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Family Circus, 9/8/12

Oh, God, something horrible happened outside, didn’t it? Those aren’t the faces of little kids who were having some fun out in the yard; those expressions are of illness and queasy terror. And then there’s Dolly, standing in the doorway, staring at them, marking their words. “Are they telling Mommy? They were specifically ordered not to tell Mommy. They know the punishment for telling Mommy: More mud pies. More mud pies. You don’t know the meaning of the word ‘filling,’ Jeffy.”

Apartment 3-G, 9/8/12

Hey, everyone, the Professor’s back! Back from … I dunno, did he go somewhere? I guess he did, they made a big deal out of his return earlier this week. Anyway, now he and Greg are bonding over their shared heritage, which seems to be causing a stone-faced Margo to vibrate with hostility in the final panel. Is she about to unleash a series of vicious anti-Greek ethnic slurs that will result in her being forever blackballed by the cabal of Hellenes who pull the strings of New York’s PR industry?

Wizard of Id, 9/8/12

The moral of today’s Wizard of Id: Don’t be lured into complacency by the false promise of nonviolent agitation for radical change! Violent expropriation of the rich’s wealth is the only path to successful class war.

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Family Circus and Dennis the Menace, 9/3/12

Happy Labor Day, everybody! Let’s all celebrate the prosperity of the American worker, which has allowed the children of the American worker to become whiny, entitled brats who can only say “gimmie gimmie gimmie.” Looks like a century of child labor laws have had negative social consequences after all! Let’s get Dennis and Billy to work in a glove factory stat and shut their greed-holes with good, honest manual labor at 50 cents an hour.

Gasoline Alley, 9/3/12

Gasoline Alley traditionally celebrates Labor Day by eschewing its usual inane plots for elaborate drawings of chain-link fences. Today’s strip contains a shocking innovation, however: acknowledgement that a so-called “Internet” exists, and that Gasoline Alley strips can be found there. Given the no-doubt extensive overlap between people who still pay for print newspaper subscriptions and people who faithfully read Gasoline Alley in the newspaper because they are unaware of other alternatives, this seems like a poor business decision.

Archie, 9/3/12

Today’s Archie may be telling us that in times of idleness we desire business and vice-versa, so that we are never truly at ease; it may be making a larger point that the things we desire will never be as sweet as we imagine; or it may be more specific, showing us that Archie himself cannot stand to spend quiet time with himself without confronting his own essential emptiness. This is pretty heavy stuff, particularly for Reggie, whose own obnoxious egotism has largely shielded him from any kind of depressing introspection.

Marmaduke, 9/3/12

Don’t be alarmed, Dottie! Like you, Marmaduke is “watching his weight.” Specifically, he needs to regulate the amount of human flesh-meat he consumes in order to be as svelte a hell-demon as he can be. So even if that number is a little higher than you’d like, be glad, because your extra pounds are all that stand between you and gory annihilation.

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 9/2/12

Oh, Slylock, I just don’t get you! You’ve always shown that you have nearly unlimited powers to arrest and jail anybody you want based on even the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. So now that you’ve caught the Wolf red-pawed, why are you going for this clever/wimpy put-salt-in-the-ice-cube-tray-so-the-water-won’t-freeze business? Perhaps he’s hoping that, by causing the Wolf’s plan to fail for reasons he won’t be able to comprehend, he’ll break the villain psychologically and leave him putty in the hands of law enforcement. Or maybe Slylock just doesn’t trust Max to do anything? That seems likely.

Beetle Bailey, 9/2/12

“Made the men eat frazzle fern” sounds like a nonsense placeholder phrase that was put into the dialogue with the intention of replacing it with something that was funny and made sense but then nobody did that because, it’s just Beetle Bailey, you know? And General Halftrack’s theatrical “Hmmmm”ing is drawn out about two panels too long. Still, though, Miss Buxley’s sad face in panel two as she muses on the web of emotional lies she’s been ordered into will haunt me for days.

Family Circus, 9/2/12

I love how sad Billy looks in the final panel as he imagines his inevitable transformation into a goody-goody adult. “God, way to be a suck-up chump, future me!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/2/12

WARNING: THREAT LEVEL ALPHA, JUNE MORGAN TO SPEND NEXT WEEK TRYING ON BIKINIS

(Happy Labor Day, everybody! I will probably have Monday’s post up sometime Monday evening, or maybe Tuesday morning. See ya then!)