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Judge Parker, 8/19/23

Not to toot my own horn too much about literally doing my job (which is, and forever more shall be, reading and in some basic way making sense of the comics so you don’t have to), but I was right about that being April’s mom that Pavel is targeting. I’m feeling a lot better about this than Sam, who now has to go kidnap someone with significantly more kidnapping and kidnapping-prevention skills than he has, all while the CIA is keeping a close eye on everything. I feel like Pavel has an exaggerated idea on how small a part of this process the “waltzing in” bit is!

Mary Worth, 8/19/23

This is the part of the date where most couples would go home and fool around a little, but for Jeff and Mary, it’s time to Solemnly Contemplate The Sea. No doubt the mighty ocean plays an important role in their emotional life: not only do they live in a beachfront community, but they know the sinister Ocean had its chance to swallow up Wilbur not just once but twice and yet rejected him both times, spitting him back up onto land and into their lives.

Family Circus, 8/19/23

The thing that really makes this panel for me is Billy’s facial expression. He’s not some amoral, destructive little ignoramus! He fucked up real bad and he knows it!

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Blondie, 8/3/23

It’s a little unsettling that Blondie just produces this elaborate sandwich tray out of nowhere between the second and third panels. I’m imagining her humming softly to herself as she made it over the course of the quiet morning before these ladies showed up, thinking, with increasing anticipation, about her husband “going away” as football season got into swing. Oh, sure, he’d be there, physically, for the most part. But she’d sure have to deal with him a lot less. “How nice! Where are they going?” she asks, innocently, hoping to have found others in the same predicament.

Dennis the Menace, 8/3/23

Sure, this seems pretty treacly at first glance, but I’m going to go ahead and ID as at least mildly menacing a scenario where a couple of unaccompanied children and an unleashed dog are wandering around the countryside, pulling a wagon with a makeshift weapon in it.

Family Circus, 8/3/23

BILLY KEANE: FAIR-WEATHER PATRIOT

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Family Circus, 7/28/23

Ah, sweet, unlearned Jeffy! Having heard his parents and grandparents telling treacly stories of guardian angels, he assumes that everyone must have one, even characters in the fairy tales his parents read to him at night. But Ma Keane’s face shows that she knows the truth: that the protection offered by God and his heavenly messengers does not extend to freakish nightmare-beings like Humpty Dumpty. Man was made in the image of his Creator, and falls under His protective grace; but this egg-demon is clearly born of Hell itself, and being shattered on the ground, his guts oozing everywhere, is the fate he deserves.

Hi and Lois, 7/28/23

I assume, in a fatalistic way, that there are no new newspaper comics fans, and haven’t been for some time, and anyone still left reading them daily has really committed to the genre, and already knows all the lore. Still, I’d like to think that there are a certain number of people — not 10,000, surely, but at least a few — who are only learning today that Lois from Hi and Lois and Beetle from Beetle Bailey are siblings, and those people are absolutely losing their minds.