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Mary Worth, 10/25/15

I was going to make a joke about how Mary is planning on journeying to New York to pledge her fealty to Olive, our new hyper-evolved Goddess-Queen who will one day enslave humanity with her mind powers, but I can’t get past today’s Inspirational Sunday Quote, from former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, who lost the bitterly contested 1968 presidential election and then apparently went on to claim that, really, nothing in life is better than friendship. He didn’t want to be president anyway. Nixon was fine, and he’s not even mad about losing, since he’s got good pals. Yep, friendship, that’s what really counts.

Family Circus, 10/25/15

I was going to make some joke about how Kids Today can’t conceive of a Halloween celebration without the omnipresent branded characters that have crowded all imagination out of their fantasy world, but then I saw panel one and got a load of Ma Keane’s costume: she’s going as some kind of horrifying pinheaded circus freak.

Panels from Beetle Bailey, 10/25/15

I was going to make a joke about how today’s Beetle Bailey throwaway panels are pretty clearly about how Miss Buxley wants Beetle to have some energy tonight, for sex, but then I got a look at this strip’s attempt to depict ears from behind and ew ew ew ew ewwwwwwww

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/6/15

Welp, I guess we’re done with Lisa smugging from beyond the grave and have moved on to … Cindy’s love life! Did you know that Cindy was supposed to be significantly (?) older than her new hunky Hollywood boyfriend, Mason Jarr? I sure didn’t! I mean, I guess her whole shtick is complaining about getting old, but the narrative time jumps haven’t transformed her into a stooped, balding potato-person like her fellow main cast members, and honestly I have no read on how old Mason is supposed to be anyway, so I sort of figured they were roughly in the same ballpark. Anyway, I kind of enjoy how Cindy starts off in panel two making a dumb Funkyverse-typical metaphor about, like, tires, I guess, but immediately gives up and just starts talking about how pretty soon nobody’s going to consider her attractive anymore, haha, the patriarchy, amiright people? Mason’s last-panel smirk is pretty great too. “That’s right, babe! The inevitable passage of time brings death to us all, and we think we’re ready for that, but first it takes away the good looks on which we’ve founded our entire self-image.”

Family Circus, 10/6/15

The “Billy, age 7” panels of the Family Circus definitely present some of the most complex layers of narrative and metanarrative in the comics today. You have the strip being drawn by the real-life Jeffy, but deliberately done all crappy so that it can be credited to a seven-year-old version of his real-life older brother who in this fiction is filling in so his real-life deceased father can watch baseball. The look on Billy’s face really says it all here. “Please,” he seems to be thinking, “release me from this convoluted web of puns and artifice. It’s exhausting.”

Apartment 3-G, 10/6/15

“You know, I’m one of Margo’s best friends and know her parents pretty well and also am part of the team responsible for her care, so they’re definitely not going to want to hear this from me. Why don’t you, a total stranger, go over to their place in the middle of the night and tell them about it? I’m not going to tell you anything about their weird family backstory or dynamic, but you should definitely fill them in about how you used to be Margo’s boyfriend but then let everyone think you were dead for five years while you hung out with some Tibetan nuns, they’ll love that.”

Marvin, 10/6/15

This is 100% the facial expression of a woman whose grandchild has stolen her credit card and gone on a spending spree at a toy store.

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B.C., 9/12/15

Yes, this is what radio listeners crave: the possibility of hearing a snail DJ slowly dissolving, over the radio! (psst I think maybe someone doesn’t actually know what “shock jock” means)

Family Circus, 9/12/15

Speaking of horrible salt-deaths, I love Big Daddy Keane’s little smile here. At last, he thinks, at last I have evidence that Billy’s heart is incurably hardened against the Lord. I can just leave him by the side of the highway with no regrets.

Pluggers, 9/12/15

Pluggers don’t even remember what it was like to feel giddy, overblown enthusiasm about anything in this life, and will thank you to leave them alone while they eat their ice cream in sullen silence.