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Apartment 3-G, 2/19/09

No Apartment 3-G girl can find happiness in love, so obviously the next box Margo receives will contain Eric’s neatly packaged non-transplantable organs, courtesy of the Chinese government, but for the moment let’s just appreciate this gesture, in which he lets her know that her many, many previous sexual partners don’t bother him. If we’re really lucky Margo will let Tommie play dress-up with it, to mock her, because it’s the closest she’ll ever come to getting married, or having anyone love her.

Baldo, 2/19/08

Notice that the customer is blushing in the final panel. The only legitimate response to a sub-pun this awful is to be terribly embarrassed for the perpetrator.

Crankshaft, 2/19/09

Oh, that Crankshaft, always combining corny, unoriginal jokes with death! Our flight attendant looks wholly uninterested in saving her own or anybody else’s life in the case of emergency, and will probably cap off her little safety talk by hanging herself with the demonstration seatbelt.

Family Circus, 2/19/09

“No, Jeffy! You know full well what the judge said.”

Marmaduke, 2/19/09

“Why are you so restrained, for once?” Phil thinks. “Go on, eat him!”

Hagar the Horrible, 2/19/09

HAW HAW HAW THE FEMINISM

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Mary Worth, 2/6/09

I really thought that, once Frank showed up at practice in his hideous green-and-orange checked sweater, I had seen the worst fashion nightmare that this interlude had to offer; it was so grotesque that I barely even registered Mary’s magenta-t-shirt-over-black-long-sleeve-shirt combo. But then he stood up and OH MY GOD THE PANTS THE PANTS! He’s wearing those same damn electric blue sansabelt slacks that every single male in this strip wears, somehow achieving a color combination even more appalling than the sweater alone. It will all make this promised resurrection of Frank and Mary’s “old pair moves” (which, by the way, what the hell) into a vomit-inducing swirl of clashing hues that in any just universe would end on the ice in a heap of shattered bones.

I’m intrigued by the Venn diagram hanging on the wall behind our protagonists. I’m assuming it’s a subliminal message about this pair, showing the overlap between “insufferable know-it-alls who think they’re always right” and “clueless morons who think that profound problems can be fixed very quickly.” The horizontal line at the bottom represents our rapidly shrinking will to live.

Crankshaft, 2/6/09

Say, it’s another cheery Crankshaft funeral strip! At least today’s installment isn’t being used to set up a fart joke. No, instead, the ’Shaft is declaring that every morning that he drags his arthritic, pain-wracked, bile-drenched body out of bed, when all he really wants to do is pass into the great beyond and end his suffering, is an act of vengeance. Who he’s getting revenge on is left unsaid — probably God Himself, Whose creation Crankshaft continues to defile with each day that he clings to life. The ’Shaft’s thousand-mile stare in the final panel seems to indicate that he realizes the enormity of declaring vengeance on his own Creator, but he feels honor-bound to keep it up until the end, when his friends will make terrible puns over his own embalmed corpse or cremains urn.

Spider-Man, 2/9/09

Aww, look at that! It seems that, even though they’re on opposite sides of the law, Spider-Man and Electro have quite a bit in common! See, they both need to find places to hide their costumes from their loved ones, in their microscopic New York homes! Also, despite their spandex-clad fame/notoriety, they’re both hard up for cash to pay their bills! Also, they’re both boneheaded mouth-breathing moronic chumps!

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Mark Trail, 1/30/09

Uh-oh! Looks like we’re going to be getting to the punchery much sooner than anticipated! Obviously, the world of Mark Trail does not conform to our simple linear Earth-logic, but there are a few things going on here that are laughable even by this strip’s standards:

• It’s laughable that any adult human — even one as demonstrably dim as poor deerophilic Patty — would require photo-taking instructions so basic as to make it seem that she’s never encountered one of these so-called “cameras” before. “And you promise that this won’t actually put you and Bucky inside the little box, right?”
• It’s laughable that someone would be jealous at discovering Mark alone with his wife, as anyone who’s exchanged two sentences with the man would realize that sex baffles and terrifies him.
• It’s laughable that anyone would be able to clench his hand into a fist within half a mile of Mark without Mark hearing the tell-tale crinkling of palm-flesh and instantly being on the alert. WATCH OUT, KEN!

Marvin, 1/30/09

“Hmm, I seem to have written a joke that requires the grandfather character to be asleep without the reader realizing it until the third panel! This is tricky because, according to my research, most people close their eyes when they sleep, and eyes are something I draw when I do cartoons. Hmm, let me think, let me think … I could have him wear sunglasses, inside for some reason … no, that doesn’t make sense. Or, I could draw his regular eyeglasses such that you can’t see his pupils. That is at odds with how I’ve drawn him every other time he’s appeared in the strip, but, as I think I mentioned, I already came up with the joke, so it’ll have to do.”

Crankshaft, 1/30/09

If there’s one thing guaranteed to shock and disgust Crankshaft, it’s a sincere expression of human affection.