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Family Circus, 4/7/16

I would feel sorry for that angel too! Imagine you’re a supernatural, superhuman being, and you suddenly find yourself in combat with a human being, of the sort that your kind hasn’t experienced since the days of Jacob — and this tiny troglodytic creature not only manages to overcome you, but through some unknown power steals your voice. Why, the whole structure of the universe must be under threat! You must warn God — but how, when you cannot speak or scream or even whisper?

Beetle Bailey, 4/7/16

For a strip that takes place entirely within the context of the U.S. military, Beetle Bailey has remarkably little to say about wars, which is interesting considering that the U.S. military has been engaging in one or more wars non-stop for the entirety of the last fourteen and a half years. So when you get strips like today, where warplanes shower Camp Swampy with flowers to let everyone know they’ve had a “successful mission,” which presumably means showering some other country with high explosives — well, it’s hard to know if this is some kind of biting commentary or rah-rah boosterism or just, “Hey, you know how planes usually drop bombs on people? Well, get a load of this.”

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Family Circus, 3/29/16

I’m usually pretty meh on the art in the Family Circus. Still, the trailing shoelace in today’s panel is a nice idea, despite the fact that those shoes look to be loafers and the lace is sort of emerging out of nowhere. It gives a nice air of childhood whimsy and innocence to the drawing; it also gives hardcore Billy haters like myself hope that he’s soon going to trip and break a tooth, or, even better, his watch.

Crankshaft, 3/29/16

Tom Batiuk famously writes Funky Winkerbean almost a year in advance, which I assume is also true for Crankshaft. So it’s actually just a total coincidence that this storyline is running the same week a guy in North Carolina was stopped because he had a broken taillight and then literally handcuffed and taken to jail for not returning Freddy Got Fingered to his local video store in 2002. (The local video store, I think it goes without saying, closed down years ago.) Anyway, if we live in an absurd world where decades-old civil judgements for very small amounts of money can lead to actual arrest, maybe you should be careful, Lillian! The cops in the North Carolina case were nice enough to let the guy drop his daughter off at school first, but they didn’t have to! Probably they could just drag Lillian off to jail and leave the twins in the car, miles from anywhere. (Is Lillian even supposed to be driving these kids around?)

Mary Worth, 3/29/16

Looks like Dawn’s starting to make a bolder personal effort at school! Step one: just don’t do things you don’t want to do! If she were being a little bolder, she just would’ve said “Nahh, not my scene. Later, blondie!” But this is definitely an improvement over signing up and pretending to enjoy it.

Funky Winkerbean, 3/29/16

“…what if I looked him up … on the Internet? And so I did. He’s got a Wikipedia page. Turns out he’s dead! Cool story, huh?”

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Mark Trail, 3/16/16

Only in Mark Trail could the hunky protagonist get away with urging the shapely female guest star, already standing unnaturally so as to emphasize her bosom and posterior, to crawl away from him so he could get a good look. Anyone else would be transparently exploiting an extremely dangerous scenario to sexually humiliate a poor woman, but we all know that Mark has never thought about sex in his life. His advice must be entirely practical here. Don’t worry, Carina, you’re in safe hands. Safe and entirely unerotic hands.

Dick Tracy, 3/16/16

Again, not really engaging much with this storyline, but wanted to point out that Dick’s new detective pals work for authoritarian regimes and are very impressed by US surveillance technology.

Family Circus, 3/16/16

Alright, who had “7” in the “how early would Billy peak, intellectually” pool?