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Family Circus, 1/24/10

I’m pretty sure that the panels here have been both mislabelled and put in the wrong order. Our story begins in panel two, which is the moment when Mommy realizes that she needs to leave her kiddie-vomit-smeared life behind her, forever. In panel one, she wakes up alone in a single bed in some fleabag hotel, grateful to be forever free of her suffocating family. Among the responsibilities she’s left behind is hygeine, and in panel three her fellow elevator passengers take disapproving note of her noticable body odor. To her, that funk smells like freedom, sweet freedom.

Beetle Bailey, 1/24/10

The reasons why the soldiers of Camp Swampy would want to stand by and cheer as their seargant suffers physical pain should be obvious. But what’s with the rigamarole with his being ordered into the dentist chair? Does it serve any purpose other than to turn the perfectly servicable daily strip represented by the bottom row of panels into a Sunday strip? My guess is that odor of Sarge’s decaying teeth and putrefying gums was becoming so noticeable and distracting that his dental health had to be improved in the interest of maintaining unit cohesion.

Funky Winkerbean, 1/24/10

“Yeah, you kids today and your moral ambiguity! In our days, heroes were heroic, like Speedball, who’s named after an awesome combination of heroin and cocaine!”

Panels from Dennis the Menace, 1/24/10

Sorry, Dennis, the only way these lines might qualify as “menacing” would be if afterwards you headed down to the graveyard to find some well preserved corpse bits to piece together.

Panels from Rex Morgan, M.D., and Judge Parker, 1/24/10

Fun fact that newcomers to the soap opera comic scene might not know: Judge Parker and Rex Morgan have different artists, but are both written by the same guy, Woody Wilson. I’m assuming that his scripts for both strips today included prominent use of the phrase “ass crack.”

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Beetle Bailey, 1/16/10

I guess General Halftrack is supposed to be a one-star general — he has a single star on his uniform, anyway, and it’s kind of hard to imagine him getting promoted. It now appears that he has chosen this star as his logo, as if he were a supervillain or some kind, buying an enormous and hideous stained glass star window for his front door to boast of his status as a general officer. This may also be the origin story of the general’s starry pajamas, although those may indicate that he secretly harbors fantasies of someday becoming a 147-star general.

Also, have you noticed that very few people send personal letters anymore, which means that bills and bulk mail make up of most of what you get in your mailbox? That’s pretty funny, right? Right?

Apartment 3-G, 1/16/10

Is it possible that Ruby’s friend/casual sex partner Lyle is a bit player from Mark Trail? Because she seems to have acquired that strip’s random bolding syndrome. Remember, kids, always use protection when getting intimate with a cartoon character, because you too can fall victim to the heartbreak of RBS.

Panel from For Better Or For Worse, 1/16/10

Speaking of getting intimate, if you feel like your overactive libido is interfering with your life, why not print this panel out and look at it whenever you need to make those erotic feelings vanish in a puff of disgust? Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go wash my mustache for the next nine hours.

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Beetle Bailey, 1/10/10

Any catalog of complaints from General Halftrack’s various body parts that does not include a plea for a mercy killing from his much-abused liver is a joke and a fraud. One can only assume that the poor organ is wholly comatose at this point, or that it possibly expired in blessed relief years ago.

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/10/10

With today’s throwaway panels, it appears that Snuffy Smith is moving away from retreaded hillbilly humor and towards an interesting new creative avenue: providing absurdly elaborate but almost realistic replies to the set-ups of classic vaudeville-era jokes. “This guy on the street told me he hadn’t had a bite in weeks … so I said ‘You might want to check out this new fish place on 33rd Street, the halibut is to die for!” “Take my wife … to that Philip Glass retrospective! It’s not my thing, but I think she’d really enjoy it!”