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Crankshaft, 3/6/12

Despite my (too many) years of reading Crankshaft, I’ve only just at this moment realized that Keesterman, the guy whose mailbox Crankshaft is constantly destroying due to his dangerous inability to operate a schoolbus, is also one of the guys who meets Crankshaft and some other old dudes at a sad chain diner where they drink coffee and pun sullenly and probably leave stingy tips. The endless mailbox-annihilation incidents might explain why Keesterman has finally snapped, looking in panel three like he’s going to react to Crankshaft’s mild ribbing with a punch to the face, something I dearly hope we get to see over the remainder of the week, from several different angles.

Hi and Lois, 3/6/12

We’ve seen some intermittent attempts to make Hi and Lois’ marriage interesting, but frankly I think there’s much more drama to be wrung from the lives of the Flagstons’ next-door neighbors. Check out Irma’s disgruntled look in the final panel: not only is her family mired in debt, but that means that she can’t even have a nice party without it devolving into recriminations and violence, which to her is the worst indignity.

Beetle Bailey, 3/6/12

There are occasional Beetle Baileys in which our heroes (?) are fighting something called the “Red Army,” and while it’s usually clear from context that these are training exercises, it would be fun to believe that today’s strip takes place in an alternate universe where the men of Camp Swampy have been deployed into combat against the Soviet Union, and that, as you’d expect, their division has been quickly defeated and its few survivors are now being rounded up. Given the creepy fact that we see no people attached to these massive gun barrels, it’s also possible that the Red Army is a band of out-of-control military death-bots, who are making short work of their hapless biological adversaries, not least thanks to the humans’ inability to function without technology that’s controlled by the cyber-enemy.

Hagar the Horrible, 3/6/12

Lucky Eddie has blatantly stolen this joke from Groucho Marx, but I’m not going to get too upset about it because in a minute he’s going to be mauled to death by bears for his crimes.

Marvin, 3/6/12

Yesterday I praised Marvin for grappling with interesting themes and avoiding scatological content. Naturally, today’s strip features the smug hell-infant boasting that he can just shit in his pants whenever he wants.

Herb and Jamaal, 3/6/12

If you’ve enjoyed this Herb and Jamaal strip about burping, why not enjoy the four paragraphs I somehow managed to write about it, back when it first ran in 2004?

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Hi and Lois and Beetle Bailey, 3/3/12

Ha ha, it’s funny because Hi is flirting with some other lady right in front of his wife, and General Halftrack is reacting to his wife’s attempt to initiate intimacy with undisguised horror! I mean, we get it, entire staff of Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC, you find the prospect of having sex with your wives repulsive, no need to harp on it. (I was originally going to write “sex with your spouses” to cover the possibility that someone working there might be a lady or gay, but then I was thought about the last 30+ years of Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois and Hagar the Horrible and decided, nope, “wives” it is.)

Apartment 3-G, 3/3/12

Now here’s a couple with a healthy sex life! I almost wrote “a healthy relationship,” but then I remembered their widely divergent attitudes about the child they’re about to have together. At least they still like to get it on! Seriously, I assume that whoever hacked into the servers of the market research company that’s asking newspaper readers about what they want to see in Apartment 3-G and replaced all the survey responses with “PREGO PORN” is one of my readers, and I just want you to know that you’re my hero.

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Jumble, 2/22/12

Oh, look, beloved Jumble artist Jumble Jeff appears to have put me in prison, again! Fun fact about me: one of my few recurring nightmares is that I’m about to be sent away to prison for some indeterminate crime, and I’m full of dread and terror about it. That’s probably why I developed my jailhouse strategy of becoming a prison librarian, which was dashed a few years ago when I learned that prison librarians are actually employees of the local library system and not prisoners themselves. This cartoon simultaneously raises another possible strategy — becoming a member of a prison drama club — and dashes it, as “creative differences” clearly would lead to a shiv to the gut in short order.

Rex Morgan, 2/22/12

Leave it to Rex Morgan, M.D., to somehow bring organ sales into the plotline in the most simultaneously gross and boring way! Yesterday we learned that Mabel offered part of her liver to her ex-(husband? lover? still haven’t figured this out) if he would move back in with her and stop drinking. I think Rex has this dynamic 100% wrong! She’s not selling her liver-chunk, she’s bribing someone with it! Is it a crime to bribe someone with a chunk of your liver? Is this all our Congress has to do with its time, making it illegal for us to literally slice apart our internal organs and offer them to old drunks in exchange for love and cohabitation and sobriety? I guess democracy really has failed, by God.

Mary Worth, 2/22/12

There’s nothing I like better after a big promotion than putting my hands behind my head, leaning back, thinking evil thoughts, and then somehow rearranging my facial features so I look like a completely different person! (Ha ha, just kidding, I’ve never gotten a “big promotion” in my life.) How do you think Nola “earned” that office, hmm? Was it a sex thing? A cruelty thing? A cruel sex thing? I’m betting on cruel sex thing, myself.

Beetle Bailey, 2/22/12

Believe it or not, this Beetle Bailey strip actually works on a number of levels! If you want to get to its intended destination — ha ha, General Halftrack is extremely old — you could laugh along with Miss Buxley’s evocation of an archaic form of rifle that she implies the General once fired in combat, or you could just notice that he appears to have dozed off in his office chair in the middle of the workday.