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Crock, 7/1/11

Do you think that the Crock creative team realizes that a timeshare is in fact a kind of real estate, and thus cannot be contained in a small box of the sort that our protagonist is attempting to offer to his desert god? It’s possible that the strip creators’ sense of time and space is permanently skewed: they may have long ago forgotten that the running gag about the hotboxes being spacious inside is indeed a running gag, and have come to believe that structures in the Crockiverse are simply dimensionally transcendental. This makes sense, as Crock is singularity from which no joy or humor can escape, and where the normal rules of existence simply don’t apply.

Mary Worth, 7/1/11

Mary Worth dialogue that bears no resemblance to any speech act that an even vaguely human creature would perpetrate is of course par for the course, but Liza’s line in panel two is really something else. Pretty much the only context I can imagine for “Despite what happened, I’m excited about my future for the first time!” is the end of a long televised show trial, right before the speaker, at whom a number of guns just off camera are pointing, is shipped off to a re-education camp.

Apartment 3-G, 7/1/11

“So I hope you’ll understand that I have to request that you and your brother Paul refrain from physical relations, as that would be disgusting.”

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Crock, 6/26/11

I was going to make some snide comment that the Legion really doesn’t need particularly smart people to undertake its primary task of brutal colonial oppression, but then I realized that, quite honestly, we never see much oppression going on in Crock, just a lot of marching around the deserts nowhere near major population centers. I suppose the people locked up in hotboxes and/or the “bandits” and “spies” with which Crock’s crew occasionally skirmishes might be freedom fighters? But still, the point is that this company of soldiers seems to be doing nothing of value, at (despite Crock’s cost-containment measures) considerable expense to the French taxpayer. Bring the boys home!

Pluggers, 6/26/11

Note that the throwaway panel goes out of its way to establish that today’s protagonist is a proud patriot before showing us that he’s also a lazy bum. Why does Pluggers hate America?

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Mark Trail, 6/5/11

It’s not often that Mark Trail sends me on an etymological adventure, but now the hunt is on! I was very suspicious that the loon was the ultimate origin of the word “loony,” and sure enough, a quick trip to the dictionary shows that it’s actually a 19th century slang abbreviation for “lunatic,” which, as the spelling implies, is derived from the Latin luna, or moon, since it was once believed that the phases of the moon affected mental states. I had assumed that “loon” as a synonym for crazy person shared the same derivation, but that seems murkier; the dictionary says it is in fact derived from the name of the bird (though “perhaps influenced by loony”), but has the bird’s name’s etymology somewhat different from the one Mark offers, deriving it from an Old Norse word for diver. Anyway, you might not enjoy sleuthing after word origins as much as I do, but surely this trip through the English language’s past has distracted you from that white-headed loon’s terrifying searing red eye blazing out at you soullessly from the final panel of this strip.

Crock, 6/5/11

Oh, look, Crock is celebrating the anniversary of D-Day! Isn’t that nice! Apparently the French Legionnaires of Crock are actually Vichy collaborators fighting for the Nazis? And they’re stationed in some desert section of Northern France? Eh, sure, why not, makes as much sense as anything else.

Dennis the Menace, 6/5/11

If Dennis is trying to up his menacing quotient, I’d say that staring at the Wilsons’ house through a fence for hours in eerie silence is doing a pretty good job of it!