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My Cage, 9/4/08, and New Adventures of Queen Victoria, 9/3/08

I never claimed to be some kind of paragon of integrity or anything, so, here you go, comics artists: if you mention me by name in your strip, I will acknowledge it in my blog, because I’m a whore like that, though sometimes I’ll be a day late. This is the New Adventures of Queen Victoria, a pleasingly wacky vaguely-historically-themed public-domain-clip-art-based strip that is on the GoComics site (and maybe in newspapers?). It’s usually not as meta as this installment, though you know I love meta. It’s far enough away from the traditional daily strips that I mock here to get regular attention, but I did finally pop it into my RSS reader. Take a look, won’t you?

Speaking of meta, the characters in My Cage are coming perilously close to recognizing their own fictional nature. Hopefully it’s not my site serving as the locus of their eternal torment when the Cartoonists turn their back on them.

Family Circus, 9/4/08

Speaking of those rejected by their Creator, we have Jeffy desperately trying to get the attention of the benevolent God that he still believes to exist, despite the evidence of his own torment. It doesn’t matter how loud you shout, Jeffy! You’re always going to have to debase yourself with awful puns and wear the hideous purple union suit, because that is His inscrutable plan.

Apartment 3-G, 9/4/08

And speaking of whores, Apartment 3-G continues its policy of darkly hinting at the lows to which drug abuse can bring you without actually spelling anything out. “Time to get out there and make some money … at my job as a middle manager in the accounts receivable department of a mid-sized corporation! Oh, there’s no level of depravity I won’t stoop to so I can get some more of that sweet, sweet dope!”

Herb and Jamaal, 9/4/08

You’ve probably missed it what with all the nonspecificity rampant in this strip, but the place where Herb and Jamaal crack vaguely wise with one another each day is a soul food restaurant that they own and operate together. Thus, the fact that Herb has dragged his ennui-inducing diet lunch to the restaurant to eat ought to tell you something about the stuff that our dynamic duo serve to their customers. “I mean, a carrot and juice is pretty bland, but God knows I’m not eating the horror that we cook here. I’d be dead of colon cancer within the week.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/4/08

A casual observer might think that Rex and June are gently mocking Lenore in this exchange, but longtime RMMD readers know that they’re actually seeing who can inflict the most passive-aggressive wound on the other here. June taunting Rex with the prospect of sex with a woman, Rex boasting of his future “cabin boy” antics … good times. I have no idea what Rex’s plan for that thing in his right hand in the third panel is, and I’m not sure I want to know. The best we can hope for is that he’s going to stab himself in the throat to end his misery.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/23/08

I’ve talked before about the Rex Morgan problem, which causes me to lose interest in the adventures of our dashing doctor at the moment at which they ostensibly become exciting. My favorite bits are always the moments of calm and barely concealed passive aggression before the storm, not in the gunplay and car chases and what have you. Today is a perfect example of the seething psychodrama that underlies this strip, as Rex, having whined about always being asked to help man Lenore’s regatta entry, is now about to start whining about not being asked. Presumably he’ll do some amateur sluething to discover why he’s been snubbed and discover skullduggery and intrigue, thus proving that dickishness is the universe’s most powerful force for good.

Family Circus, 8/23/08

Dolly, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with anyone touching his or her command module. It’s perfectly natural and healthy. If mommy and daddy had spent more time touching their command modules, there probably wouldn’t be so many of you terrible melonheads running around.

Archie, 8/23/08

Ho ho ho! The AGJLU 3000 knows that there’s nothing the humans find more amusing than jokes about geometery.

Shoe, 8/23/08

“Now I’m dying of heart disease and skin cancer! Damn the slow, painstaking march of science!”

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Family Circus, 8/20/08

Billy is continuing to tear his swath of contempt through our nation’s capital, and I for one couldn’t be happier. Today, we see that the New 21st Century Man, his soul purged of all feelings of patriotism or sentimentality or historical awe by the cleansing fires of our violent, amoral world, is incapable of understanding what emotions these monuments from a dying culture are meant to evoke, seeing only their physical properties and none of their symbolism. Jeffy, still too young to comprehend the hellscape that he will inherit from his elders, apes their belief that these piles of dead stone still mean something, and wordlessly holds a picture of the grotesque phallus that the Victorians somehow thought would honor America’s long-dead first leader.

Beetle Bailey, 8/20/08

Speaking of grotesque phalluses, there are few better illustrations of the term “creepster” than General Halftrack gazing rapturously heavenward as he imagines the erotic shenanigans that his young secretary is committing to her journal. Hopefully he’ll at least get into his office and get the door shut before he starts pleasuring himself.

Judge Parker, 8/20/08

NOOOOOOO! NOT THE CELL PHONE! WHY, GOD, WHY? Cut down in the prime of its battery life … *sob*