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Family Circus, 6/16/09

The Family Circus isn’t just a beloved refrigerator decoration for old people everywhere; it’s also an elaborate long-running narrative experiment, challenging our notions of hard and fast divisions between “reality” and “fiction.” The Family Circus family has a very strong resemblance to the real-life family of Bil and Thelma Keane; the parents are modeled very closely on them, and the kids are as well, though not as closely as you might think — there are actually five real-life Keane kids, and the only daughter, whose childhood nickname was Dolly, is in real life older than the Billy analogue, whose real name is Glen. The strip father’s job is also supposed to be a cartoonist; you do see him sometimes working in a home studio, but he also appears to leave for some kind of office job during the day. Then there’s strips like this one, where pretend-Billy takes over for pretend-Daddy in the comics drawing business, which implies that the comic is actually produced by one of its own characters, like a snake vomiting up its own tail, even though the actual end result has traditionally been drawn by real Bil and not real Glen. Add into the madness the fact that for some time the real artist of the strip has been the real Jeff, though there is the fiction (see what I did there?) that Bil is still doing it; real Jeff looks remarkably like pretend-Jeffy and yet seems determined to portray pretend-jeffy as a moron whenever possible.

Try to keep all this in mind and you’ll be left with a serious headache when trying to figure out who might be responsible for today’s panel on the several different layers of fiction, metafiction, and reality that it simultaneously occupies. And that’s too bad, because, when you cut through all that, the content of today’s panel is pretty delightful, containing at is does the pretend-Keane parents (or the pretend-pretened-Keane parents) getting into a screaming fight because LOOK AT ALL THESE FUCKING BILLS and WHY DON’T YOU GET A REAL JOB and MY MOTHER SAID NOT TO MARRY YOU and so on. Of course, the real Keanes never had arguments like this, because of those aforementioned old people and their insatiable lust for Family Circus-branded merchandise. But nobody wants to put a crudely drawn panel of Mommy and Daddy lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills on their refrigerator.

Luann, 6/16/09

The punchline of this strip would be kind of cute if Brad did in fact have any other friends, but as it is it’s just kind of depressing.

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Blondie, 6/13/09

Oh look, it’s yet another Blondie where I’m left wondering exactly how I’m supposed to assemble the various elements into a pleasing joke-like whole. Does Dagwood refer to the order-taker as a “clown” because of the semi-conscious association resulting from his giving his order into a molded-plastic clown head? Are we supposed to think that Dagwood is so dumb that he believes that a literal clown is taking his order? Or is a literal clown in fact taking his order — some poor bastard with clowning experience who was willing to answer any job ad, any job ad at all, only to find himself shackled and put into some kind of stocks and forced to hawk greasy food to folks in their cars? It would certainly explain the desperation he exhibits at being unable to move sufficient quantities of product.

I have already expressed my admiration for Clown Burger’s “Say — then pay!” motto. Few corporations are as willing to explain how a simple economic transaction works on such a basic level: “First you must tell us what it is you wish to purchase, through a speech act of some sort; then you must supply some medium of exchange to us.”

Family Circus, 6/13/09

Uh-oh, it looks like Billy has discovered philosophy, or perhaps has been listening in to the conversations of stoned college students! Either way, the blank, expressionless faces of his siblings shows just how well fancy brain-thinkin’ goes down in the Keane Kompound. A swift but brutal beating will soon teach him that the only kind of utterances permitted here are prayers or adorable malapropisms.

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Luann, 6/9/09

Say, did somebody mention “view[ing] Luann’s treatment of human sexuality with mingled fascination and horror”? Oh, yeah, I did! Well, today’s strip offers an insight into the origins of the squick that hangs over this feature like a squirm-inducing black cloud by proposing a typical fair as some sort of carny-staffed aphrodisiac. Let’s go over each item presented as potentially arousing in turn, shall we?

• The smells: A heady melange of fryer grease, unwashed barnyard animal, sweaty humans, feces from said animals, and barf from said humans.
• The food: Dripping in grease and inappropriately deep fried.
• The rides: “Wait, has this thing been inspected by anybody? I don’t like that grinding noise it’s making, and I don’t think the door is shutting all the way … also, it’s hard to grip onto the handlebar, because somebody appears to have puked on it.”
• The animals: Sheep, pigs, and cows, all trotted out of their barns so they can be inspected by those who plan to kill and butcher them!

In other words, the “whole hot, earthy, exciting atmosphere” is a tremendous boner-killer for any right-thinking person. I’m frankly amazed that the Tilt-a-Whirl upchuck incident didn’t just turn Mr. DeGroot on further.

Mark Trail, 6/9/09

There is absolutely no strip on the comics page today that can deliver the laughs like Mark Trail. I certainly hope that the Williams Chemical Company is an enormous publicly traded multinational corporation, and that Mark spends a baffling day being shuffled between the plant manager, the operations manager, the CEO, the COO, the chief environmental officer, the chief quality officer, the chairman of the board, and the heads of the major stockholder factions before becoming frustrated and just punching out postindustrial capitalism itself.

Apartment 3-G, 6/9/09

“Wait … Eric is such a nobody that this newscaster can’t even remember his name without reading it off a sheet of paper? GASP! I must break off the engagement at once!”

Family Circus, 6/9/09

Well, Jeffy, it looks like you’re going to have to take some of that stuff out of your suitcase before you leave! Don’t worry, I’m sure that the other children at the orphanage will be happy to share their toys and clothes with you!

Funky Winkerbean, 6/9/09

“HA HA HA HA HA! Get it! I took what you said, but then reversed it! HA HA HA HA HA! Hey, wait a minute, are your pants unbuttoned?”

Panel from Spider-Man, 6/9/09

Meanwhile, over in Spider-Man, Wolverine is posing for his yearbook photo.