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Crock, 5/2/11

Ha ha, someone thought that underage scat porn used as an instrument of torture was a good theme for a comic strip! Sure, why not?

Crankshaft, 5/2/11

It sure makes Crankshaft’s half-assed attempts to sexually harass hapless customer service personnel seem positively quaint by comparison.

Spider-Man, 5/2/11

This whole “human vampire” business has worked itself out in even sillier fashion than I could have imagined, with Dr. Morbius’s fiancee accidentally becoming a real vampire in order to understand her beloved’s fake vampirism. The only logical hole out of many I’ll point out here: wouldn’t Dr. Morbius, wracked with guilt over his faux-vampirism, have noticed his fiancee’s vampiric tendencies? “Say, sweetie, would you like to go out for dinner? I’ve got 6 o’clock reservations!” “Let’s make it 9, so that I don’t have to leave the apartment when the sun’s still up. Also, they serve blood there, right? You know I subsist entirely on human blood now.”

Also, regarding the last panel’s NEXT box, it probably wouldn’t be so much a race against time if Peter had woken up when MJ first got into trouble, several hours ago.

Panel from Hi and Lois, 5/2/11

Was baby Trixie from Hi and Lois not on your list of characters who filled you with dread? Well, that’s changed forever now, I’ll say.

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Gasoline Alley, 3/24/11

I can’t be bothered to update you on the boring doings in Gasoline Alley — they’ve involved genealogical research and the American Revolutionary War, and I actually find both of those topics interesting, or at least I did until this strip got its hands on them. Apparently, though, the last several weeks have been far too thrilling for this strip’s target 80-and-up demographic, so in order to soothe those folks, we’ve slowed down a bit and now some guy in a suit is telling extremely mild jokes to Clovia. Still, to judge by her shell-shocked expression in the final panel, you’d think he’d been giving her the graphic details of the time he spent in the killing fields of Cambodia. That “LOL” is not some sad attempt at Internet-speak, but rather an incoherent gurgle of horror. Oh, God, the puns! Please, no more puns!

Crankshaft, 3/24/11

Ha ha, look at that knowing glance Crankshaft’s pals are exchanging. After all these years, could this finally be the massive heart attack they’ve been praying for?

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Crock, 3/20/11

One way to tell when something has been a well-understood facet of mainstream world culture for at least a year or so is that weird, fumbling, semi-coherent references to it start appearing in legacy comic strips. One thing I find interesting about both this reference to WikiLeaks and the one that appeared a a couple months ago in Marvin (beaten to the punch by Marvin! the shame!) is that the word in both cases is rendered in both small and capital letters, in contrast with the standard all-caps orthography. This just draws attention to the word in a sort of “Hey, look at us, bein’ topical!” sense, with a negative effect on the overall humorousness of the strip (though of course even without the typeface issues that, “humorousness” could only be detected with the most delicate scientific instruments). It’s as if the authors, barely understanding who or what a “WikiLeaks” might be, are convinced that the internal capitalization is crucial to the word’s totemic power and must be preserved at all costs, when in fact it’s just an irritating legacy that’s trickled down from late ’90s branding practices in the high tech industry.

Speaking of trickling down, though, while Crock lost to Marvin in the “making a stupid joke about WikiLeaks” race, at least Crock’s stupid joke isn’t about pissing oneself.

Panels from Crankshaft, 3/20/11

Ha ha, just another day in the Funkyverse! “I experienced a brief moment of triumph! But now the physical and emotional agony that is my life has come to the fore once again. You can’t win your way out of suffering!”