Family Circus, 11/15/04
Um, yeah, gorilla arms. Except that someday little PJ will be all grown up, and then Mommy and Daddy will be stuck with hairy, extra-long gorilla arms, and then what are they going to do with them? Besides pick lice off of each other and fashion crude tools, I mean. I guess the people who want to ban genetic engineering of humans might have a point.
Family Circus, 11/1/04
A week ago, I would have scoffed at the idea that any child Jeffy’s age would even know what marbles were. However, Monday I went to a nine-year-old’s birthday party, and you know what the gift that made the biggest impression was? Marbles! I was shocked, and a little horrified. You know, when I was a kid, we had to play crappy video games on an Atari 2600 (and what person born during the 1970s doesn’t remember the bitter, bitter disappointment that was the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man?). And so many people of my generation went on to slave away selflessly in the computer industry, for almost no pay, in order to produce whiz-bang, photorealistic, ultraviolent video games so that their kids didn’t have to suffer like we had suffered. And this is how they’re repaid? It just makes me sick.
This panel illustrates one of my favorite narrative oddities in the Family Circus: dialogue that’s half in word balloons, half in quote marks below the panel, and all half-assed. Also, sometime this week someone on the Family Circus production line decided to kick the caption font up from Roman to boldface. Maybe the whole family’s just been shouting a lot lately.
Family Circus, 10/9/04
This has to be the meanest thing I’ve ever seen in the Family Circus. Dad smiles at his own cruel taunt, but little Billy’s face, contorted in a rictus of rage, shows that he’s now at the age where such make-believe games no longer soothe the sting of forced child labor. You can’t spend leaves at the store, Dad, and I’m guessing you’re not coughing up any real money at the end of this chore, either. Decades from now, someone’s going to be describing this moment to a therapist.
Comics sweatshop watch: no doubt the hapless soul who did the coloring for this strip is shackled to a drafting table somewhere in the steamy tropics, and can therefore be forgiven for making those fallen leaves a vibrant, mid-summer green.