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Blondie, 4/28/14

Haha yes but … that’s a lamp, right? With a little antenna on it? The joke is that she’s pretending it’s a “conversation piece” art object but she really just went and bought a lamp with maybe a radio alarm clock in it? That’s the joke? Because otherwise the Blondie artist was faced with the challenge of drawing something truly strange, an baffling object sure to inspire conversation among everyone who catches a glimpse of it, and ended up drawing a combination desk lamp/clock radio. And that would be sad.

Pluggers, 4/28/14

I was willing to tolerate Pluggers using a vaguely suggestive phrase as a caption for a cartoon depicting wholesome gardening activities. However, today’s panel, in which the sexual ecstasy young people enjoy on the dance floor is cruelly contrasted with their bodies’ inevitable decay into an aged state where even walking is an agony, goes too far for my taste.

Apartment 3-G, 4/28/14

At last! The Margo we know and love is back! The Margo we know and love is a violent sociopath willing to resort to kidnapping or worse to impose her vision of correctness on her social circle and even her closest friends. Hope you were aware of that when you decided to know and love her! You’re in it for the long haul now.

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Mary Worth, 4/25/14

Oh, Mary! How could we ever doubt the nobility — and the complexity — of your intentions? It seems Mary never had any intention of meddling Tommy into a job at all. I mean, she’s not against Iris’s son finding gainful employment — whatever gets him out of Charterstone is fine by her! No, Mary is after something much, much more difficult than helping an ex-con with dumb hair find a fulfilling career: she’s trying to find love for Wilbur Weston. She recognized when Iris had reached the state of emotional desperation necessary to be receptive to Wilbur’s advances, and has even left the possibility open that Wilbur himself might help solve a difficult problem and thus boost his self-esteem. Truly, Mary never tires of challenging herself with seemingly impossible meddle-quests.

Blondie, 4/25/14

Speaking of awkward and weird, Dagwood is reading a broadsheet paper that features the 1754 Join, Or Die cartoon on the front page, for some reason? And he expects it to be of interest to an actual, literal five-year-old? Also, Elmo is only five, and yet his parents are never seen and he seems to wander freely back and forth through the neighborhood between the Bumsteads’ house and wherever it is he lives? This seems like a lot of trouble to go through to trash-talk Dan Piraro.

Apartment 3-G, 4/25/14

OK, we can all agree that Tommie and her pet deer needed to get out of the apartment and see some changed scenery, but the look of sly satisfaction on Jack’s face indicates that she’s stumbled onto some kind of BDSM scene here that I’m not sure is really what the doctor ordered, you know?

Dennis the Menace, 4/25/14

Bringing Joey into his mother’s bedroom and narrating the action as she stands paralyzed in terror by the unstoppable march of time and its effects on her body? I deem Dennis’s behavior today: pretty menacing!

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Judge Parker, 3/1/14

I was going to apologize for not keeping you up to date on the conversation between April and her dad, but then I realized that it’s literally lasted two weeks and can be easily summed up as follows: April’s dad is on the run from some Romanian weapons-smugglers he’s fallen out with, and now they’ve managed to plant a tracker on April’s car and are on their way to this impregnable jungle fortress/cancer research facility, presumably travelling via heavily armed helicopter gunship. Good times appear to be in the narrative hopper, though, if the sinister grin of bloodthirsty mercenary/cheerful groundskeeper “Abbott” as he promises that April and Randy’s wedding ceremony will not be unduly disturbed by the endless screaming of their enemies is any indication.

Blondie, 3/1/14

Nobody in this strip is what you’d call “introspective,” so I guess Elmo is as likely a candidate as any to stumble onto self-reflective questions of ontology. Dagwood, who can only dimly grasp the philosophical thought processes this line of questioning has provoked in his young pal, is probably wrong about what’s going on in that closet; it’s more likely that Elmo is just using the dark, warm space to go into a fetal position, having arrived much too quickly at the “why is there something instead of nothing” problem.

Spider-Man, 3/1/14

It’s good to see that New York’s criminal element has a clear-eyed perspective on exactly how much of a threat Spider-Man is to them (namely, not much).