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Family Circus, 6/10/08

Congratulations to the Family Circus for providing the most stomach-turning visual image of the day. Usually I think the limited palate used to colorize the King Features strips detracts from their visual impact, but there’s no question in my mind that that’s exactly the right shade of brown to use to instill total revulsion into the hearts of right-thinking people everywhere. With the lint on the side, it actually looks like Jeffy has a shrunken head on a stick. The little droplet of extra brown coming off the side in particular will be featuring into my nightmares.

Apartment 3-G, 6/10/08

Like so many artists before him, Alan is proving to be a remarkably inept businessman. I love his look of shock and disgust in the second panel as he contemplates the arrival of people who actually want to buy what he’s selling. Hey, Alan, who did you think was going to buy your “rock,” hedge fund managers and mid-level British aristocracy? He’s about to learn a hard lesson, which is that when you deal crack, you end up having to deal with crackheads.

Gil Thorp, 6/10/08

It’s painfully obvious that Elmer and his “BFF” Branden have run off together to get married so as to fix the former’s immigration situation, so I won’t dwell on that (except to note that, based on the experiences of friends and family who have wed Canadians, it does not work like that anymore [if it ever did] so please don’t try this at home). Instead, I feel a need to focus on Coach Mrs. Coach Thorp’s clothes. More specifically, what the hell is going on with her clothes? She seems to be wearing some kind of belted one-piece collared-dress-coullotte number, which, I feel, would be a bad fashion choice if such a thing actually existed, which I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/10/08

I’d like to say that “What makes you think I know anything about them?” is one of the most reasonable possible answers to “I need to know what happened to the old wrestling mats at Hamilton Middle School!” We also would have accepted “Wrestling mats? What the hell are you talking about?” But panel three shows why our be-soul-patched miscreant was so quick to flee the man he thought was a cop: he’s obviously incapable of standing up to even the gentlest level of interrogation. “Hey … is this about the kid that was smothered to death by those wrestling mats and then his body was thrown in the river? Wait, MRSA? What’s that? Oh, un, then never mind about the first thing.”

Mark Trail, 6/10/08

Ha ha, Cherry, it’s all well and good that you want to stand on your own, but I’m not sure that you’ve noticed that you have a vagina. The fact that Kelly Welly is similarly endowed and yet manages to function without a male guardian is the main reason why Mark and Doc find her so unsettling. But, you, my dear, are no Kelly Welly. In fact, I think you’re about to accidentally stick your hand into that pot of boiling water.

Six Chix, 6/10/08

Hey, everybody, here’s today’s Six Chix! It’s about chickens fucking.

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Gosh darn it, those Sunday strips are so big! With my feeble attention span, I could only focus on these small bits of them:

Panel from Mark Trail, 6/8/08

Hmm, there were 50,000 grizzlies in North America, but now there are about 1,200 … plus another 30,000 in Alaska? Apparently the Russians, not satisfied with merely reversing the political consequences of the Alaska Purchase, are secretly in the midst of building a canal down the Alaska-Canada border and using the resulting dirt to fill in the Bering Strait, thus making the grizzy-rich Seward’s Icebox a part of Asia! Mark Trail’s gonna have to punch a lot of Russkies to stop this.

Panels from Shoe, 6/8/08

The philosophical implications of Roz’s first statement here — “I hate time” — sort of boggle my mind. Does she hate time as an abstract concept? Does she wish that everything happened at once? Is she actually opposed to entropy, which scientists call “time’s arrow”? These intellectual musings serve to distract you from her statement in the second panel, which, given that Shoe takes place in an all-bird milieu, we must take quite literally: Roz has horribly mutilated one of her fellow avians and is wearing its feet as some kind of grisly trophy. Her “somewhere” implies that she doesn’t even know the whereabouts of her hapless victim, implying that she committed her ghastly crime in a fugue state — so perhaps it’s “lost time” that she really has a beef with.

Panel from Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/8/08

Speaking of philosophical dilemmas, Rex is about to find out just how hard it is prove a negative. “See, here’s my ID, which says, ‘Rex Morgan, M.D., a doctor, and totally 100 percent not a cop.'”

Panel from Family Circus, 6/8/08

Ha ha! Jeffy is terrifying his little brother with some kind of horrific demon mask! Oh, it’s all fun and games until Daddy finds out he’s been poking around in the Ritual Room again.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 6/8/08

“She is convinced that Shady Shrew is the nut-grabber.” Oh, well played, sir.

UPDATE: Oops, that’s actually “nut-nabber.” Curse you, tiny type and failing eyes! I like my version better anyway.

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Family Circus, 6/5/08

A discussion about the nature of eternity, set against a blank, featureless void: behold the beginning of the transformation of the Family Circus into Existential Despair Comics.

Mark Trail, 6/5/08

“No! When Kelly took my pictures, she made me do things and touched me and it made me feel funny and bad! I MUST PROTECT THE ANIMALS!”

Gil Thorp, 6/5/08

“I mean, he’s still a total douche, so by all means carry on with the assault; I just can’t stand to see a savage beatdown conducted under false pretenses. It cheapens it, you know?”

Spider-Man, 6/5/08

“That’s my wife! The only thing she cares about more than my health is money, and the things you can buy with money.”

Pluggers, 6/5/08

Oh man, that plume of noxious smoke is just the delicious icing on the “fuck you, hippies”-flavored cake.