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Dennis the Menace, 5/24/07

Dennis’ black, shriveled heart does not understand this feeling you call “love.”

Gil Thorp, 5/24/07

The Lady Mudlark softball team ought to forget about breast cancer and get Brynna Antenna to a reconstructive surgeon who can do something about her leathery mask of a face.

Family Circus, 5/24/07

Billy will go far.

For Better Or For Worse, 5/24/07

April can destroy things with her mind.

The Lockhorns, 5/24/07

The Lockhorns’ marriage is so depressing that it defies all human understanding.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/24/07

Child labor is alive and well in Appalachia, or the Ozarks, or wherever the hell this strip is supposed to be set.

Pluggers, 5/24/07

Or died. He may well be dead.

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Dennis the Menace, 5/22/07

Dennis the Menace rightly gets flack on this site for his repeated failure to menace anybody, and today’s installment, in which he and his pal Joey take a whimsical trip down memory lane on the family footstool, would seem to be even less menacing than most. But think about it: Dennis is well aware of the fact that Alice, who used to have a name, and, moreover, an identity of her own, has now, by the very fact of his whelping, become merely an adjunct to his own larger-than-life personality. She’s no longer Alice Mitchell, and she’s definitely not Alice Whatever-Her-Maiden-Name-Was; she’s just “mom,” and, more to the point, she’s mom to the most hated child in the county. And Dennis looks pretty damn smug about this state of affairs. That sound you hear is millions of women across the country opening the cases that hold their birth control pills, double-checking to make sure they haven’t missed a day.

Hi and Lois, 5/22/07

I like the fact that Hi is not charmed by his twins’ antics, but rather stares at their handiwork in goggle-eyed panic. The lawn is shaggy enough that he can’t really care that much about the damage to the landscaping; rather, he sees that his golf dates, which were his only chance to get away from his hated family, will now be replaced by sullen putting around his backyard to delight of his squealing kids, followed by his suicide.

Crock, 5/22/07

Today we learn that the characters in Crock are in fact parasites who live their days wandering around the bright yellow flesh of some unimaginably huge being. If you had told me that somehow they’d find a way to make this strip even more unsettling than it already is, I wouldn’t have believed you, but there it is.

Momma, 5/22/07

Today we also learn that Momma’s Francis is into watersports, or maybe scat play. This revelation really ought to make the strip even more unsettling than it already is, but after I found out that Francis surfs for Internet porn while sitting right next to his mother, frankly nothing he does could possibly shock me.

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Blondie, 5/13/07

The saddest thing is that the central joke of this strip — that Blondie has been utterly charmed into an aroused frenzy by her pampering, and is eager to discovery what other surprises her husband has prepared for her, while Dagwood has one foot out the door as he’s planning to head out for a “men’s foursome” — is so in keeping with the well-established dynamic of the Bumstead marriage that I barely noticed it. The thing that really disturbed me is the heart that’s drifted up into Blondie’s word balloon in the final panel. I have no idea what it’s supposed to represent semantically. I suppose it could be “love” as a noun and term of endearment, rather than “love” as a verb, which it usually stands for — but then it ought to have a comma after it. Really, the fact that it’s sitting after a comma just makes it all the more anomalous to me. Mostly I’m worried that Dag and Blondie have ingested some kind of potent hallucinogen and now believe themselves to be conversing using abstract symbols rather than normal human speech.

Family Circus, 5/13/07

This strip is a subtle but powerful reminder of the strict laws of patriarchy that govern the Family Circus. Note that Dolly wonders who their mother would be if her parents hadn’t met, not who their father would be. On Mother’s Day, she assumes that her mother is just an interchangeable womb who could have been replaced by any number of other females from other times and places and their family would have remained pretty much the same.

I really enjoy the fact that all the other comics moms in Billy’s thought balloon are just sort of idly looking off into the distance, except for one. FBOFW’s Elly is looking straight at the eldest Keane boy in goggle-eyed horror, as if contemplating how excruciating it would have been to pass that enormous melonhead through her birth canal.

Doodles by Mac & Sack, 5/13/07

Someone’s kind of fixated on the idea of being crushed to death by a boa constrictor, and it makes me uncomfortable. I’m also disturbed the puffed-out cheeks of “the Doughboy” in the Doodle Zoo: they clearly indicate that he’s dying horribly as the smart-ass little koala cracks wise. I am kind of amused that the Doughboy seems to have lost his “Pillsbury” moniker at the last minute due to trademark infringement concerns, though it does bring to mind the notion of an American infantryman, having survived the hell of combat in the trenches against the Hun’s forces on the Western Front, being felled by an unexpected snake attack.

Panels from Dennis the Menace, 5/13/07

I’m not showing you the rest of this strip, because these panels perfectly set up the Dennis the Menace strip we’d all like to see, the one where Mr. Wilson murders Dennis with a pair of garden shears.

Panel from Mary Worth, 5/13/07

Since Vera’s so angry at Von, it’s ironic that she’s remembering him at the height of his glory: all decked out in his yellow suit, shirt, and facepaint, standing in front of that blue door, and disco dancing like nobody’s business.