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Hi and Lois, 3/8/09

My goodness, today’s Hi and Lois presents one of the most searing indictments of standard-issue suburban heteronormality that I’ve ever seen — it certainly strikes me as more compelling than Revolutionary Road, which, I should confess, I didn’t see, because it looked pretty snoresville. Side note: I think Revolutionary Road should have been marketed as a Titanic sequel, and framed as a dream sequence going through Leo DiCaprio’s character’s mind as he froze to death in the North Atlantic, imagining what his life would be like if he survived and married Kate Winslet’s character. The numb, soul-crushing lifestyle he envisions for their future would really just reflect the fact that his body and mind are shutting down in the icy waters.

Wait, where was I? Oh, right, Hi and Lois. Lois, driven completely bonkers by her unruly brood, contemplates just leaving, just walking out, getting some “fresh air” and not coming back. Her wide-eyed look in the next-to-last panel is particularly harrowing: she’s just staring off to space, thinking, “What if I just keep standing here? They say that freezing to death is just like falling asleep. You don’t even feel anything. Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t it be nice to fall asleep in the nice white fluffy snow, forever?” Eventually, she decides that venturing into her hell-house is marginally better than dying of frostbite, so she turns around and returns, a wan little smile on her face.

The first two throwaway panels add an extra little bit of awful to the whole affair. “Woah,” Hi says, “Your mother sure looks like she’s about at her breaking point! I’m just going to take this newspaper with me to the bathroom and not come out again for the rest of the night.” At least Chip doesn’t actively flee when asked to help, though I note that he “took over” without once getting off the couch or even looking up from the tiny little screen on his cell phone.

Mary Worth, 3/8/09

On that note, I should mention that Mary Worth appears to be setting itself up to compete with the recently completed “sometimes we slap and terrify our partners because we love them too much” Mark Trail storyline in the repressive patriarchy department. Adrian may be a full-grown adult and a doctor to boot, but we’ll soon learn what happens when a fragile, vulnerable, young little girl attempts to choose her own husband: betrayal and grifting and heartbreak and despair. Once Ted has left town with her life savings, Adrian will finally agree to the plan her father has been pushing all along: an arranged marriage with the son of Dr. Jeff’s neighbors, so that their children will eventually inherit both estates and achieve a higher status in the ranks of the local landed gentry.

Family Circus, 3/8/09

Ah, NyQuil — is there any problem you can’t solve?

Panels from Dennis the Menace, 3/8/09

There’s nothing Mr. Wilson longs for more than to pound back a few bourbons, get in his car, and slam himself into a tree.

Crankshaft, 3/8/09

Ha ha! It’s funny because Crankshaft is old, and all his friends are dying!

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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!