see how many chocolate milkshakes he can ingest. Panel five, in which he bumps up against the limits both of his stomach volume and his imagination, is one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen.

Crankshaft, 3/9/14

Nobody likes Crankshaft or his family, for obvious reasons. Though they still get invited to social functions out of obligation, their hosts generally go out of their way to let them know how unwelcome they actually are.

Six Chix, 3/9/14

Here is today’s Six Chix! It’s about snowman cock.