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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/13/08

I’ve been having a pretty good day so far, and coming home to find out that Rex kicked off today’s installment of his namesake comic strip by saying “Speaking of cruising…” just made it that much better. Even though the plot being expositioned up seems to involve less sex with anonymous 18-year-olds in the park and more yacht-related high society hijinks, I’m still pretty excited about it. Rex’s shifty-eyed look in the final panel would seem to indicate that he’s Lenore Foster’s connection for banned performance-enhancing drugs before each year’s regatta; of course, this calls into question which drugs might enhance yachting performance. Gin?

Curtis, 8/13/08

Oh, look, Ms. Honeystump’s emblackenation has spread to his classmate Venus!

If I may talk seriously for a moment: some readers have speculated that these mysterious racial shifts have been designed to accommodate editorial grumbles about the merest hint of miscegenation. Truly, I think you’re giving the comics coloring world far too much credit, in terms of thinking that weird things actually happen for reasons. The online versions of the King Features strips are not colored by the artists, nor do the artists offer guidance for same. The colorists can only use the internal context of the strip to help them make their choices. When you realize that they often ignore explicit in-strip cues to product howlers like this and this, well, do you really expect some sort of multi-week trans-strip consistency?

For Better Or For Worse, 8/13/08

“I’ve known you both for a long time. I’ve seen you guys through a lot of crazy circumstances. You know, like when you were transparently lusting after her even though you were married and passive-aggressively browbeating your wife into having a child she didn’t want! And when you were still married and propositioned her right after she was nearly raped! And when she moved back to Millborough specifically because she heard you were getting divorced, but continued to string along her boyfriend! I gotta say … this feels like it’s gonna work. I say that because I’m a terrible, terrible person.”

Crankshaft, 8/13/08

Oh, that Crankshaft! Trying to warm up to his new housemate, he offered to “take [her] on [his] favorite ride!” By which he almost certainly means his penis! Ha ha, I have to go lie down and weep now because I thought of that.

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Family Circus, 7/24/08

They say that smell is strongly associated with memories, and when she got just the faintest whiff of mimeographic fluid from the papers she kept in the chest, suddenly she was twenty-one years old again, and working as an assistant in that downtown office. There weren’t many women in business jobs in those days, but her boss, Mr. Franklin, seemed to take her opinions about things seriously. They spent a lot of time in his office, talking about sales strategies and advertising, and somehow she barely even noticed it when it became something more — something much more — than just a business relationship.

He told her he’d make her part owner of the company, told her that they’d travel around the world together, to London and Buenos Aires and China — but in the end, she couldn’t see herself living that life. Despite so badly wanting to say yes, she turned in her resignation, and Mr. Franklin accepted it, looking like a broken man. She married that boring but reliable boy from her high school class, the one that she knew would be a good provider, and would help her raise children, and grandchildren … grandchildren … moronic, melonheaded grandchildren … Jesus, what were they rambling on about over there? If she heard one more basic piece of English vocabulary mangled by one of those little genetic rejects, she swore she’d take a belt to them … anyway, the mimeograph sheets were nothing important. Some reports, about what she couldn’t even remember — they were just what she happened to be holding when she walked away from Mr. Franklin for the last time. She put them back in the box, carefully, knowing that she would inevitably come back to them again.

“Whatever they are”? Christ, usually the oldest one at least could muster something close to a pun at least. She imagined that nobody in Buenos Aires had even heard of “Ida Know” or, God help her, “Not Me.”

Crankshaft, 7/24/08

“Josh,” people ask me, “what keeps you reading comics that you obviously don’t like, day after day, for your entire life?” Well, sometimes you have to seize on to small bits of hope, no matter how unlikely they seem. For instance, I know that every day when I turn to Crankshaft, I’m probably going to see pettiness and anger and mean-spiritedness and quiet despair. But now I can say to myself, “Hey, maybe today’s the day when Crankshaft’s horrible yuppie neighbor is finally going to go on that killing spree with his hedge clipper.”

Momma, 7/24/08

This is Momma. The title character’s interaction with her children will make you profoundly uncomfortable. It’s a real comic strip, that runs in the newspaper, where everyone can see it!

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Mark Trail, 7/15/08

I knew there was something missing from this storyline, and at long last we have it: a heavily armed Cherry Trail! Once she fells the charging moose with her shotgun, it will obviously be time to turn her weapon on the woman who’s tormented the whole expedition with her antics. Then comes the shallow grave, and the Oath of Silence.

Crankshaft, 7/15/08

OK, I’ve come to terms with the fact that we will occasionally be reminded that the Duncans (of Zits) enjoy getting their legally-sanctioned marital freak on, and that the Forths (of Sally Forth) are actually experiencing the joys of intimacy more frequently than usual, what with the baby-making attempts and all. But … but … please don’t make think about the ’Shaft-in-laws getting it on mopily, their owlish glasses clinking against each other as they do it, OK? Please? Please?

Cathy, 7/15/08

July 15, 2008, will go down in history as “the day we saw Irving’s ass crack.” Will the interminable and all-too-frequent “Irving and Cathy try to sort their digital photos” strips be made somehow more palatable, or at least more intriguing, by the knowledge that Irving probably isn’t wearing any pants while they ACK at their laptop? Does the fact that he isn’t wearing pants tells us something about the content of those digital photos? The mind boggles.