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Crock, 9/29/14

Reminder: When you see daily comics in color, those colors haven’t been selected by the artists, who generally submit their strips in black and white; instead, there’s a separate staff of colorists, paid by the syndicates, who add color for those contexts where color versions of the strip appear. I’m never afraid to mock these poor underpaid drones when their work results in weirdness or blatant historical errors, so I’m willing to give them kudos when they do the best they can with what they have to work with! Would a normally green cactus that loses its needles as part of a joke about it being “fall” in the desert turn orange, the way green leaves of deciduous trees turn orange before falling of their branches? Maybe! Does having the cactus be orange in the beginning ruin the joke? Trick question: this is Crock, and Crock jokes cannot be “ruined.”

Mary Worth, 9/29/14

It turns out that the real problem with Hanna Dingdon (side note: HAHAHA “DINGDON”) isn’t that her failing eyesight makes her a dangerous driver, it’s that her daughter just uses her as a personal babysitting services at the last minute, without any advance notice! Hanna has had it up to here with this inconsiderate treatment, and so she’s getting revenge the only way she knows how: by letting her grandson watch the most horrifying children’s programming you can imagine, starring monkey-faced rat-things bearing the logo of a literal broken heart on their chests, so that after every visit he’ll return to his mother a traumatized emotional wreck.

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Slylock Fox, 9/22/14

We’ve seen this courtroom drama before, and back then I was interested in the sad picture it painted of the animal justice system: the injured Slylock meekly giving his testimony, almost cringing as the bull and his sharp-toothed lawyer grin confidently, secure in the knowledge that this case is going their way despite the facts. Today I’m more intrigued by those facts, or at least the presentation of them here, and what they say about the post-animapocalytic world. Are we meant to understand that the Great Change altered so many things about the world’s bovines — not only making them sapient, but also transforming them from quadrupeds to bipeds and granting them front-facing stereo vision to boot — and yet still left them color blind? Moreover, how exactly did the entirely human urban legend about bulls being enraged by red come to be believed by animal-dom at large? Were images of bullfights perhaps used during the Bestial Revolution to rile up anti-human sentiment? At any rate, this provides more evidence that Slylock Fox takes place in the first generation of so of the post-human reality, as the animals are slowly learning about each other … and about themselves.

Crock, 9/22/14

Congratulations, Crock: for a strip with exceptionally crude art, you’ve sure managed to pack a lot of deeply unsettling emotion in the face of the Legionnaire in the second panel here. Does Butt Stew contain meat from a butt, or stuff that came out of a butt, or something even more disturbing? You don’t want to know, but he wants to spend the whole rest of the afternoon grinning smugly about just how much you don’t want to know.

Apartment 3-G, 9/22/14

NO DON’T TAKE YOUR TIME GO VERY QUICKLY JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I CAN’T BELIEVE WE’RE GOING TO GET ANOTHER WEEK OF THIS STORYLINE

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/10/14

Good news, everyone! Despite the fact that Les holds everyone involved in the lowbrow and extremely lucrative (for him) process of turning Lisa’s Story into a cable movie in the deepest contempt, he’s still been able to give everyone little pick-me-ups and sage advice, like “it’s really all about acting,” so I think everything’s going to be OK. The best line here is clearly “Not in a weird way or anything,” because the best way to make sure an attractive actress knows you’ve been masturbating to the pictures on her website is to blurt out, without prompting, “NOT IN A WEIRD WAY OR ANYTHING” after telling her you’ve been looking at her website.

Crock, 8/10/14

Jules Schmeese is definitely one of the more hapless of the damned souls who inhabit Crock, always on the verge of being executed but never actually achieving the sweet release of death. Today we learn that not only is he somehow suspended in his final moments of mortal terror forever, but that, like Franz Kafka’s Josef K., he is not even permitted to know what he has done to merit his punishment.

Hagar the Horrible, 8/10/14

We already know that Hagar looks forward to the day when he will enter Valhalla. Apparently he’s concerned that his entourage in the afterlife won’t be adequate for his status, because he’s planning on taking his entire crew with him whether they want to go or not.

Heathcliff, 8/10/14

Heathcliff killed a shark with a fork, and now he’s going to eat it! That’s the joke, I think?