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Family Circus, 9/4/10

There’s certainly a little something weirdly circular about Dolly praying for the power to pray more intently, but perhaps we ought to take this scene at face value and respect the poor girl’s fervent desire to keep her mind focused on the divine in the midst of a chaotic living situation. Her casual description of her middle brother wandering about the house muttering incomprehensible but threatening nonsense to himself is particularly harrowing.

Crock, 9/4/10

Though I once praised the poor damned souls who do the coloring for the comics, they still must be called to account when they err. Why must we buy into the beauty myth that only blondes are sexy? The Crock artist appreciates an attractive brunette, obviously, having gong to some pains to ink in the hair of Grossie’s sexy friend (since this is Crock, she’s probably just named “Sexy”). Why do you supply a blondeish nimbus that was not part of the original artistic vision, O Colorist?

B.C., 9/4/10

Ha ha, she made a real impression on him … with her enormous ass! Possibly by sitting on him! And her name is “Fanny!” And they’re, uh, ants, and probably when an ant has a distended rear thorax section like that it means something, but, uh, bugs gross me out so I don’t want to look it up. Probably it relates to breeding or something though, or feeding the young. Which casts this strip into a completely different and more disgusting light. Jeez, I think I liked B.C. better when it was just telling me I was going to hell.

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Crock, 8/30/10

Many comic strips set theoretically in some specific time and place often end up wandering afield from that time and place, either for humorous effect or just out of sheer forgetfulness. Thus, while the action in Crock once was meant to be understood as taking place in North Africa under French colonial rule, today the strip might be happening somewhere where the IRS has authority, or really any time and any place at all. Today’s dialogue, for instance, implies that the action of the strip takes place during the time period described in one of the earlier sections of the book of Genesis, just before the Deluge. This is good news for everyone — including, I assume, all of you — who wants to see every single Crock character killed by an angry God in a world-destroying flood.

Gil Thorp, 8/30/10

Our phoned-in summer golf storyline has finally, mercifully, ended; let the phoned-in fall football storyline begin! It’s just day one and already the characters are starting to ask why we’re even bothering to have a fall football storyline. “Man, what’s the point?” asks a nameless Mudlark. “I mean, my face is melting due to some horrible space alien virus, and you all are just standing around with arms stretched out looking bored! Hello? Melting face? Over here?”

Funky Winkerbean, 8/30/10

There are few things simultaneously sadder and more hilarious than watching Les deliberate over whether to have his book launch party in his home town’s only functioning non-Toxic Taco restaurant with more anxiety and indecision than Hamlet trying to figure out whether he should kill his stepfather. But one of those even sadder and more hilarious things is watching two otherwise attractive and normal-seeming women compete to see who can debase themselves further to win Les’s mopey, self-absorbed affections.

Apartment 3-G, 8/30/10

Holy cats, is Apartment 3-G’s aged core audience about to be introduced to the great advances in hair extension technology that have taken place over the past few decades? Or does Tabitha simply plan to knock Margo out with some kind of sleeping potion, only for her to wake up 20 years later with her hair grown to ludicrous lengths, Rip van Winkle-style?

Slylock Fox, 8/30/10

Ha ha, it’s a trick question! There’s no such thing as “valuable” Kansas City Royals memorabilia.

Gasoline Alley, 8/30/10

I know I haven’t discussed the light-hearted Gasoline Alley strip lately, but in case you’re wondering what’s going on over there, here you go: a group of adorable schoolchildren is about to die in a terrible bus accident.

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Apartment 3-G, 8/20/10

“Going soft?” Bite your tongue, Lu Ann! Margo isn’t freaking out about getting her hair cut because, unlike you, she hasn’t linked her sense of self-worth to something frivolous and external like a hairstyle. Margo knows that hairdos come and hairdos go, but that whatever happens to her hair, nobody can touch her heart, her core. Margo will always be Margo. Her self cannot be harmed by whatever silly makeover plans Kat and Kitty have in store.

She also sees the hair-styling portion of the show as a great opportunity for escape: all she has to do is grab a pair of scissors and stab her way out.

Crock, 8/20/10

What if you wrote a comic strip that nobody, not even your editors, read or cared about? Would you keep dutifully churning out the lame jokes, day after day, so long as the checks kept clearing? Or would you grow resentful and eventually just replace the dialogue with banal non-sequiturs, just to see if anybody noticed?

Mary Worth, 8/20/10

“And if one of the bums I interrogated didn’t know anything, I made ’em switch clothes with me. That might seem strange to you, kid, but I was on the street, and I had to live my life by the codes of the street. And those codes say that when a man doesn’t help you with your vengeance mission, he forfeits his right to his clothes. That’s how it works. On the street.”