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Marvin, 7/21/11

So a few days ago, Marvin featured a strip that went something (I’m not even going to check the archives to get all the details right, that’s how much I resent thinking about Marvin over multi-day spans) like this:

[Marvin’s parents are looking at Marvin while he’s asleep.]

MARVIN’S MOM: Oh, Marvin’s dad! Doesn’t our awful poop-baby look adorable, when he’s asleep and not moving or making noise, or pooping? It makes me want to have another baby!

MARVIN’S DAD: [Eyes wide with silent horror]

I figured this was nothing more than another attempt to make a joke out of the fact that Marvin is such a loathsome baby that even his parents hate and fear him, and live in terror that they might bring another like him into the world. However, apparently it has set up the actual conception, incubation, and birth of a new Marvin-sibling, all over the course of only a few days. Did the Marvin franchise need shaking up to this extent? Eh, well, it can’t get any worse, so why not? (Unless we learn in a week or two that this seemingly major change was all dream. That will be worse.)

Funky Winkerbean, 7/21/11

Oh, man, when I analyzed Monday’s Funky Winkerbean, I obviously wasn’t prepared for the multiple layers of smugness we were in for. Les didn’t smugly display his superiority over his old professor; instead, he refrained from this act of petty taunting, so he could come home and wax smugly about his moral superiority. Kudos to you, sir!

Family Circus, 7/21/11

I’m reasonably sure that this week’s “Keane Kids trash Boston” strips are repeats from several decades ago, which would explain why the camcorder Big Daddy Keane is holding in front of his face looks so awkward and out of place and pasted-in-later-y. Presumably it was put in to cover up the circa 1962 Nikon F Photomic he was using in the original? Honestly it looks more like a canister that he’s huffing paint out of, and really, who can blame him.

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Spider-Man, 7/14/11

Oh boy, this bespectacled lady wants to capture Spider-Man, in photographic form! This is delicious, because of course taking pictures of Spider-Man is, as far as I can make out, Peter Parker’s sole source of income. One of Newspaper Spider-Man’s least attractive qualities — and lord knows there are lots to choose from — is his continuing macho panic at the idea that his wife makes more money than he does, despite the fact that his wife is a successful actress and he’s a stringer working in the dying newspaper industry (and also a superhero, a role that you’d think would be enough to boost his fragile ego, until of course you see how he goes about filling it). Anyway, my bet is that this woman will humiliate Peter further by displacing him from his pathetic job; I assume that her pictures of Spider-Man will be better than his, both because it’s tricky to stage photos of yourself and because Peter is an incompetent who’s no good at anything.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/14/11

Haw haw, looks like Jughaid’s startin’ to hallucinate! He’s probably sufferin’ from heat stroke, no doubt because he insists on wearing a fur hat in the middle of summer.

Family Circus, 7/14/11

Dolly, nothing in your current life might match up with the sanitized fairy tales in that book, but surely the Brothers Grimm or Russian folklorists have recorded stories of a quartet of terrifying, stunted gnomish things locked away in a compound by their horrified parents.

Hi and Lois, 7/14/11

This is the first Hi and Lois I can remember laughing at. Ha ha, it’s funny because the innocent little baby is learning about disappointment! Oh, I’m a terrible person.

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Family Circus, 7/11/11

I actually don’t feel any need to discuss PJ’s pants (they’re called “men’s capris,” and they’re not particularly rare these days), but I do think we should take a hard look at Jeffy’s. For years I’ve heard jokes about his “leg warmers.” I’ve always assumed that he’s supposed to be wearing dark jeans that are cuffed up at the bottom, like he’s some kind of 1950’s tough, but in today’s version he just seems to be wearing some kind of featureless black leggings that have a blue stripe at the bottom, stretching from his ankles almost all the way up to his knees (not that it’s easy to figure out where the knees are given his freakish Keane Kid anatomy, yeesh). Anyway, I’m guessing that Jeffy looks so sad because he know his sister’s vicious fashion inquisition will be turned upon him in short order.

Archie, 7/11/11

I was going to say that White Collar Prison Riot and Crash Dancing were the all-time funniest things ever associated with the Archie franchise, but then I read this.

Oh, and hey! Did you know today is the seventh anniversary of when I started this blog? That’s, um, a lot of blogging. Good lord I’m old.