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Family Circus, 5/12/11

I suppose the joke here is supposed to be kind of the flipside of the Mother’s Day installment; both have at their core the sad fact that the Keane Kids are semi-feral slobs who would, if not for Mommy’s constant attention, live in their own filth. But I’d like to believe that we’re seeing a progression here from Sunday’s episode: after the unseen fiasco of her very special dinner, during the course of which every single meticulously arranged outfit was in short order coated with a viscous layer of ketchup and boogers, she just decided to give up entirely. What we’re seeing here is the nicest outfit that Billy has left only a few days after his mother stopped grooming him. Soon the kids will be lurching around the house in gunny sacks (lurching because nobody will bother cutting out arm or leg holes for them).

Herb and Jamaal, 5/12/11

Ha ha, Herb, your daughter has no time for your weak and ancient Semitic sky deity! She will only offer prayers to her awesome and majestic insect god!

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Apartment 3-G, 5/8/11

As near as I’ve been able to tell, Trey has big plans to remake the Mills Gallery in a retro-Art Deco style, and has managed to convince his firm to underwrite the project rather than actually be paid by the client who will benefit from the makeover. Now, I’m as bored with both enormous, inhuman sheets of glass and exhaustingly whimsical Gehry-esque postmodernism as the next guy, but I’m not sure the solution is just to gin up some kind of throwback visual language and turn a perfectly nice art gallery into a slightly more upscale Johnny Rockets. And I’m definitely certain that anyone whose big idea for architecture revolves around nostalgia shouldn’t be displaying the sudden and unsettling delusions of grandeur that Trey is throwing off in the last two panels. Only one person in Apartment 3-G is allowed to indulge in that kind of unjustified megalomania, Trey, and you’d better ratchet back if you ever want to sleep with her again.

Spider-Man, 5/8/11

Ha ha, any day where Spider-Man gets bonked in the back of the head with a club-like object is a good one! But Martine shouldn’t be so proud of whatever vampire power she believes defeated our hero’s spider-sense, since the exact same attack has in the past been successfully executed by some random criminal henchman and a snooty butler, neither of which were undead bloodsuckers, as near as anyone could tell.

Family Circus, 5/8/11

Ha ha, Mommy! Your worry-wart fantasy shows that you’re starting from a false premise: You apparently believe that your family is taking you to a nice restaurant for Mother’s Day. There’s no need to dress the kids in nice shirts — or indeed in any shirts at all — if you’re just ordering at the drive-through window!

Panels from Hagar the Horrible, 5/8/11

In other news, Hagar’s wife Helga appears to have completely lost it.

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Phantom, 4/27/11

I’ll say this for the Phantom: Whatever its questionable history of depictions of Africans decades ago (a little digging will find you some howlers), the current version of the strip makes a reasonable attempt to accurately depict a post-colonial African state. Today’s strips neatly encapsulates the tension between the multiple sources of identity that can compete for the loyalty of citizens of such nations. Most residents of Bangalla probably aren’t more than a generation or two removed from their ancestral villages, where ties of clan and tribe are paramount; yet many of the young have moved to the modern capital of Mawitaan, where they’ve mingled with people from other parts of their country, and have perhaps begun to see themselves more as citizens of Bangalla than anything else. Which I imagine might cause problems for this whole Chatu-wrangling thing. “Wait, you want us to come home and do what now? Uh, yeah, see, we have this nice construction gig thing going here … cool shared apartment down on the lower East side, near some decent Bandar restaurants … why are you guys running a prison anyway? Don’t we pay taxes to the Bangallan government to run a prison system? Oh yeah, that’s right, you don’t participate in the whole monetary economy thing. Well, anyway, I think we’re going to stick around in the city for a while, but thanks for asking! Say hi to Grandpa for us!”

Herb and Jamaal, 4/27/11

Oh, that wacky Herb and Jamaal, unable to bring itself to use such specific terms as “GI Joe” or “soldier”! But this zaniness masks the important issue here: If the information I’m getting from Funky Winkerbean is correct, Herb’s GI Dude will be suffering from PTSD after years left abandoned in that box.

Family Circus, 4/27/11

“Just like all the messages we send to Mommy on Twitter begging her to love us! They never work either.”