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Spider-Man, 12/7/11

I’ve been staring at MJ’s hair for a long time now trying to figure out what exactly is so wrong with it. Is the back of her skull now disproportionately bulbous? Is her ponytail just sort of sticking out of a huge, matted mass that’s starting to border on white-girl dreadlocks? Whatever it is, Peter can now get over the fact that he’s been emasculated by his wife’s high salary. “Ha, Mary Jane may be the main breadwinner in this family, but at least my hair doesn’t look like that.”

Actually, MJ may soon be the family’s sole breadwinner, seeing as Peter has overslept on his first day of work.

Family Circus, 12/7/11

There are so many delicious reasons for Daddy to look depressed here that I can’t settle on my favorite! Is he sad because he wanted to play the hero and deliver on Billy’s extravagant gift desires, only to have the kid go over his head to his mother? Is he sad because Billy has figured out that there is no Santa Claus, and more to the point that his parents are cheap bastards who would never be able to fulfill his Christmas wishes? Is he sad because work is his refuge from his family, but today’s he’s going to have to spend precious moments scanning and emailing Billy’s gift list, time could be spent more pleasantly on spreadsheets and such? Is he sad because in all likelihood this is a recycled panel from the ’80s in which Billy originally wanted him to fax the list to grandma, and he realizes that he’s doomed to repeat the same dumb gags forever with only the technology updated every decade or so?

Crankshaft, 12/7/11

Crankshaft, meanwhile, is sad because he has to pay for medical services! I can’t wait to see how sad he’ll be when he finds out he has prostate cancer.

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Crankshaft, 12/3/11

Oh, look, this week’s Crankshaft ended whimsically after all! Crankshaft’s nemesis built a mailbox out of the rock-hard inedible brownies, and Crankshaft caused thousands of dollars worth of damage to school district property when he backed into it. Also, three children in the back row of seats on the bus were terribly injured.

Gil Thorp, 12/3/11

It’s been far too long since we were treated to the Bucket, Milford’s inexplicably popular teen hangout spot, as a component of vaguely filthy-sounding conversation in Gil Thorp. The last three panels here may not quite reach the level of “Liz Ritter all but forces Stormy Hicks to go to the bucket,” but they’re not far off.

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Crankshaft, 11/30/11

Once upon a time, the Funkyverse strips were actually whimsical and funny and not at all depressing, and you can find evidence of this embedded in some of the strips’ running gags, which now seem deeply horrible wrenched out of their original context. Remember how teenage hall monitor Les used to guard his station with a machine gun? In the old days that was just cheery absurdism, but now it would probably set up a story about a Columbine-style massacre — or, no, that’s too flashy, it’d probably actually be about how the gun went off accidentally and hit an innocent student-athlete in the leg, ending the Scapegoats’ chance for a championship and the poor kid’s promising career, leading to a downward spiral into alcoholism, suicide, etc.

Anyhoo, Crankshaft constantly destroying mailboxes out of some combination of incompetence and spite and Lena’s inedible and possibly poisonous brownies both had a similar sort of innocence about them back in the day, but in the modern Funkyverse we get to see the emotional devastation that they cause. Ha ha, that man is legitimately furious because Crankshaft ran over his mailbox, and neither Crankshaft nor the bureaucrats who employ him care, which just makes him madder! The best part of today’s strip is the expressions of genuine horror on the ’Shaft’s fellow drivers’ faces, as if somehow they’re only now realizing what a colossal dick he is.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/30/11

Speaking of the Funkyverse, today’s second panel could pretty much be its mission statement.

Six Chix, 11/30/11

It probably says something about me that this is a cartoon featuring the evil queen from Snow White talking about freezing her eggs and the thing that most baffles me about it is the setting. Is she on a date? Isn’t this talk a little heavy for a date? Or has she replaced her magic mirror with a nebbishy personal assistant, and this is the two of them unwinding after work?

Spider-Man, 11/30/11

“Yes! I finally got a staff job in the lucrative, growing print media business! And all I had to do was give my tyrannical boss a picture of my superhero identity consorting with a known criminal! I’m a genius!”

Archie, 11/30/11

Archie’s I Love The ’90s week continues! Today’s flashback memory: Remember when they started giving talk shows to ethnic people?