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Mary Worth, 8/22/10

I’m pretty sure there’s some kind of “most consistently hilarious depiction of drunkenness in a comic strip” Reuben Award, and Mary Worth is gunning for it, hard. Lonnie began his drunken day with a jacket and pants of different colors — obviously, the hard drinking has destroyed the fashion centers of his brain. (That’s why he only wears grey now.) But once he’s got a real bender on, we can see the true horror that booze does to a man. Did Lonnie unbutton and then drunkenly try to rebutton his shirt? Probably! Because that’s what alcohol does. It leaves your wispy stomach hairs visible for the world to see. Is this what you want for yourself? Turn away from the drinking, before it’s too late!

Apartment 3-G, 8/22/10

I’m pretty sure that Lu Ann’s stylist is supposed to be some sort of sassy gay artiste. Unfortunately, as depicted, he looks more like the answer to the question “What if Mr. Clean were a supervillain who was also a resurrected undead king from ancient Sumer?” This is a question that I’m pretty sure has never been asked, ever, and even if it were I would hope that the character so described would not be saddled with the name “Mister Mojo.”

Funky Winkerbean, 8/22/10

Ha ha! It’s funny because Funky can’t feel joy, due to his crippling emotional problems.

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/8/10

The best sadness in today’s Funky Winkerbean (because that is how one should evaluate any day’s Funky Winkerbean, by determining which of its many sadnesses is the best) is not Funky’s failure to recognize how his own unquenchable anger has infected every aspect of his life; that’s a theme that’s been harped on a bit too much of late to be fresh. No, my favorite is Crazy Harry’s rage at Funky for selecting a private service for parcel delivery, choosing reliable tracking capabilities over long-standing friendship. One assumes that Harry’s hangdog expression in the next to last panel is due to this betrayal, and not over the psychological implications of the new t-shirt design.

Panel from Marvin, 8/8/10

Unfortunately, this panel does not depict Marvin’s parents watching with bored detachment as their son is carried away by hungry rodents, with Jeff responding to his wife’s earlier question, “What kind of hungry rodents are those, carrying Marvin away to eat?” But I’ve put isolated it here like this, so you can pretend that it does.

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/25/10

It seems my earlier suspicions — that this strip’s implacable torment has shifted from Les to Funky — has now been confirmed. Thus Les’s sheepish smirk in the final panel: he knows that every car accident or cancer diagnosis Funky is involved in means one less pregnant daughter or dead spouse for him. Holly is grinning like a maniac mostly because she knows Funky will be dead soon, and then she’ll be free, free.

Family Circus, 7/25/10

I think my favorite of the “Ma Keane is irritated by her children” panels here is the one at the lower right. In most of the other ones, she’s just intervening in momentary crises so as to prevent her arrest for child neglect and/or public nudity ordinances. But it’s when she’s forced to play some stupid ball-toss game with her feeble little daughter that the rage lines really begin to radiate from her head. “Damn it,” she thinks, “Does she never get bored with this inanity? I’ve been trying to work my way through this damn novel for the last eight years!”

Slylock Fox, 7/25/10

I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve ever seen Slylock mediate in a human vs. human dispute. It goes to show how low the status of H. sapiens has fallen in this nightmare world of bipedal talking animals that the Josh family would be willing to turn to a canid law enforcement. If I were Slick Smitty, my defense would be that I was trying to protect the boy’s delicate mental health, as waking up every morning to find that piggy bank grinning at you like that is a guarantee of nightmares and insanity.

Meanwhile, in the six differences, a little boy has extorted some free cake out of the local diner by bashing one of the counter’s stools with a baseball bat. “Hand over the cake or this clown in the hat is next,” he growls.

Beetle Bailey, 7/25/10

As part of its atonement for years of making light of sexual harassment, Beetle Bailey has begun putting out a series of PSA pamphlets on social and relationship issues. This one is called “How to tell when you’re in an abusive relationship.”