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Judge Parker, 10/17/13

Why it’s the Harrisons! Hello … Audrey! DUN DUN DUN DUN!!!!

Judge Parker, 6/21/13

Well, Audrey, the Parkers actually consider it their table, and you’ll be pretty *&^% lucky if they let you sit down at it, placecards or no.

But as the solitary drop of rain to have fallen on the Parkers’ parade in recent memory, dear Professor Harrison, won’t you please sit over here with us, and your husband too? May we freshen up those drinks for you? Now tell us, in careful, patient detail, leaving nothing out, all the ways that Alan Parker’s The Chambers Affair is a derivative, puerile, monotonous, steaming mass of gelatinous offal. We’ve got all night.

Back at the Parkers’ table, that is the purplest “California chablis” I’ve seen in my life. I’m beginning to think Sam and Abby aren’t very capable vintners.

Mark Trail, 10/17/13

Ah, the lunatic majesty of a Mark Trail plan. All he has to do is confront two heavily armed co-conspirators in the middle of a wilderness. What could possibly go wrong?

I do love the action pose in panel two — if that phone weren’t already dead, it would be in for one heck of a beating right now.

Crankshaft, 10/17/13

The joke is that Crankshaft thinks this is a joke. The shame is that he steps completely out of character to backstop a stupid golf gag. The tragedy is he’s even less appealing this way. The irony is that those charming panel-one leaves demonstrate a level of craft and imagination far beyond anything the text deserves.

Luann, 10/17/13

These little flickers of self-awareness never amount to anything.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Momma, 9/30/13

To “render” a judgment just means “to pronounce, declare, or state the decision of the court in a particular case.” Which doesn’t seem like it’d be very rewarding for someone like Momma, who isn’t a lawyer and doesn’t even live in Washington, D.C., so you can understand why she looks so world-weary as she explains this in panel two. (Is that sheet of paper she’s looking at a Supreme Court verdict he’s going to have to render soon?) But since they’ve heard her rendering judgements for the Court for most of their lives, Francis and MaryLou probably just assume that she’s the one literally laying down the law on America. After all, if there’s one thing reading this strip for years has taught us about these two, it’s that they’ve very dumb.

Beetle Bailey, 9/30/13

Super excited that Beetle Bailey has decided to discard any pretense of offering gentle military-themed humor and is now all about sex with robots and the characters’ crippling alcoholism. General Halftrack’s booze problem used to be limited to weekends, but now it’s spread to pretty much any day of the week as his downward spiral into substance abuse gathers speed!

Crankshaft, 9/30/13

“It’s homicidal rage! Really, he’s a complete monster!”

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B.C. and Herb and Jamaal, 9/20/13

Well, congratulations, B.C., you have done the impossible! You have created a strip that made a technology joke in Herb and Jamaal look hip and with-it by comparison. Sure, Jamaal, still adds a weird, awkward “and tons of other means” to his list of social media services in panel one; but at least that list consists entirely of real, actual websites that exist and are popular right now, on the day the strip was published. And the punchline to the joke actually reflects a reasonable observation about how social media affects our day-to-day relationships with other humans! Another way that social media affects us is of course that sometimes we find it so overwhelming that we fly into a panic and then write a cartoon in which a bunch of ants spout gibberish at one another.

Crankshaft, 9/20/13

The entire plot of Crankshaft for the past two weeks has been that there is a new bus driver who is a lady, and who is nice, and who actually cares about being good at her job and nice to her co-workers and to the children who ride her bus. Naturally, she’s viewed with suspicion and loathing by the monstrous assholes who are the ostensible protagonists of this strip. Today their long national nightmare is about to come to end, though, because Crankshaft is clearly relishing the thought of murdering her by running her over with his bus.