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Gil Thorp, 8/25/06

A few weeks ago, I pondered the ethics of enjoying Marty Moon’s spiral down to rock bottom. Now that he’s gotten there — passing out drunkenly in your car because you lost a four-figure sum to a Ben Franklin lookalike playing golf being pretty much the lowest point of spiritual debasement I can come up with — I stand by my conclusion that it’s not just ethical, but mandatory. I particularly like how he goes from unshaven, crooked-grinned drunken bravado in panel one to head-in-hands shame in panel two. In panel three, it appears that his coffee arrived just a few seconds too late, and he’s about to flop face-first onto the table in blessed unconsciousness.

Crock, 8/25/06

Haw, haw! Overeating men are from Mars, and overeating women are from Venus! Seriously, though, if you could get a big Box O’ Tacosâ„¢, I might seriously look into how much one cost.

Beetle Bailey, 8/25/06

I’m pretty sure that Beetle will be recounting this conversation on the witness stand at Rocky’s war crimes trial.

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Beetle Bailey, 6/11/06

Here’s a strip that manages to completely undermine its own punchline, as near as I can tell. Because we were here to see what went on when Sarge was gone, and trust us, it wasn’t really that interesting.

Still, I am totally charmed by the rather bizarre sentence “We’re playing football with no boundaries!” I’m trying to come up with similar assertions. “We’re playing hockey without caring about what other people think!” “We’re playing baseball with no sense of proportion!” “We’re playing bridge full of contempt for civilization and its works!”

Apartment 3-G, 6/11/06

Here’s a good example of a strip where the throwaway panels in the top row actually have a great deal of impact on the meaning. When I read this strip in my paper today, without those top panels, I assumed that Lu Ann really didn’t care whether Margo came or not, but that sad face in panel two indicates that she knows all to well that Margo loves a party all too much. We readers, of course, can thank our lucky stars that this dark-haired dynamo is going to be crashing this artsy fartsy bash, because it’s gonna be wacky as hell.

I was going to complain that we just spent a week watching Tommie and Lu Ann getting ready for this shindig, and now we have to wait for Margo to primp herself as well. Then I realized that there’s a chance that we might see some Margo-in-sexy-underwear action, so I’m withholding my judgement for now. I don’t know what the hell is going on with her hand in panel four, though. That’s just weird.

Judge Parker, 6/11/06

So we’ve learned that “Raju Mishra” is Bengali for “Brick House”:

I’ve been impressed with the new Judge Parker artist’s work so far, but today he met his ultimate test: Abbey’s hair. Of course, he’s constrained by the fact that his characters have to be recognizable as the people we’ve come to know and love over the years. He’s almost managed to make Abbey look like she’s chosen a hairstyle that a non-insane person would choose to go out in public in … almost. It think that this may be as close as anyone could expect.

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Beetle Bailey, 6/10/06

For all you haters who are still hating on Lou and Kelly gettin’ busy, consider yourself lucky: we could be dwelling on the Halftracks sex life — or lack thereof — instead. This is an unfortunate topic that Beetle Bailey revisits a bit too often for my taste. While the strip isn’t generally known for its attention to detail, the look of shock and alarm on the General’s face in the second panel brings the horror home. Also disturbingly well rendered: his neck wattle.

Check out the beret and goatee on our street artist here: isn’t there some aspect of the military code that forbids officers from engaging in financial transactions with Frenchmen? Perhaps he’s just one of Alan’s “boho friends” from Apartment 3-G.