Post Content

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.

Post Content

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!)

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 8/30/12

Say, did you hear the one about the one-armed golfer? He was the subject of this summer’s Gil Thorp storyline, which turned out to not be that interesting! Wrapping up briefly: we learned that One-Armed Steve was full of rage because he did in fact lose his arm in a non-heroic fashion (car accident while on a military base overseas), and his attempts to woo Molly Kinsella failed not because he was an amputee but because he’s a grown man and she’s still in high school, gross. But all that psychic pain was nothing a little match play couldn’t cure, so Steve got cleaned up and has learned to love life again. So instead of getting a real job and getting back on his feet, he’s going to become yet another Milford community member offering the high school no-cost coaching services! It’s a win for everyone, but mostly for Gil.

And now our fall drama is taking shape! Anita Visci is taking cookies to her new neighbor … who refers to them as “biscuits,” which means that she’s English, probably! Will her son refuse to play decent American football and instead demand equal time for his British freak sports, like rugby or cricket or punting? Will Maeve take the pram to the lift on the telly in the boot or whatever? Stay tuned!

Family Circus, 8/30/12

Ha ha, yes, we all know little kids all over this great country of ours will be glued to the tube for the next couple of weeks, thrilling to the minutia of parliamentary procedure! Actually, this cartoon is kind of dating itself, as the last presidential nominating convention where there was realistic suspense about how things would go on the first ballot was (I think) in 1980, so maybe kids were smarter then?

Blondie, 8/30/12

Dagwood has gone through all the trouble of baking a pizza in an oven, and yet he’s still leaving his hat on while he eats. I don’t know why this bothers me, but it does.