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For Better Or For Worse, 8/30/06

Never has the flabby make-it-up-as-you-go-along nature of the Foobian plot been on display as nakedly as it is here. I mean: How far away is Liz’s apartment from her parents’ house that she would considering moving back there to shave a little off her commute? And she’s been back down south for, what, three months now? Don’t they have leases in Canada, or are Pattersons just allowed to break them with impunity? And doesn’t Ellie have any say over whether her totally adult and self-sufficient daughter decides to up and move back in, or is she just going to go on with the passive “It’ll happen if it happens” attitude? These are questions that I want answered. In return, I’ll answer April’s question about why Liz wouldn’t want to move back home: it’s because she’s, like, 26, and living at home when you’re 26 and have a job is for looooooosers.

Dennis the Menace, 8/30/06

Speaking of losers, Dennis is continuing his trend of eschewing menacing, preferring instead to hone his floral-themed dinner-table bon mots. It actually took me about 45 seconds to grasp the “bud”-“blossom” wordplay going on here, and I finally only got the joke because of the presence of the rose on the dinner table, which I assume was intentional. Note to cartoonists: If you need to put in a visual aid to forward the cause of a pun in your comic, your pun needs work.

Slylock Fox, 8/30/06

Apparently it’s terrified prey week in Slylock Fox. As if the terrified beaver wasn’t traumatizing enough, check out the discarded ribcage, presumably of one of his family members, next to the crocodile on dry land. Today’s scene of the savagery of nature provides a backdrop for a true/false quiz. “True or False: Sometimes things that are cute and basically good die in agony for so that something more powerful and vicious can survive. (Answer: So very true!)”

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Mary Worth, 8/22/06

So the truth is revealed! Aldo isn’t a murderer — he’s just a sad, neglectful drunk. At least the booze might go a little way towards explaining his otherwise inexplicable lust for Mary.

Mark Trail, 8/22-3/06

So now we know what heartless mustachioed fiend is set to menace lovable Molly the bear: this bee-loving cad! Normally, his obsession with his insect friends would make him an animal lover and thus a good guy in the world of Mark Trail, but his senseless chicken-kicking in panel two of today’s strip indicates that his apiphilia has driven him so deranged that he would do anything — even senselessly murder a lovable, kissy-faced trained bear — to protect his precious, precious hives. Clearly, he needs a good solid Trailian punch to the jaw to set him straight.

I like the fact that our omniscient narrator lets us know that Molly doesn’t know what to do for more probably-dead Buck. What do you want from her? She’s not a trained medical professional. Also, she’s a GODDAMNED BEAR.

Dennis the Menace, 8/23/06

Dennis: Growing less menacing by the day.

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Dennis the Menace, 7/27/06

I’m not sure if that’s Mr. the Menace in the background with the surfboard, but Dennis clearly is learning at the beach that his dad’s no paragon of hunkery. In this twisted act of marital warfare, he shows that he’s taking his menacing out of the world of mere mischief and into the dark realm of psychological destruction.

Herb and Jamaal, 7/27/06

Yeah, because it was so much more naughty back when it was up … on her … thigh? My guess is that in the original joke, the tattoo was somewhere a bit below something a lot naughtier (on her stomach?) and then the powers at be forced the poor strip back into the Herb and Jamaal Prison of Blandness and Inoffensiveness. (It’s not the first time it’s happened, either.)

Pluggers, 7/27/06

OK, even when I hate Pluggers, I generally get Pluggers, but this is just baffling. Do non-Pluggers hold their dogs in such contempt that they just say things that excite them, not caring about the emotional roller-coaster ride it puts them on? Do non-Pluggers just have extremely stupid dogs? Or maybe it’s that Pluggers are themselves quasi-beasts, and so their language is close enough to that of the true dogs that interspecies communication is almost possible? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s stupid and doesn’t make any sense and DAMN YOU PLUGGERS FOR MAKING ME THINK ABOUT THIS DAMN YOU STRAIGHT TO HELL.

Anyway, if you’d like a little Pluggers spoofery from the fellow who brought you that TDIET takeoff the other day, click here.