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Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/2/12

You have to hand it to today’s Rex Morgan. It faced a difficult test — “Can we depict a drunken younger woman, dressed in fairly modest mourning clothes, strangling an old lady, but at the same time remind our readers that younger one has large, shapely breasts?” — and passed with flying colors.

Apartment 3-G, 6/2/12

Desperate to change Nina’s mindset and put a stop to her irrational fear of childbirth, Tommie has come up with a new religion based around worship of Nina’s unborn child, with Tommie as the high priestess.

Judge Parker, 6/2/12

Sam is staring at that signed contract with more affection in his eyes than he’s ever show to his wife, children, or any other human being. I know this is supposed to be a “realistic” strip, but shouldn’t he really have dollar signs floating around his head?

Family Circus, 6/2/12

If the Family Circus suddenly became a body horror comic, with the Keane Kids cracking wise as fingers grew out of their feet and their ears dripped blood and their hair fell out and the back of their heads were covered with eyeballs, would that be more or less disturbing than the jokes they use now? Discuss.

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Family Circus, 5/18/12

“Every time Mommy leaves the Keane Kompound and interacts with non-family members, she briefly remembers that she once had social bonds with others, and even friendships! This is obviously unacceptable. I wish that, when we have to go on our once-a-month shopping trip buy the things we can’t make ourselves, there were no humans there at all to distract Mommy with the temptations of the rotten human society we’ve sworn to separate ourselves from.”

Ziggy, 5/18/12

Always just a bit behind the times, Ziggy is trying, and failing, to sell toxic mortgage-backed securities to a bird.

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Wizard of Id, 5/8/12

It’s really kind of sad that this fearsome, powerful wizard, heir to a long tradition of human beings who have managed to pierce through the barrier separating our mundane world from the realm of magic, having just used his unspeakable powers to bring a poor mortal back from the brink of death, feels a need to make a terrible and barely coherent joke relating to Apple’s electronic gizmos. It ought to be just as sad that cartoonists working on long-established strips that run in hundreds of newspapers around the world also feel the need to make terrible and barely coherent jokes relating to Apple’s electronic gizmos, but, you know, that ship sailed long ago, so it’s hard to feel more than just mild disgust about it at this point.

Family Circus, 5/8/12

Aw, look at that, the name of the mall the Keanes have descended upon sounds like “Bless ’em all,” isn’t that nice? For my money there are not nearly enough mall/all puns out there in the world. For a while, when I lived in Oakland, there was this truck from Lavine’s Heating & Cooling that was often parked near my apartment that featured prominently the company’s URL, kingofthemall.com, meant, I assumed, to indicate that Lavine’s was King of Them All, with “them all” referring to all the HVAC contractors out there (or who knows, maybe it meant all of humanity, but the on-truck marketing copy didn’t seem that grandiose otherwise). I always saw that and thought “Boy, the King of the Mall must be pissed that he didn’t grab that URL when he had the chance.” Anyway, I’m curious as to whether an encounter with the horror of a litter of Keane Kids will make Blessem Mall’s management regret being so universal with their blessings.

Apartment 3-G, 5/8/12

Haha, this some high-quality amateur Freudianism going on right here! Nina’s mother died giving birth to her, so now she’s ambivalent about having a baby because she … never had a mother to love her? Or maybe because she did have a mother, and then that mother died horribly while giving birth to a baby. Just a thought!