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Sally Forth and Zits, 4/4/07

Man, I guess the liberal media really is determined to undermine the traditional American family. First, Disney insists on churning out movie after movie featuring single parents, and now Sally and Ted and Connie and Walt have dropped any pretense of wanting to spend time with their offspring. The Duncans have at least waited until their son was legal to work in some dead-end job before abandoning him to his fate; the Forths apparently don’t care whether Hilary forth ends up as a child prostitute or in some kind of Dickensian pickpocket ring, as long as they’re left alone to screw.

Gil Thorp, 4/4/07

Typically, Gil Thorp storylines come to a screeching halt as soon as each team is eliminated in the playdowns. (Can anyone remember the last time that any Mudlark team actually won a championship? That’s the sort of hard-hitting question Marty Moon would ask Coach Thorp if he weren’t so drunk.) After each season ends in shame and defeat, a new one begins, full of hope and new difficult-to-follow drama. That’s why I’m so pleased to see that the lady jocks of Milford are moving from basketball to softball and still buzzing over l’affaire autoclub, as the French punks in Judge Parker would say. I’m dying to know exactly what it is that Tyler is going to say to the softball team that’s going to get Brynna Antenna back into their good graces. I hope that he stands there in the outfield for a minute while they all stare at him, then clubs himself in the back of the head a few times and runs off.

On the self-clubbing tip (ew), why haven’t more of you entered the Self-Clubbing Tyler lookalike contest? I mean, how hard is it to look like this?

Well, actually, it’s really quite hard, but the lure of fortune and glory should overcome that. I’ve gotten a few entries so far — and to be frank they’re all quite strong — but nowhere near the numbers we saw for the Finger-Quotin’ Margo contest. So send in those pictures, damn it!

For Better Or For Worse, 4/4/07

I really have no desire whatsoever to wade into the twisted swamp of teenage gender politics here. Really. None. Whatsoever. But I did want to feature this strip because it contains my new hero. I speak, of course, of the dude at the far right in panel two, the one with the gap in his teeth and the eyes the size of dinner plates who’s saying “Hoooo!” I shall call him “Gap-Toothed Starey ‘Hoooo!’ Guy.” It’s clear that he needs to be brought front and center in this feature right away, and possibly given his own spinoff strip. What makes Gap-Toothed Starey “Hoooo!” Guy tick? What’s his home life like? What, other than risque gossip with his buds, makes him say “Hoooo!”? Will he be going to university? Now I can’t wait until next month’s letters are up on the Foob site on May 1; I’m really looking forward to his missive, which will be entitled “Hoooo!”

Archie, 4/4/07

Man, right up until that last panel, I was convince that the Archie-Joke-Generating-Laugh-Unit 3000 had discovered absurdist whimsy. Replace Archie and his dad with Griffy and Zippy and it would make a great deal of sense. Sadly, it all gets very bourgeois in the last panel.

Archie himself has never looked more like a baffled and angry lowland gorilla than he does in panel two.

Beetle Bailey, 4/4/07

Ignoring the ostensible joke of this strip (remarkably easy to do, since it doesn’t make a lick of sense), I have to say that there’s something unspeakably creepy about the way that all of the assembled soldiery at the ostensible celebration in the second panel is completely lacking in any indication of joy or excitement or any other normal human emotion. The affectless Beetle handing a balloon solemnly to General Halftrack is just the icing on the cake. If you told me that all of these people were about to unholster their sidearms, blast their commanding officer to bits as he stands on his makeshift podium, and then walk away in silence, I honestly wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

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Spider-Man, 3/31/07

You may have missed Friday’s thrilling Spider-Man, in which the fake Mrs. Spider-Man attempted to escape from the back seat of her captor’s car! So, thrill to this installment in which … she … is … put back into the car by her captor. This, combined with my rage earlier this week at similar non-developments, has brought about an epiphany: just about everything that happens in Spider-Man happens only to slow down the action of the strip. It’s all an endless delaying action, making the big payoff we’re going to get that much more exciting. I’ve been reading this feature daily for something like three years now, so I can tell you that said payoff had better be really good.

Panel three: Spidey, you got clocked by a brick and you’re just now wondering if this whole “spider-sense” thing isn’t a load of bunk?

