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Family Circus, 10/23/14

For all its various crimes against taste, humor, and narrative sense, the Family Circus at least treats its pets fairly realistically. Sam, Barfy, and Kittycat don’t exchange wisecracks with the kids in thought balloon form like, say, the dogs in Marvin; they are instead mostly ignored by the children except for when they’re being tormented, which strikes me as an accurate portrayal. Anyway, that all ends today with this terrifying depiction of Kittycat’s facial expression, which proves that he’s definitely in league with Satan, and is perhaps possessed by the Lord of Lies himself. Presumably when the poor creature rejected baptism in the name of Christ, he created a space within himself where the Devil could get in. Now the demon-controlled cat body still purrs in evil joy, even though his heart stopped beating long ago

Funky Winkerbean, 10/23/14

Funky Winkerbean is taking a break from death-terror and gross romance to give us a lighthearted sequence of Les and Funky on their morning jog. (Funky hates jogging but has to get in better shape so he doesn’t die of a massive heart attack, so it’s not a complete break from death-terror, I guess.) Anyway, Les takes this private moment to gently let his friend know that he hasn’t been meeting the pun quota set for every Funkyverse character. “Oh, crap,” thinks Funky. “Uh … it’s a running panter? Panter? Get it, it’s like banter but I’m panting?” Les smirks his approval.

Curtis, 10/23/14

Who can forget those great slang phrases of yore, like “Answer your telephone: ‘This doesn’t concern you!'” Or “I believe the message boy from Western Union is at your door with a telegram: ‘Your opinion is irrelevant!'” Or “A courier from the King has arrived at your castle, bearing a scroll sealed with the royal signet: ‘I don’t need your advice!'” I mean, this strip isn’t up-to-the-minute like Blondie, so we didn’t get a real cutting-edge phrase like “You might want to check your Twitter DMs: ‘Don’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong!'” But this is still a good approximation of how the kids talk, A+ job.

Marvin, 10/23/14

Marvin has been farting out aggressive, mindless defiance literally since the day he was born.

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Apartment 3-G, 10/20/14

Well, this is certainly the most shocking development in Apartment 3-G in some time: during Tommie’s multi-month absence, Margo hasn’t gotten bored and come up some new vaguely aspirational business plan, but has instead continued to be a publicist when the plot demands it! You might remember Skyler as the young starlet who Margo’s employee/sex slave/secret enemy Evan flirted with so that Margo would refuse to take her on as a client. Skyler used to be a brunette and then had black hair and now is a blonde, which is par for the course for actresses, I suppose. Less realistic is that she’s wearing a shapeless pink sweatshirt, or that she now looks more or less exactly like Lu Ann, or that Margo is a good enough publicist that anyone would try to hire her after she cruelly rejected them for no good reason.

Mark Trail, 10/20/14

Since this is Mark Trail, it’s a safe bet that the folks on TV here are aggrieved over some kind of nature or environmental issue, which makes me even angrier that, in an age of rapidly shrinking journalism budgets, Woods And Wildlife Magazine can still afford a high-rise office for its wholly out of touch top editor. Still, Bill Ellis’s uncanny resemblance to LBJ has never been more appropriate than it is here, as he smirks with hooded eyes at some damn hippies protesting on his television set.

Judge Parker, 10/20/14

Just in time for Halloween, and then for the seven to fourteen months after halloween: as darkness falls, the Parker-Driver clan is going to drive the Road Queen into a spooky, abandoned RV park! How many chainsaw-weilding murderers will be lurking there, and how much money will our heroes get as a reward when they arrange for those maniacs to be captured by the local police, with very little effort on their part?

Family Circus, 10/20/14

Remember the innocent days when the Keane Kids would cheerfully blame their transgressions on adorable ghost-things “Not Me” and “Ida Know”? Well, that’s all over now. Reality has set in. The kids know that nobody buys that crap anymore. One of them is going to have to take the fall. The question is: who? This will only be settled by an ugly outbreak of violence.

Beetle Bailey, 10/20/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because Beetle is injured and writhing in agony and begging Sarge to drive more carefully, which Sarge callously refuses to do! But the real joke is that all those injuries were almost certainly inflicted by Sarge in the first place.

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Gil Thorp, 10/10/14

Usually Gil is far too disengaged from his job and his student-athletes to live up to any of the usual stereotypes of gym teachers as bullies, but as his cruel smile in panel three indicates, he’s not above indulging in a little sadism if the opportunity falls ready-made into his lap. “That’s right, quarterbacks, duke it out for my love, like bugs in a jar! Oh, does the jar need shaking? COMPETITION IS GOOD! NOW FIGHT! FIGHT!”

Dennis the Menace, 10/10/14

Dennis, unable to truly grasp the concepts of “past” and “future” or the endless cycle of the seasons, lives in an eternal present, refusing to learn anything from anything that happened before or consider that his actions might have effects on what’s coming next. It doesn’t get more menacing than this.

Family Circus, 10/10/14

When the starting premise for your Family Circus cartoon is “Let’s pretend that seven-year-old Billy drew a naked picture of his little brother in the service of an awful sub-pun,” I suppose it’s actually a good thing that the end result looks like a fleshy pink chicken with a human head.

Six Chix, 10/10/14

There’s a lot to dislike here — the crude drawing, the sub-par joke — but I’m going to focus my enmity on the fact that this cartoon ran on a Friday.