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Beetle Bailey, 6/23/11

If you’d asked me before today, I would have sworn that nothing could be more disturbing than seeing the Halftracks attempting to spice up their erogenous life with costumed role-play. But in fact, it’s the Army shrink’s suggestion that the General cast his mind back to the very sexiest fantasies he had as a little boy that has me so very thoroughly skeeved out.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/23/11

Good thing the meddlin’ revenooers never come to Hootin’ Holler anymore, as they might inform their colleagues at the EPA about Loweezy’s plan to clear out sensitive wildlife habitat! But even though I’m a coastal elitist, I have to admit that, upon realizing that the local amphibians had begun to master human speech, my first instinct would be to wage a war of extermination against them.

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Mary Worth, 6/19/11

“When?” we’ve all been calling out, for weeks now, as poor Drew has the living daylights stalked out of him by Liza. “When will the meddling start? When?” Well, this is where it starts: “Drew … let me see what I can do.” Think of the all the horror passing through Mary’s vast and cool and unsympathetic unsympathetic intellect during that ellipsis. Being cruel to Liza is not an option for Drew, but he’s not afraid to farm the cruelty out. He may be off to Vietnam at the end of this thing anyway, just to avoid the carnage.

Panels from Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/19/11

Every Rex Morgan storyline begins with awesome supporting characters before eventually petering out into dullness, and this one is no exception. I’m already falling in love pretty hard with this bickering mother-daughter pair with bad emotional boundaries. Check out those icily arched eyebrows and model-quality cheekbones! I certainly hope that one of the promised loser boyfriends show up at an inappropriate time to the consternation of everyone, especially Rex.

Panel from Beetle Bailey, 6/19/11

Meanwhile, Sarge has been possessed by demons.

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Mark Trail, 6/12/11

Do you hear that, Young People? Mark Trail is on to you, and your inveterate littering. And he has hard data proving that today’s kids are the worst, supplied by independent scientific researchers who were not at all biased by the massive grant that they received from the Foundation For Extolling The Virtues Of The Elderly And Demonizing Anyone Born After 1968. Why, look at that young punk in the final panel, who, following the latest hip youth craze that he got from the Internet or FM radio or whatever, has driven out the forest just so he can dump garbage everywhere. Fortunately for justice, Mark learned from yesterday’s strip how to impale a man with a word balloon, and so that pile of trash will be the last thing this miscreant ever sees.

Beetle Bailey, 6/12/11

The throwaway panels from today’s strip contain material for a cheap “Beetle refuses to submit to Sarge’s advances on the Lord’s Day” joke, but I’m more intrigued by the action in the main sequence of the strip. Sgt. Lugg’s advice that Sarge use “a little humor” has failed spectacularly, mostly because Sarge, inhabiting as he does the laffs-free Beetle Bailey universe, has no idea what “humor” could possibly be like.

Crankshaft, 6/12/11

Oh, look, Crankshaft is an architectural critic now! Note the use of italics: Crankshaft the strip is cracking wise about post-modernist architecture; Crankshaft the character is just sitting sullenly on the couch watching the television trash Frank Gehry. Because much as the strip’s creators might want to criticize Gehry’s work, they realize that Crankshaft having an opinion that couldn’t be expressed as some wildly inappropriate pun would be way too out of character for the readers to handle.