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Beetle Bailey, 9/25/13

Probably you were hoping that Spec. Gizmo’s sex robot would a be a shameful, one-off joke that would never reappear in the comics pages or on the Internet again. Well, too bad, because you don’t live in your perfect world! You live in this world of unrelenting horror, with the rest of us. Anyway, panel one reveals all sorts of unfortunate things. For instance, when Gizmo’s robot was first unveiled, nobody had bothered to drape human clothes over its square metallic chassis, yet now it appears to be wearing some kind of exaggeratedly girly dress with a crinoline skirt, further gendering the fembot and making it a slightly more acceptable target of Chip’s sexual lusts. The mere act of clothing it can be seen as akin to teaching it a shame-based code of sexual morality, much like the one Adam and Eve learned abruptly after eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The fembot’s rudimentary ethics may be limited to sexual matters, as it seems more than willing to use its inhuman strength to work violence against humans, though perhaps this is a sign that its advanced circuitry understands the concept of consent and believes that attempts to violate its structural integrity may legitimately be met with self-defense.

Anyway, I was going to do a close reading of panel two along these same lines, but then I read “He has to turn off the work switch and press the love button” and so I went and lied down for an hour instead.

Mary Worth, 9/25/13

OK, Mary Worth: I enjoy making endless jokes about Wilbur’s sandwich obsession as much as the next person who blogs about newspaper comic strips, but I like to do it on my terms. Frankly, if you’re going to include an entire panel of the sort of filthy talk that you might expect to hear when you dial 1-900-HOT-SANDWICH, I’m going to feel a little bit baited.

Herb and Jamaal, 9/25/13

I genuinely enjoy how insanely excited our nameless white-collar drone/Heart and Soul customer looks in the first couple of panels as he sets up his joke about how meetings make you doze off, ha ha, amiright people. He’s really going the extra mile here, and I appreciate it when people put effort into their sarcasm.

Phantom, 9/25/13

“Except for a period from the 1870s, when European powers began the wars of conquest referred to as the ‘Scramble for Africa,’ until the process of decolonization really took hold in the 1960s! I mean, the British, man! I couldn’t leave a skull mark on the chins of the entire British Empire, you know what I’m saying?”

Pluggers, 9/25/13

Pluggers remember a time, now thankfully in the distant past, when they had to engage in brief bouts of physical movement every half hour or so.

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Beetle Bailey, 9/4/13

I was going to say something snide here about how if you hear the phrase “3-D printing” on the news you can’t just panic and throw it into a comic at random, you have to do a few minutes of research about what 3-D printing actually is, but then I thought: what if Gizmo has one of those 3-D printers that can create living tissue and has decided to make another version of General Halftrack, piece by piece? If nothing else, this horrible 3-D-printed abomination of science will allow us to do some good nature vs. nurture studies about terrible, crippling alcoholism.

Mark Trail, 9/4/13

Now that Mark Trail’s gotten all the punching out of the way early, the strip is free to draw out the rest of this storyline as one long, dull anticlimax. “Thanks for the tip, Dusty … it turns out it was surveyors who had been damaging our fence! They had been leaning their equipment up against it. I explained to them why they shouldn’t do that, and they apologized and said they wouldn’t do it again. Anyway, good luck catching those poachers! I’m going to go get some pancakes.”

Apartment 3-G, 9/4/13

Oh my goodness, which character from Apartment 3-G will suddenly find themselves appointed the new Lieutenant Governor of New York? Probably Tommie, right? Lieutenant Governor is about the most boring political office America has to offer, Tommie’d be perfect.

B.C., 9/4/13

Wait, none of the ant-adults in B.C. have jobs? All the stories about their work ethic are just lies!

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Beetle Bailey, 8/28/13

“I guess he’s a pile of shattered bones and mangled organs, mostly! Aw, Sarge looks kind of sad, like he vaguely regrets beating Beetle to death in a savage frenzy of violence.”

Mark Trail, 8/28/13

“That is a good job, Rusty — and speaking of jobs, isn’t about time you started contributing financially to this household? You’re not an actual blood relation, so it’s not like we have an obligation to keep feeding you free of charge. Say, I hear the new glove factory in town is looking for line workers! They’ll pay you 50 cents an hour and all the irregularly stitched gloves you can fit into a gunny sack!”

Crankshaft, 8/28/13

“I’m not really sure what Rocky Rhodes’s name is supposed to say? I guess it was meant to be punny, years back when we first introduced this character, but who can really remember now.”

Family Circus, 8/28/13

“Mommy, is Grandma a filthy foreigner? Is our bloodline tainted? Can we only be redeemed by cleansing this entire condo complex with purifying fire?”