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Beetle Bailey, 3/15/12

Look, I’m just a simple, privileged man who’s managed to get to the age of 37 without every actually peeling his own potatoes, mostly by being so obviously inept at such things that nobody’s ever assigned me this task and lord knows I’m not volunteering, but even I know that the inside of the potato is white while the peels are brown, so I guess I’m one up on the King Features coloring gnomes. Still, I’ve also never seen a pile of potato peels form into a nebulous demon-head that will probably kill us all, so maybe the color situation is not what I should be focusing on.

Apartment 3-G, 3/15/12

Margo thinks Scott isn’t getting enough love, so she wants to help? NOOOO MARGO WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOOOOUUUU

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Apartment 3-G, 3/12/12

“Come on in, Scott! I was just fixing supper. Care to join me?”

“Thanks, Margo. That looks great! I am of course talking about that ill-defined piece of brown vertical furniture behind you. I can’t see any food from where I’m standing.”

“Don’t worry, Scott, I’ll just wave my hand and the table with all the food on it will magically appear behind us! Obviously transporting matter across space like this has some dimension-warping properties, so you may feel some slight discomfort as our heads and limbs change size relative to the rest of our bodies. Don’t worry, the effect is purely temporary. Anyway, supper is just some pasta, spices, and veggies with a fresh loaf of artisanal bread! Even though I was planning on eating alone, I’ve spread all the dishes out across this enormous table because it makes me feel more dominant. Also, I’ll just be eating the pasta out of the pot so I don’t have to wash another dish.”

“I confess, I never pictured you cooking! Usually in my masturbatory fantasies you’re giving me specific orders on how to best service you sexually or just lounging around the house naked. I also confess that I never pictured you with a freaky, elongated neck, but that’s sort of turning me on.”

Pluggers, 3/12/12

It is of course not a surprise that every surface in a plugger’s house is covered with the various pills and salves that they need to live, but I’m a little surprised to see the strip name-check a particular pharmacy chain. Frankly, pluggers always struck me as too canny and cheap to have much brand loyalty. Do you suppose CVS paid for this product placement? If so, I dearly hope that whoever signed off on that decision was fired post-haste for extreme incompetence.

Mary Worth, 3/12/12

Is it possible that poor simple Toby is actually ahead of Mary here? That she knows that Nola is irredeemable, and now is only good for gossip? “Enough of your tiresome bourgeois morality, Mary, what did she divulge? Don’t spare a single juicy detail!”

Beetle Bailey, 3/12/12

Yawn, another Beetle Bailey about how Sarge likes to eat a lot and OH GOD OH GOD HIS MOUTH OH GOD HE IS COMING

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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?