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Beetle Bailey, 7/29/09

The action in today’s Beetle Bailey obviously violates every workplace sexual harassment regulation known to man, not that I expect Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Enterprises LLC to realize that there might be something inappropriate about handing a co-worker a skimpy undergarment and then demanding that she put it on right in front of you. Ignoring that for the moment, though, I do have to say that I like the (probably accidental) way that the always-unsettling wiggle lines of horniness emitted by Killer’s hat-nodules form what appear to be quotation marks around the word “present.” “I got you a ‘present.’ Well, it’s not really a present for you.”

Crock, 7/29/09

Now here’s a problem that arises when the art in your strip is mangled and impenetrable: I guess today’s punchline is supposed to some cruel joke about how the librarian’s girlfriend is ugly, but this being Crock, who can tell? Whether the joke is about supposedly ugly people or supposedly pretty people, they’re all just barely-recognizable Crock-squiggles.

Dick Tracy, 7/29/09

Wait, did I say that Dick Tracy was like German expressionist film? Now that we have an elaborately dressed ringmaster responding to a tragic scene by repeatedly shouting “It happened!”, I’m updating that assessment to David Lynch.

It’s nice of Dick to address our no-doubt-implicated-in-the-crime-but-still-emotionally-tortured ringmaster as “Mr. Ringmaster.” He knows that it costs him nothing to be polite, just as it will cost our overburdened court systems nothing when he executes everyone involved without trial in front of hundreds of horrified onlookers.

Mary Worth, 7/29/09

Oh, goodness, Charley isn’t just a sex pervert, but also an alcoholic, by which I mean “someone who drinks alcohol that isn’t the terrible ketchup-red wine they serve at the Bum Boat.” Delilah is right to cringe on that couch in terror! Of course she wants plain soda water, as flavored sodas are far too exciting.

Family Circus, 7/29/09

As several faithful readers have pointed out, this Family Circus camping sequence actually consists of reruns from the early 1980s. This explains the vintage station wagon, and the hanky code.

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Blondie, 7/12/09

I’ve often wondered at the obviously complex relationship between Dagwood and Mr. Dithers. For a while, I thought that Dithers was really Dagwood’s millionaire father, who disowned him when he decided to marry low-class flapper Blondie (this is the strip’s pre-Depression backstory, FYI) but who was never able to cut the kid out of his life completely, and so has kept him employed despite his obvious incompetence. I don’t think that’s true, but it’s hard to tell exactly what keeps these two together, not just professionally but socially as well. Today at least hints at the source of their codependence: their relationship provides the sort of dramatic highs and lows, the anger and catharsis, that their stable, happy, and boring home lives never could.

Normally, of course, I’d be imputing some kind of sexual relationship or tension here, but it’s obvious to anyone who reads Blondie that the only kind of thing that stirs Dagwood’s loins involves pastrami and lots of mustard.

Crock, 7/12/09

As a regular reader of the shambling nightmare that is Crock, the core grotesqueries of this particular strip — that the dog intends to urinate on the cactus as an act of malice, and that the cactus can bend on its own accord and fire off its spines as defensive missiles — come as no surprise to me. I am a little perturbed to learn that the camel’s name is “Quench.” I understand that there is a certain conceptual nexus between camels and water-drinking, but it doesn’t seem quite right; it’d be better as the name of a robot that, in an ill-conceived promotional exercise, can morph into a bottle of the new Quench™ brand sport energy drink, in the upcoming Paramount/Dreamworks film Transformers 3: Revenge of the Thirsty.

Oh, and the camel is wearing a hat, which is also inappropriate.

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Crock, 7/6/09

When you have a narrative form like a syndicated comic strip that runs on and on for decades, there are some interesting results. For instance, there may be features of your strip’s universe that made some sort of sense, or were at least explained, at the time of their introduction, but which have either slowly mutated with time or had all knowledge of their significance lost, and whose existence today is taken as a given by all concerned despite their baffling nature. Take, for instance, today’s Crock. Obviously the presence of tiny hotboxes just outside the Legion’s fort, in which prisoners condemned for some forgotten crime sit hunched over day after day for years, slowly going mad from the hot sun and the isolation, is easily parsed. But why exactly are the sides of these portable torture chambers marked with giant keyholes? Wouldn’t the key required to operate such a lock be over three feet long? Wouldn’t the mechanism for such a lock intrude onto the prisoner’s already miniscule living space? Is it perhaps not a real lock at all, but just some sort of symbol of the State’s ability to imprison on a whim, and indefinitely? Perhaps this reminds the cook of his complicity in the workings of this monstrous dictatorship, which would explain his otherwise baffling anger at having to walk approximately five feet outside to dump some greyish glop into the prisoner’s bowl.

Gil Thorp, 7/6/09

Oh, Gil, if you’re going to openly acknowledge what I asserted last week — that summertime is for wackiness in Gil Thorp — then you’d better be prepared to follow through on your promise, or you’ll just break my heart all the more. Gil having lunch with vintage clothing aficionado and former teen hobo Ted Pearse is a good start; having some kind of gangland shooting happen right outside the Thorps’ front door (involving Marty Moon? please?) is even better.

Mary Worth, 7/6/09

You know, every once in a while even Mary Worth can surprise me. For instance, yesterday I could have only thought of two possible outcomes to Mary’s weeks-long attempt to browbeat Delilah back into her loveless marriage: acquiescence or suicide. Never did I imagine that she had the strength of will to shrug off the onslaught, put on her sexiest/most insane halter top-yellow fishnets combo, and go cruising the Charterstone grounds for all her ex-boyfriends, determined to rip their stripey shirts off and have her way with them right there on the concrete (which is already cracking only a few years after it was poured, thanks to Mary’s insistence that they go with the lowest bidder). Mary looks like she’s having a stroke in the second panel, and why wouldn’t she: she’s discovered someone immune to her meddling powers! I’m surprised she isn’t just melting into a puddle.