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They’ll Do It Every Time, 9/9/06

Wow, check out the lower panel here: Ol’ Foghorn looks like he’s about ready to slap his wife around for suggesting a little home improvement. The way terrified little Foghorn Junior is clinging to his mom implies that he knows what’s coming and that this isn’t the first time dad has turned nasty. Presumably Foghorn Pater’s literally violent aversion to any change in his domestic scene explains the William McKinley-era aesthetic sensibility on display in the Foghorn household. The other attendees at the town meeting may feel that Fred (oh, I’m sorry, that’s “Ferd”) dominates civic discussion with his high-minded blather, but he clearly dominates his family in a much, much uglier way.

Apartment 3-G, 9/9/06

AAARGGH! DISCUSSION OF YOUR MARRIAGE COUNSELING SESSIONS: NOT SEXY! NOT GOING TO GET YOU LAID! ABORT, TED, ABORT!

If you’re a marriage counselor, I’ve got to imagine that the moment when one of your clients throws her infidelity in the face of her husband has got to be kind of a professional low point.

Beetle Bailey, 9/9/06

Ha ha! It’s funny because Sarge beat Beetle so savagely that many of his bones were shattered, leaving him hospitalized and in traction for months! He’ll be lucky if he ever walks again! Ha ha!

Seriously, Beetle Bailey is really fucked up.

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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.