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Family Circus, 8/16/13

I freely admit to being charmed by the little drama in today’s Family Circus. It is a story told almost entirely in facial expressions. Dolly and Jeffy are largely uninterested in where they eat, so long as they get to eat soon; PJ doesn’t really understand what’s happening, but he can feel the anger in the air, and it makes him sad; Ma Keane is upset both about the sassback she’s getting and about the fact that once again she’s been assigned the role of the enforcer. And then there’s Big Daddy Keane and his eldest son, the axis around which today’s story revolves. Far in the background, but still deliberately made very visible to us, Daddy is practically glowing. It’s because he’s looking forward to an entire meal of adult conversation for once, of course, but it’s also because he’s getting to watch Billy get put in his place. Billy, meanwhile, is just as aware of what’s going on. He glowers back at his mother, seething at his banishment to the kitchen. Alone among the Keane Kids, he understands that the seating arrangements are based on status, and that he has fallen on the wrong side of the dividing line. Someday he’ll be at the grown-up table, he thinks, and the grown-ups will all be shut up in a nursing home somewhere, unvisited and unloved. Someday.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/16/13

Finally, after showing the main characters lounging around in their underwear and threatening to show them in a bikini and actually showing them in a bikini and having them walk in on people wearing just a towel and order people to take their shirts off — finally the strip gets to depict a naked butt. Jokes on you, prudes! That naked butt is a naked statue butt, so it’s art. Can’t argue with art!

Crankshaft, 8/16/13

Crankshaft’s viscera are still bathed in enough bodily fluids to keep them functioning, in case you were wondering.

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Mary Worth, 8/15/13

Mary’s long depressing walk in the desert with what’s-her-name where they talked about widowhood, which I found so boring that I’m not even bothering to dig up a post to link to, took for-frickin’-ever and I hated every minute of it. But this amazing “talk group”? It can go on for years as far as I’m concerned. Let’s everyone just let loose with some free-form anxiety/complaints! “My kids are out of control and I don’t know what to do!” “I’ve alienated everyone who’s every loved me!” Will Mary be so overloaded with meddling possibilities that she’ll shut down with smoke coming out of her ears, like a computer from the original Star Trek confronted with an elementary logic paradox?

Gil Thorp, 8/15/13

Oh, man, is Gil Thorp going to get in trouble for breaking kayfabe and revealing to the world that pro wrestling is staged? Not sure what the punishment for Gil Thorp the strip will be, but Gil Thorp the guy will be punished by getting into the ring with a man who’s quite physically fit but isn’t mentally all there, and who might have a hard time sticking to the script that they only half-assedly worked out.

Blondie, 8/15/13

Check out those weird circular wrinkles around the base everyone’s neck in this comic. Almost as if they’re wearing a garment the exact color of their skin? It appears that for the past eight years or so, Dagwood has continued his habit of wearing shirts made out of human flesh, and has even convinced the local youth to join his nightmarish death cult.

Family Circus, 8/15/13

If the Keane Kids are going to wander through this sterile, baffling condo complex for days and eventually starve to death, as I assume they will, it’ll be kind of appropriate that they were literally killed by suburban conformity.

Wizard of Id, 8/15/13

Here is a comic about a sexually aggressive dragon, enjoy!

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Shoe, 7/29/13

So, here you go: Shoe finally takes a stab at acknowledging that its denizens are sentient bird-men and -women, with puzzling results. First of all, I can’t believe I never made the flappers-bird connection before, and am reasonably sure that there’s some elaborate sentient-bird-women-as-flappers fan drawings out there, possibly on DeviantArt, possibly in the context of an all-sentient-bird Great Gatsby graphic novel. And yet the whole potential crossover is wasted, for the most part. Instead, Loon just tells a weird story about how his aunt used her unremarkable-in-this-context power of flight to … transcend to a higher plane of existence? Like in Jonathan Livingston Seagull? Or maybe she just died of exhaustion/oxygen deprivation? Anyway, if there were ever a situation where Shoe’s patented goggle eyes of horror would be appropriate, it’s this one — “let me tell you a fun story about my aunt that ends in her disappearance and probable death” — but instead the Perfesser just stares straight ahead with dead-eyed numbness. He stopped listening to Loon hours ago. He just says “Yeah?” during conversational lulls to feign politeness.

Gil Thorp, 7/29/13

It may be no Gail Martin mystery, but this summer’s Gil Thorp storyline has been zany in a low-key way, involving an amiable, Alzheimer’s-stricken ex-pro-wrestler and his also ex-pro-wrestler son wandering the nation on the dad’s whims. Today, our senile king of the squared circle is going to teach One-Armed Steve some wrestling moves! Steve seems amused and convinced this will all be in fun, about which he may turn out to be mistaken.

Family Circus, 7/29/13

I guess the tattered state of Jeffy’s blanket is meant to indicate that it’s a well-loved security object for him, but I prefer a different interpretation: it’s decayed during his multi-decade, Rip van Winkle-style nap. No, I’m not sure why Jeffy hasn’t gotten older or why his clothes and house are still intact, even though his family long since moved away and/or died. The important thing is that Jeffy has been thrust alone into a world he no longer understands, OK? Just … just give me this.