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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!

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Mark Trail, 4/30/12

I would like to hereby apologize for disparaging the quality of the violence in the current Mark Trail storyline last week. The lackluster bludgeoning on Friday was clearly just a set-up for this fully awesome scene of Andy suddenly transforming from a cheerful, happy companion to a slavering vicious attack hound at Mark’s command. Do you think Mark saw that the marijuana grower was growing marijuana with a gun in his hand? If so, we must assume that he knows that any bullet fired from such a feeble pistol would simply bounce harmlessly off Andy’s massive skull. It’s not like he would ever put his best friend in danger, after all!

Family Circus, 4/30/12

The key to understanding this panel is Jeffy’s expression of heavy-lidded boredom. “Mommy always looks great, and yet society’s crushingly unrealistic expectations about female body types can cause her to spiral into an emotional tailspin when that cheap scale tells here she’s gained only a few pounds. I’d rage against the patriarchy, but I’m just too exhausted by the efforts I make to comfort her, efforts that always fall short.”

Apartment 3-G, 4/30/12

Kudos to Apartment 3-G for being so sensitive as to keep all intimate, interesting details about the death of Nina’s mother off-panel. Sure, letting us in on this information would have made the storyline more engaging, but at what emotional cost to its fictional characters?