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Hi and Lois, 5/17/10

As obsessive comics readers know, Hi and Lois have four kids, none of whom are in college, which makes their “UConn Dad/Mom” shirts kind of confusing. Is it possible that, since nobody in the family ever ages, they actually have a phantom fifth child off in Storrs, perpetually in his or her sophomore year and never mentioned ever since s/he decided to waste his/her life and the Flagstons’ money on a French lit major. It’s also possible that Hi and Lois has just experienced a Funky Winkerbean-style time jump, and that Chip is now away at school, Dot and Ditto are hitting their awkward adolescence, and Trixie is being traumatized by Sunbeam’s refusal to follow her into her windowless kindergarden classroom. This, I suppose, is the sort of disorientation that casual Funky Winkerbean readers, those who didn’t follow the trade press’s reporting on the upcoming temporal leap forward, experienced when they opened up their paper and discovered that Les and Funky and the gang were 10 years older. (The trade press did not bother to report on this event in Hi and Lois because nobody, not even people who cover the newspaper comics industry for a living, really cares all that much about Hi and Lois.)

I note also that Lois the realtor, realizing that this family of poor saps is selling off their car in order to provide a better life for their children, might be close to cashing in on the family home as well, and naturally her professional instincts are kicking in. The real estate industry: profiting from, and causing, America’s financial problems for most of the 21st century so far!

Curtis, 5/17/10

It’s 99 percent certain that this is not going to be a “Curtis and Barry find their parents’ sex tape” storyline, but this is the strip that brought us the syrup chapter, so we can’t be sure. Until all is revealed, I will merely point out for your interest that Curtis is so dedicated to hip-hop as a genre that he apparently owns a poster extolling not some specific artist but rather the abstract concept of rap.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/17/10

Due to its isolation, Hootin’ Holler is years behind most of America when it comes to pop-culture trends. For instance, streaking is only now starting to catch on there, a full 35 years after its heyday in the rest of the country.

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Curtis, 4/12/10

I’ve been wondering for the last couple weeks where the “Flyspeck Island peanuts give you psychic powers” plotline in Curtis was going, and now I know: fulsome praise for a terrifying Orwellian police state where one isn’t even safe in the confines of one’s own skull.

Marvin, 4/12/10

Marvin is taking a break from the poop jokes to bring us hilarious gags about old people in sad, loveless marriages, to which I say: bring back the poop jokes.

Family Circus, 4/12/10

“But until then, we’re letting Barfy crap all over the lawn.”

(See, Marvin? It’s so easy!)

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Panel from Mark Trail, 2/21/10

Mark Trail has offered us few sights more adorable of late than this vision of a drunken lorikeet, the universal comics symbols for inebriation swirling about its befeathered head, woozily flying back to its companions after drinking up all the palm wine it can find. Mark himself of course does not drink, and only allows himself to be intoxicated by the sweeping vistas of America’s natural landscape; however, he seems more amused than judgmental over alcoholism among our animal friends.

Panel from Curtis, 2/21/10

Meanwhile, in Curtis, Gunk has taken an ill-advised trip to a factory farm, the horror of which has shocked his eye-sockets into the horizontal arrangement normally favored by humans. But at what cost? The pain of the reconfiguration appears to have been excruciating. If I ever see his puffy eyelids and pinkish irises again, it will be too soon.