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Family Circus, 4/3/07

Uh oh, Big Daddy Keane, you’ve made a crucial tactical error: The time to extract that sort of promise from Jeffy would have been before you handed the bludgeoning instrument to him, not after he’s gotten his grubby little paws on it and certainly not while he’s lunging at your face, all dead-eyed and zombie-like.

Apartment 3-G, 4/3/07

Today I want to remark not on Margo’s icy callousness, which isn’t really remarkable at all, but on her appalling fashion choices. Seriously, a black turtleneck under some kind of pink button-up … jumper … thing? GIRL, HAS LOVE REGULAR SEXUAL ACTIVITY DESTROYED YOUR BRAIN? She ought to know that she’s made a terrible mistake because she actually looks more Amish than Tommie, who is showing an alluring hint of collarbone today.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/3/07

Thank God this strip keeps June’s priorities in order. “Damn it, Heather, Milton may have gone down to his icy North Atlantic grave, but my awesome rack and ass are still very much alive! Also, Pete’s pants weren’t going to unzip themselves.”

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Spider-Man, 3/31/07

You may have missed Friday’s thrilling Spider-Man, in which the fake Mrs. Spider-Man attempted to escape from the back seat of her captor’s car! So, thrill to this installment in which … she … is … put back into the car by her captor. This, combined with my rage earlier this week at similar non-developments, has brought about an epiphany: just about everything that happens in Spider-Man happens only to slow down the action of the strip. It’s all an endless delaying action, making the big payoff we’re going to get that much more exciting. I’ve been reading this feature daily for something like three years now, so I can tell you that said payoff had better be really good.

Panel three: Spidey, you got clocked by a brick and you’re just now wondering if this whole “spider-sense” thing isn’t a load of bunk?

Pluggers, 3/31/07

Just when you think that the whole “anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic animals uneasily sharing narrative space” scenario can’t get any more unsettling, you get today’s paean to involuntary sterilization. For obvious reasons, I try not to pay too close attention to the various family relationships among the horrifying bipedal beasts of Pluggers, so I can’t say for sure if the dog and the Chicken-Lady are kin or just acquaintances, but I think what really makes this panel disturbing is the look of mortal terror on the face of the li’l pup contrasted with heavy-lidded indifference of his feathered captor.

Would it make me an evil chardonnay-swilling elitist if I suggested that actual plugger litter control is a crude, hand-scrawled sign that reads “FREE PUPPIES,” which you put on a pole in the middle of your dog-feces-laden yard? What, it would? Oh, OK then, I won’t … what, I already said it? Damn it.

Beetle Bailey, 3/31/07

Wow, who knew that painting your own porch furniture was something that somehow lowered one’s prestige, and that, more generally, the elite of our military’s officer corps lives in a fishbowl in which every action that they and their spouses take is judged by neighbors and passersby? Who should be painting a general’s chairs? A crew of enemy combatants, on loan from Gitmo?

Family Circus, 3/31/07

“I’m helping her too, Jeffy! I’m masturbating to Internet pornography because I know that cleaning leaves her too tired to perform her marital duties. Oh, and let me borrow one of those shirts, while you’re handing them out.”

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Family Circus, 3/8/07

Man, does the total and constant humiliation of Jeffy ever get old? I’m going to go ahead and say “no.” In a normal human family, Grandma would have probably sent clothes a few sizes too big in the expectation that her grandson would soon grow into them; however, since Jeffy’s been the same height for decades and shows no sign of getting any taller, we have to assume that her aim was to drive him ever deeper into self-loathing.

The Phantom, 3/8/07

So the Phantom is in the midst of an incredibly dull storyline involving the kidnapping of Old Man Mozz and some bank robbers who want the seer to [Note: Rest of recap cut because of extreme dullness. –Eds.] Anyway, I’d just like to point out that Kono slipping and falling on the steps of the bank he’s attempting to rob, followed by him cracking his dreadlocked skull open as his eyes roll back in his head, is a pretty gruesome image for the funny pages.

And where is our purple-clad, stripy-butt hero in all of this? Last we saw him, he was lounging in a jungle clearing while his cone-headed midget sidekick was napping on top of an elephant. No, really.

Pluggers, 3/8/07

You heard it here first, people: The only choice available for the radio-listening plugger is “AM” or “FM.” What, you also want to be able to change channels within each band? What are you, some kind of chardonnay-swilling East Coast liberal elitist? In this sense, plugger radios are like the one available in Nazi Germany, which were also pre-set to a single station. Although my guess is that pluggers listen to a lot fewer hateful rants about how the Jews are undermining the purity of the master race and a lot more hateful rants about how the Cowboys really need to get more free agent help for their offensive line.

I also note that today’s featured plugger has been banished out of the house entirely, presumably so that his radio listening doesn’t distract his she-plugger mate from her “stories.” Either that, or all his furniture has been repossessed and a tree stump is a “plugger easy chair.”

They’ll Do It Every Time, 3/8/07

The looks of pure joy on the faces of Loopina’s parents in the first panel at the prospect of a Loopina-free evening are only matched by the wave of obscenity-tinged bile we get in the second. It seems that her parents don’t really like her very much, though that should have been obvious from the mere fact that they named her “Loopina.”