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Family Circus, 7/12/08

Since the America-hating ACLU prevents the Keane kids from forcibly saving the souls of their classmates during school hours, and no other children voluntarily spend time with them outside of the classroom, they’re left with only one target for their relentless soul-saving agenda: their pets. While their attempts to wash away the sins of their demon-spawn cat went horribly awry, Dolly is thinking that they might have better luck with the dogs. I urge Barfy and Sam to surrender their lives to Christ with a minimum of resistance, as the Keanes’ exorcism techniques have been known to destroy the body in order to save the soul.

(Speaking of the Family Circus, thanks to the many, many readers who sent me a link to this fabulous panel from the ’80s, in which Ma Keane imagines Dolly being hunted for sport.)

Mark Trail, 7/12/08

I admit to being strangely unmoved by the current Mark Trail storyline, despite the fact that it consists almost entirely of Kelly Welly being foolish again. But the prospect of a joint moose/megabeaver attack on Kelly’s hapless assistant, who will scream for help while Kelly snaps gruesome photo after gruesome photo for her new When Animals Kill column, does perk my interest up a bit. Don’t disappoint me, forest beasts! Do your worst!

Cleats, 7/12/08

I was moved to break my long silence on Cleats by the installment in which the genial children’s strip suddenly took a page from a nightmarish Harlan Ellison story. I assumed, naturally, that it couldn’t get any worse and I could get back to ignoring it, but that was before the hungry, sinister carrion eaters arrived, determined to begin picking the flesh off the still-living soccer ball as it lies roasting in the hot sun.

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Family Circus, 7/7/08

The Family Circus has a long list of crimes that it will eventually have to answer for, but I’m hard-pressed to remember any of its offerings being as visually unappealing as today’s. Faithful reader Dean Booth has already taken things to their logical and repulsive conclusion (warning: very very very gross), so I’ll just point out that in the middle of this filth-eating mess, Jeffy appears to be concerned about his girlish figure. I was going to chalk this up to unrealistic body image propaganda coming from the media, but then I got a look at his disproportionately large ass. Dolly is kneeling, but Jeffy appears to be able to just about put his feet and his butt on the ground simultaneously. It almost looks like he’s wearing the bottom half of a fat suit, or, perhaps more realistically, like he was assembled from various mismatched parts.

(I wrote that last sentence intending to mean that this particular drawing of Jeffy might have been assembled from bits of other drawings, obviously, but I do admit that the idea of the middle Keane boy actually being an unnaturally reanimated collection of corpse parts robbed from the local morgue is deeply pleasing to me.)

Zits, 7/7/08

I like the way Connie appears to be leaning as far away from Jeremy as she can get and still stay in the frame in panel three. It’s like she’s suddenly been forced to visualize her teenage son getting “hands-on learning” from Mrs. Graworski, his biology teacher, and her skull is involuntarily attempting to flee from the source of the offending image.

Pluggers, 7/7/08

Pluggers so enjoy rubbing their carnivorous habits in the face of tree-hugging hippies that they’re willing to pretend to believe in evolution to make their point.

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Family Circus, 7/4/08

232 years ago today, the leaders of the British colonies on the east coast of the American continent took a fateful step, authorizing a Declaration of Independence that would make their fractious home states into a new nation. If the corpses of the men who had been present that day in Philadelphia were revived through some sort of voodoo magic, what would they think of the country they had made? If “pleasure” was an emotion that could penetrate into their monstrous undead souls, they would probably be pleased that their descendants were spending the day goofing off from work, eating huge quantities of meat, and firing off weapons-grade munitions (or, in some places, actual weapons).

But if their mouldering, skeletal fingers were to turn to the funny pages, their empty eye sockets would come to rest on today’s Family Circus, and then their rotting, unbeating hearts would be filled with the one feeling we all know to be possible for zombies: rage. Because the flag is there, and the notes are there, but shouldn’t Dolly be adorably mangling our national anthem (“And the rock heads will blare/ The mom’s purse strings are there”) or some other patriotic ditty (“For space and skies/ For Pam’s full plate of grain”), and not some pestilent tune about picking up male prostitutes on the Jersey seashore or whatever the hell it is she’s singing? What I’m trying to say is, if you see a shuffling mob of undead patriots in moldy powdered wigs attempting to eat the brains of the degenerates who currently live in the country they started, don’t come crying to me.

Apartment 3-G, 7/4/08

I suppose Gabriella is fainting because, as an ethnic, she’s tuned into the spirit world and can thus detect the ghostly/demonic presence that lingers over Lu Ann’s paintings. But I’m hoping that she stumbled on to Alan’s stash.