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Crock, 10/19/08

I’m not sure which thought is more disturbing: that this is some sort of metaphor for pubic hair depilation, or that it’s a straightforward and genuinely insane comic about cactuses having sex.

Family Circus, 10/19/08

In order to keep Jeffy pure, his parents are sheltering him from troubling concepts such as “genitals.”

Slylock Fox, 10/19/08

Oh, Cassandra, isn’t trying to worm your way out of speeding tickets kind of beneath you? For that matter, isn’t stopping speeders kind of beneath the chief of police? Look, just show some leg, thus disabling the part of Chief Mutt’s brain that can do math, and we can all forget that any of this ever happened.

Panel from Blondie, 10/19/08

This is way more than I ever wanted to know about Mr. Dithers’ personal life.

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Mary Worth, 10/13/08

Well, Toby Cameron’s Big Identity Theft Adventure, having been beaten to death with a bludgeon of love and understanding and openness, has finally gasped its last; today, without even the foreplay of a Charterstone Pool Party, we’re thrust rudely into our next storyline, which is: Mary and Jeff watch TV. Taste the thrills! Who do these people think they are, characters in Spider-Man?

Anyway, it’s hard to predict where a Mary Worth storyline is going to go based on its opening moments — who could have foreseen that an innocent lunch with Mary would have led Toby down the road to credit card fraud and shameful kilt-porn purchases? — but based on today’s strip I’m hoping that we’ll get back to my favorite theme in this strip, which is the humiliation of Dr. Jeff. “Frank Griffin? I haven’t seen him in ages, since that time I refused to let him get past second base! But that was before I realized that he was a famous person, on TV. Hmmm, if I make good time I could be at the skating competition in less than two hours … Jeff, don’t wait up, dear.”

Curtis, 10/13/08

Key questions about today’s Curtis:

• Why is Curtis, whose main interest in Christianity seems to be in the outrageousness of the hats worn by the ladies at the church he attends, so excited about a book of Old Testament lore?
• Why is Curtis, who is old enough to be a seething cauldron of lust-hormones, so excited about finding a children’s book?
• Could there possibly have been an even more awkward way to introduce the concept of Noah’s Ark into this conversation?
• What kind of pagan terrorist Lord of the Rings-based religion do they practice on Flyspeck Island, and why haven’t we clamped down on immigration from this breeding ground for un-American weirdos?
• Did Curtis’s ass sigh in the final panel? Seriously?

Spider-Man, 10/13/08

Yes, that’s right, Jonah — Maria, who is a successful and attractive television personality, can’t afford her own food, so obviously the only way she can avoid starvation is to accept dinner invitations from irritating blowhards with terrible haircuts and Hitler mustaches. And of course, if you’re so desperately famished that what you want is a free meal with which you can gorge yourself as quickly as possible, what you’re going to order is the lobster.

The sad thing is that this is by far the most interesting of the current Spider-Man storylines.

Blondie, 10/13/08

This wouldn’t be such a big deal if not for the fact that this is the only outfit that Dagwood owns.

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Blondie, 10/8/08

I’m intrigued by Julius Dithers’ latest attempt to achieve Big Brother-like omnipresence in his workforce. It’s kind of surprising that his employees must spend the day staring not at his sneering face, but at his clenched fist. At first glance this would seem to be the ultimate expression of the unabashed threats of violence that underpin his thuggish regime, the identity of the Leader reduced merely to the instrument that he uses to deal out pain. But note that the fist isn’t advancing knuckle-first at the viewer in the style of a righteous fist o’ justice; rather it appears to be waving in the air in impotent rage. In this sense, what’s meant to be a symbol of tyranny in fact exposes the regime’s weakness and plants the seeds of its eventual overthrow.

It’s also possible, but unlikely, that this is a close-up of Dithers flashing a proud Black Power salute.

Family Circus, 10/8/08

This may look like yet another “freakishly large-headed kids say the stupidest things” installment of the Family Circus, but I actually think Billy is using the live NASA feed (the only thing Daddy will let the kids watch, other than Veggie Tales and Davey and Goliath) as an opportunity to broach the subject of his father’s fanatical refusal to stop at rest areas during long car trips. “OK, dad, they’re in the terrible vacuum of space and need to stick to a tight schedule or they’ll run out of oxygen, so that makes sense, but why is it so important to ‘reach our mission objective within the established time parameters’ that I have to pee in an empty coffee cup?”

Pluggers, 10/8/08

Pluggers are too lazy and ignorant to spend thirty seconds looking things up on the Internet so as to spell people’s name correctly or determine whether something is the name of a person or of a television show.

Hi and Lois, 10/8/08

Hi is looking stunned in the second panel here because his teenage son’s act of disrespectful rebellion: rocking out to a song released in 1975.