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Family Circus, 11/9/10

Maybe it’s just me, but Dolly appears to be exuding a weird and unsettling combination of anxiety and self-awareness here. It’s like she knows that she’s supposed to be churning out yet another adorable malapropism, for the seventy quadrillionth day in a row, and quite honestly she’s got some performance anxiety about it, in part because the whole scene is pretty stale to her at this point. “Uh, yeah, I want my french fries to, uh … wear ketchup? Like, it’s clothes, except it’s a condiment? Damn it, I got nothing.” Billy, meanwhile, is sitting across the table staring at her in a sort of mute disbelief at her inability to come up with anything better. “‘Wear ketchup,’ huh? Wow, Dolly, I always thought you were on top of your game. But that … that wasn’t even trying. It’s like you’ve forgotten what being a Keane Kid is all about, which is saying adorably dumb shit about anything and everything. ‘Wear ketchup.’ Honestly.”

Shoe, 11/9/10

“Also, I’m a bird, so I don’t have teeth, and I’m pretty sure I don’t actually have ‘nails’ per se! Do claws count? Does pulling at them with my beak count?”

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Beetle Bailey, 11/4/10

The art in Beetle Bailey isn’t really “good” per se, but sometimes the characters’ faces are quite expressive in their stylized way. Today, Sarge in particular has this look of resignation slowly sliding into soul-wearing sadness, presumably due to his terribly fraught relationship with food, and I actually find it quite poignant. “Don’t mind me, I’m just going to sit here at my desk joylessly eating these indeterminate brown disks that have been sitting in my desk drawer for four hours, cramming them down my maw as I stare off into space, dying inside. See you in a few minutes! I hate myself!”

Family Circus, 11/4/10

On the other hand, the thought of Jeffy lying on the living room floor weeping ceaselessly while his mother talks on the phone and ignores him is something I find utterly hilarious.

Spider-Man, 11/4/10

Oh my goodness, Spider-Man is engaged in super-powered combat! Or at least he was, briefly, before being disabled by a swift whack to the thigh with a largish stick. “OWWW” indeed! Our hero has previously been brought low by some dude with a club, a butler with a lead pipe, and a brick, but all of those adversaries allowed him the dignity of swiftly disabling him by attacking him from behind. Mole Man, by contrast, just walked up to him and hit him in the leg. The Amazing Spider-Man!

Apartment 3-G, 11/4/10

Jokes on you, crazy taser lady! As was mentioned in passing six years ago and never explained since, the Apartment 3-G girls own your building, so you’ve just confessed your lease violation to your landlord! Tommie’s too wimpy to do anything about it, but she’s also incapable of keeping a secret from Margo — as soon as Margo makes eye contact with her, she’ll blurt out “CAT! MRS. BLOOM HAS A CAT!” — so you’d best take Prissy to Florida with you if you don’t want to find your furniture crushed into a cube and left on the curb when you get back.

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Family Circus and Dennis the Menace, 10/29/10

These two parents-on-the-floor panels were immediately adjacent to each other on my Chron page today, which allowed me to quickly come up with a game I like to call “Who’s the sociopath?” In the Family Circus it’s clearly Daddy, who’s sporting a sick little smile as he allows Jeffy’s utter terror and desperation to go on much longer than anyone should be comfortable with. (It should come as no surprise that budding sadist Billy can barely contain his glee at his brother’s panic.) Dennis, meanwhile, isn’t even deriving any joy from having literally knocked his mother out of her shoes and fused her brains into a molten lump. “Mommy isn’t moving anymore,” he tells his father, stone-faced. “Will we need to get a new mommy?”

Pluggers, 10/29/10

It’s true: blanket-stealing is only perpetrated by honest heartland folks of the sort depicted in Pluggers. We coastal elitists don’t worry about it, because we sleep under mile-long blankets woven out of feathers stolen from the wings of angels.

IMPORTANT SOCIAL NETWORKING UPDATE! You might recall from Wednesday that Mayor Dalton’s prostate has its own Pacebook page. It now also has its own page on Facebook, a somewhat more popular social networking service. Feel free to “like” it, or whatever you kids do!