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Family Circus, 6/11/13

Hey, everyone, grown-up Keane Kid Jeff Keane is once again pretending to be his older brother Glen’s in-panel avatar Billy filling in for his deceased father, who we’re pretending is still in charge of drawing the strip. Got it? Anyway, this hall-of-mirrors meta-version of Billy is gracing us with illustrated puns this week, and it’s only Tuesday and we’ve already reached ULTIMATE NIGHTMARE LEVEL. Ha ha, look, it’s a majestic lion, king of beasts, lying dead, the vague odor of rot already beginning to waft up from him. A horrifyingly cheerful Big Daddy Keane stands only inches away and pelts the corpse with bloody chunks of meat. I mean, I guess if you’ve already decided that “meat” as a transitive verb means “hurl raw steak at,” why not go all the way into horror, you know?

Better Half, 6/11/13

Speaking of rotting meat, it sounds like Stanley’s past his due date, and will be dead soon! Maybe he’s already putrefying from within? I was going to say that there has to be a sexier set-up for noticing something on your spouse’s naked body than “checking each other for suspicious moles,” but considering Harriet’s husband is a walking semi-corpse, who can blame her here.

Heathcliff, 6/11/13

I guess I would judge a seafood restaurant’s quality not only by the number of cats it attracts, but also by its ability and determination to keep said cats out of the dining areas? Anyway, behind that middle door there’s just a room full of sand and cat shit, FYI.

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B.C., 6/5/13

So vultures are creepy because we associate them with death, right? Like, they only show up when someone or something is dying, and then they feast on its corpse. We find this horrifying and repugnant! So wouldn’t it be even more horrifying and repugnant if the vulture actually killed a living being in order to leave it in a state that the vulture found palatable to eat? Possibly by using a weapon of some sort it designed specifically for that purpose? How gruesome! That was probably the thinking behind the joke in this strip, and then whoever came up with that joke probably went somewhere and enjoyed a sandwich filled with meat sliced from an animal that wasn’t alive, how could you think about eating a living animal, that’s disgusting.

Speaking of the awful stench of death, it’s a good thing I can’t tell the barely distinguishable cavemen of B.C. apart, because otherwise I might feel more of an emotional attachment to whoever it is who’s suffering a slow, agonizing death from exposure in the first panel.

Family Circus, 6/5/13

At last, PJ’s training is complete! Soon he’ll face off against other competitors in the 25-to-35-pound weight division in … THE BABY OCTOGON.

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Gil Thorp, 6/4/13

The dreary Gil Thorp spring storyline continues to plod along, with lawyer-spawn/aspiring lawyer Knox Foley (aka “Foley Knox,” aka “How am I supposed to keep track of which is your first name and which is your last name when they both look like last names”) still at the fore. His latest legal shenanigan: trying to convince his aspirational lady love that she should sue the grocery store where she fell and broke her wrist and UGH I can’t even work up the energy to make a joke about this. Mostly I want to point out Foley’s huge hand flopping around in the middle of panel three, like we’re playing in a first-person shooter video game except it’s not a first-person shooter, it’s a first-person poker or grabber or something. Giant meaty freak-hands have been the defining visual element of Gil Thorp since artist Rod Whigham took over in 2008, so it’s great to see a Thorp-flipper literally front and center here, and I wouldn’t be sad if every subsequent panel followed suit.

Beetle Bailey, 6/4/13

Less well known to Beetle Bailey regulars than “Miss Buxley Wednesday” is “The Halftracks loathe each other Saturday,” which today seems to be happening on Tuesday for some reason, maybe because we’ve crossed some sort of nuclear threshold of mutual hatred. Haha, it’s funny because General Halftrack is at the bar drunkenly boasting to his friends that he’s going to leave his wife! His wife is back home, stone cold sober, boasting to nobody in particular that she’s going to leave her husband, and it’s terrifying.

Family Circus, 6/4/13

Oh, man, just look at this guy! Billy’s pretty good at being smug, but this kid’s the master. “Teach me how to be like you, Eric! If I exude epic levels of self-satisfaction, will the ‘law of attraction’ bring me all the tooth-related revenues I deserve?”