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Family Circus, 11/18/04

Seriously, though, I’m starting to worry about what’s going on in the Family Circus. My current theory: in a deliberate attempt to sabotage decades of wholesome goodwill, the artists will have it make progressively less and less sense, just to see how long it will take for people to start complaining. In six months, Billy will be wearing a dress and crawling around on his hands and knees shouting “I’M A TREE! I’M A TREE!”, while PJ just looks on and laughs and laughs.

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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.

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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.