Pluggers, 3/31/07

Just when you think that the whole “anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic animals uneasily sharing narrative space” scenario can’t get any more unsettling, you get today’s paean to involuntary sterilization. For obvious reasons, I try not to pay too close attention to the various family relationships among the horrifying bipedal beasts of Pluggers, so I can’t say for sure if the dog and the Chicken-Lady are kin or just acquaintances, but I think what really makes this panel disturbing is the look of mortal terror on the face of the li’l pup contrasted with heavy-lidded indifference of his feathered captor.

Would it make me an evil chardonnay-swilling elitist if I suggested that actual plugger litter control is a crude, hand-scrawled sign that reads “FREE PUPPIES,” which you put on a pole in the middle of your dog-feces-laden yard? What, it would? Oh, OK then, I won’t … what, I already said it? Damn it.

Beetle Bailey, 3/31/07

Wow, who knew that painting your own porch furniture was something that somehow lowered one’s prestige, and that, more generally, the elite of our military’s officer corps lives in a fishbowl in which every action that they and their spouses take is judged by neighbors and passersby? Who should be painting a general’s chairs? A crew of enemy combatants, on loan from Gitmo?

Family Circus, 3/31/07

“I’m helping her too, Jeffy! I’m masturbating to Internet pornography because I know that cleaning leaves her too tired to perform her marital duties. Oh, and let me borrow one of those shirts, while you’re handing them out.”

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For Better Or For Worse, 3/17/07

Oh yeah, Gerald an’ April are gonna be at home all by themselves. And they’re going to “practicing.” And I think you and I both know what they’ll be practicing. That’s right: they’ll be practicing talking like actual fifteen-year-olds, rather than robots programmed by a sixty-year-old to say things like “make some green,” “the kiddies,” and, of course, “practice.”

Beetle Bailey, 3/17/07

For those of you who don’t know, a “magnum” is a one-and-a-half liter bottle of wine or champagne, which is twice the usual size. Thus, General Halftrack is merely proposing to drink himself into a stupor so as to at least briefly obliterate from his mind the hellish reality of the marriage he hates, and is not openly contemplating some kind of murder-suicide scenario. It’s still plenty grim, though perhaps not as off-putting as his flesh-colored mustache in panel two.

Curtis, 3/17/07

Clearly there’s some kind of off-panel donkey defecation going on in the first panel of today’s Curtis, but I have to admit that I’m disturbingly fixated on Curtis’ unfinished sentence. Why do you think they call it what? What? Is there some proverb or turn of phrase or bit of folk wisdom that involves donkey poop?

Judge Parker, 3/17/07

Wow, look at the expressions of utter panic on the faces Neddy and Abbey as they grapple with the concept of having missed their stop. If rich Americans, who are clearly the best and smartest people in the world, can’t handle the complexity of public transit, how in the world do the poor foreigners who ride it consistently make it home alive? Here’s a hint, kids: the train goes both ways along its whole route. You could just get off and get back on going back the other direction until you return to your stop, and not have to wander through whatever horrifying slumscape you’ve inevitably ended up in.

If you can’t tell, I’m growing more and more contemptuous of these two with each passing moment that they manage to further botch the relatively simple task of taking the train; thus, I am now openly rooting for the sinister punk rockers, and firmly believe that our pair of innocents abroad will deserve what they get. Fortunately, the evil punks probably don’t have anything sexually deviant planned for their victims, since, despite all evidence, they apparently believe that Neddy and Abbey are men. Yes, “Ils regardent la carte,” as Mohawk Punk puts it, means “They’re looking at the map,” but the “they” is masculine; the feminine would be “elles”. I don’t mean to imply that I’m some big expert Frenchie-talker — I was in charge of parlezing the vous when we were in a remarkably punk-rocker-free Paris a few years ago, and Mrs. C. will be happy to tell you how badly that went — but the ils/elles distinction is something you literally learn in the first week of French class.

Slylock Fox, 3/17/07

The most disturbing thing about this Slylock Fox? It’s not the fact that the cow has, in a burst of unnatural strength, managed to leap across a road; nor is it the cow’s unprovoked attack on the terrified rabbit, despite the fact that two species are not traditionally antagonistic towards each other. No, it’s the heavy-lidded, unfocused expression on the cow’s face, combined with the lolling tongue. That cow is high as a kite, and I don’t just mean literally.