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Hi everybody, I am back! Thanks to Uncle Lumpy for his fine fill-in work! And thanks to all of you who participated in the spring fundraiser to help keep the lights on around here! You’ll be getting personal thank-yous in the next few days, plus links to a fancy-schmancy Google Forms questionnaire that will make it hopefully easier for me to get rewards out in a timely/organized fashion. BUT FIRST: BACK TO THE COMICS!

Apartment 3-G, 4/29/15

Hey, guess who else is back? Gabriella’s mother, apparently! Gabriella, your mother isn’t sick any longer — she’s a foul, undead abomination, shuffling from the graveyard towards the still-living family that her rotted brain just barely remembers, moaning with a hunger that can never be sated. It’s the best news of all!

Speaking of the undead continuity strips: Uncle Lumpy tends to pay Newspaper Spider-Man exactly as much attention as he deserves (none), but I can’t look away from it, and I feel compelled to share with you another great example of Newspaper Spider-Man’s Spider-Powers Being Real Crappy, from last week:

Panel from Spider-Man, 4/22/15

Oh, Spider-Man, your spider-sense is literally of no use to you in situations where more than one person is around! It’s a good thing people generally dislike you and try to avoid you!

Anyway, after a little light breaking and entering and security-guard-webbing, we arrive at today’s strip:

Spider-Man, 4/29/15

Haha, the potential for super-heroic combat has quickly withered away, and now we’re just left with Spider-Man arguing with the pajama-clad heir to an industrialist’s fortune about the mental health professionals he’s consulting. I love how quickly this strip finds its level in every plot!

Hagar the Horrible, 4/29/15

I’ve often wondered when exactly the action in Hagar the Horrible takes place vis-à-vis the conversion of the Norse from paganism to Christianity. Well, fun fact: when the Vikings became Christian, they started burying their dead instead of cremating them. So, does today’s installment definitively place this strip in the age of Norse paganism? Not necessarily: perhaps Attila, still loyal to a polytheistic pantheon, is taunting Hagar, whom he knows has converted to the faith of the “civilized” world and, by implication, has gone soft, by sending him an object to remind him of his pagan warrior past. Quite a sick barbarian-on-barbarian burn, eh? I mean yes, the pagan Huns didn’t practice cremation themselves. Also, Attila lived a solid four centuries before the Viking Age. Look, just let me have this, OK?

Dennis the Menace, 4/29/15

Whining to the neighbors and asking them to call for help because you got stuck up a tree? Not menacing. Making your neighbors, who probably hold you in justified contempt for your irritating antics, question their own moral worth as you force them to confront the fact that, in their heart of hearts, they value the life and safety of an animal over that of a little boy? Extremely menacing.

Herb and Jamaal, 4/29/15

Herb’s expression of evil plotting as he contemplates an extremely minor transgression against conventional morality is definitely the funniest thing in the comics today. “I’m pretty bad at golf … but based on this scorecard, the world will think I’m only mediocre at golf! None will be the wiser! All will tremble before me! MOO HA HA HA HA HA HA HA”

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Dennis the Menace, 4/9/15

“Hey, Mr. Wilson, you’re a hoarder! A sad old hoarder! You think you can fill the empty hole inside you by getting more stuff, but you can’t and you never will!” Menacing level: extremely high.

Heathcliff, 4/9/15

I’m pretty sure all the tough guys out there with “THUG LIFE” tattooed across their knuckles or shoulders or whatever would be horrified if they found out that Garfield had gotten the phrase inked onto his fuzzy orange belly. But Heathcliff? Heathcliff’s a tougher breed, and is also less ubiquitous and commercial. I’m going to choose to believe that, after the initial shock, there would be grudging respect for this cartoon within the thug life tattoo community.

Spider-Man, 4/9/15

Spider-Man has, as is its wont, devolved from a brief bout of superheroic action into petty bickering. At least the bickering is over vaguely interesting philosophical questions this time around! If “superhero”/”ordinary human” is a spectrum and not a binary, how can we truly distinguish between “human altered by radioactive spider bite”, “highly trained assassin/spy who wears a distinctive skin-tight outfit”, and “actress portraying a fake superhero in a movie who took her costume home and was wearing it in public for vaguely erotic marital cosplay purposes”? Do Marvel Comics characters know about DC Comics characters like Superman, and if so do they know them as real or fictional? Are Spider-Man’s pleas for Mary Jane to help prop up his brand his most pathetic whine yet?

Beetle Bailey, 4/9/15

Oh man, I guess we’re gonna get uncomfortable glimpses into the inner sexual life of Beetle Bailey characters all week! “Can you make your computer have sex with me?” Private Blips asks, grinning girlishly. “I want to have sex with a computer!”

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Funky Winkerbean, 3/29/15

This isn’t the first time Funky Winkerbean has used “Nordic” as a euphemism for “clinically depressed.” “I think following that couple through those movies is a lot of fun.” “Yeah, you know what else is a lot of fun? Thinking about how everybody dies and none of us escape.”

Panel from Slylock Fox, 3/29/15

“Slylock helped the bird cough it up.” Haha, how much of Slylock’s job consists of him rooting around the gullets of semi-sapient animals who’ve accidentally eaten some valuable object or piece of evidence? “I’ll just, uh, be over here holding this nice lady’s purse,” says Max.

Rex Morgan, M.D. 3/29/15

Oh hey I haven’t talked about it at all but there’s been this whole other non-Sarah non-mob storyline about Nurse Becka who got a black eye from maybe falling into a dresser in the middle of an argument with her cheating husband and then abruptly quit her job and left town, so now we’ve got her replacement … Nurse Carter! Nurse Carter is here to clean up this operation. Literally. This operation is covered with mayonnaise. It’s pretty disgusting.

Panels from Dennis the Menace, 3/29/15

“In my day, during the long, anarchic regency for the child Emperor Of All Space Glorbax IX, we didn’t need a video game to raid the galaxy! We just went down to the Star Docks, found the most disreputable ship’s captain we could spot, swore a blood oath to defend his ship’s honor, and then launched into the lightly guarded Outer Rim systems! The Galactic Peacekeepers were thin on the ground out there, so we could bomb whole cities into submission, load up our cargo bay with the valuables we salvaged from the smoking ruins, and then headed to the Market Zone, where nobody asked any questions. Sometimes we’d even ensl — er, wait, no, I mean, uh, we played some dumb kangaroo game, here on Earth, where I’ve lived my whole life, yeah, that’s it.”