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Apartment 3-G, 7/5/10

Oh, God, Tommie’s humiliation is going to be even more delicious than I might have hoped. “Tommie, get out here! What are you wearing, a sweatsuit? You’re letting down everyone, with your ugly clothes! God, you make me want to puke. Let’s turn the house lights up, so you can see everyone’s disgusted faces!”

Mary Worth, 7/5/10

Dear Mary Worth Creative Team: I know you submit your strips weeks in advance and all, but I can’t help but feel a bit miffed that you’ve followed up my “Jenna and Mike are on drugs” funny with a strip in which our lovers are talking in oddly lucid and detached terms about their weird, altered emotional state and the “strange buzzing” they’re experiencing, all while rubbing up against each other. Has Mary so lost faith in her meddling skills that she’s resorted to spiking her victims’ meals with Ecstasy?

Mark Trail, 7/5/10

Since the main point of this storyline is to return Sassy home so that Rusty can make another horrifically overwrought facial expression, I fail to see the point to any of this sordid unlicensed animal shelter drama; people are just competing for the Sassy reward money, as is natural and healthy in a capitalist society. “Yes, Mr. Trail, your little dog is here somewhere… wait, where is he?” “Why, is this the dog you’re looking for, sir?” “Why, yes it is, mysterious mustachio’d man! Here is your reward!” “But … but … that man stole the dog from me!” “Whatever, lady, I stopped caring about this the moment the wayward puppy was returned to me. By the way, does the zoning board know you keep all these animals here?”

Dennis the Menace, 7/5/10

Mrs. Wilson has paid Dennis and Joey to induce the heart attack that will finally free her.

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Dennis the Menace, 6/16/10

I have to admit that I find today’s Dennis the Menace funny. No cutesy puns, no adorable kid antics, just Dennis straight-up gettin’ pissed as he realizes that he’s been bamboozled into dressing nicely and going somewhere boring. And he’s being genuinely menacing towards adulthood’s veneer of politeness, the pretense that we put up purporting that we want to be doing the things we have to do, even when we don’t, that keeps civilization from collapsing into chaos. Henry’s tiny smile seems to indicate that he approves of his son’s agitation. “Ha ha, yes, nothing ever good happens to you when you put on a tie, kid! But don’t worry, your belief that you can change your life to make it more like one you want to live will be broken, soon enough.”

Family Circus, 6/16/10

Today’s Family Circus is also funny to me, though much more difficult to get a handle on. Was a sleeping Jeffy attacked by a suddenly wakeful Kittycat, leaving his blanket in shreds and his tiny mind fixated on etymology? Or is he just wandering around the house in his underwear spouting groggy cat-related nonsense for no reason?

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Dennis the Menace, 6/6/10

Let’s pass over for the moment the fact that if, as I’d guess, Mr. Wilson is around 75, he himself would have grown up with the first generation of comic book superheroes, and thus would not find Dennis’s own media consumption choices to be so sneer-worthy; let’s ignore too his seeming assumption that Dennis would view a world where basic services were performed by humans to be baffling and alien, as if he lived in a culture where people were tended at all times by advanced robots. Instead, let’s focus on the middle panel of the bottom row, in which Dennis imagines Mr. Wilson’s mail-delivery alter ego as a wild-eyed psychopath, who presumably used his job dealing with the public and the protection of his public employees’ union to go on a years-long killing spree that no doubt held the entire city in terror.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/6/10

When comics strips lavish loving energy on the depictions of the ass-cracks of adults, it can be kind of sexy! When they lavish the same amount of attention on the ass-cracks of prepubescent children, it’s just disturbing.