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Judge Parker, 3/27/11

Ha ha, Sophie is absolutely justified in being so angry! In her attempt to throw off the shackles of nerdom, she put an awful lot of effort into seizing a spot on the cheerleading squad, a goal she achieved by a combination of grass-roots mobilization and awesome, albeit off-panel, physical prowess. Only now she discovers that dork stuff like debate club was the key to popularity all along! I have to say that my four years of high school debate did not win me the affections of anyone with a hilariously WASP-tastic name, but maybe that’s just because I wasn’t ludicrously wealthy. In fact, that’s probably the real source of Sophie’s rage here. Sure, the Spencer-Driver clan is the wealthiest in the state, but what’s the point if you don’t engage in vulgar displays of affluence that improve your social standing? Sophie won’t be satisfied until Abbey allows her to top Honey Ballenger’s dramatic entrance; look for her to arrive at school on Monday carried aloft on a litter, surrounded by dozens of family retainers on horseback.

Family Circus, 3/27/11

I’m not sure which is sadder: that the Keane kids are so excited by the idea of driving around their dreary suburb with a vague acquaintance that they’re willing to bend the truth to get permission to do it, or that the lone Keith child looks positively ecstatic at the prospect of sharing the car with the three noxious melonheads. How grim her life must be!

Panel from Dick Tracy, 3/27/11

Wow, kudos to the new Dick Tracy team for bringing the Crimestoppers Textbook up to date with modern skullduggery! I’m not sure how many regular Dick Tracy devotees also own extensive collections of vacant rural real estate, but still, I’m impressed and I learned something. (Matchbox scratch panels? Who knew?)

Panel from Mark Trail, 3/27/11

I love Mark and Doc’s smug smirks in the background as a terrified, bug-eyed Cherry works herself up for battle against the spider menace. “Gee, Doc, should we tell her that she’s trying to kill one of mankind’s allies?” “No, Mark, we’ll explain it after she wipes out all the spiders and then the cabin is overrun by the vermin the spiders would have eaten! It’s the only way she’ll learn!”

Panel from Gasoline Alley, 3/27/11

Slim finds the concept of physical intimacy with his wife distasteful, but he dreams of a future as a high-priced prostitute.

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Gasoline Alley, 3/24/11

I can’t be bothered to update you on the boring doings in Gasoline Alley — they’ve involved genealogical research and the American Revolutionary War, and I actually find both of those topics interesting, or at least I did until this strip got its hands on them. Apparently, though, the last several weeks have been far too thrilling for this strip’s target 80-and-up demographic, so in order to soothe those folks, we’ve slowed down a bit and now some guy in a suit is telling extremely mild jokes to Clovia. Still, to judge by her shell-shocked expression in the final panel, you’d think he’d been giving her the graphic details of the time he spent in the killing fields of Cambodia. That “LOL” is not some sad attempt at Internet-speak, but rather an incoherent gurgle of horror. Oh, God, the puns! Please, no more puns!

Crankshaft, 3/24/11

Ha ha, look at that knowing glance Crankshaft’s pals are exchanging. After all these years, could this finally be the massive heart attack they’ve been praying for?

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With no easy way to represent a full day every day in just three or four panels, continuity comics develop little collections of stalls and skips. Since most of them are stuck in the doldrums right now (thanks, comics!), let’s take a look at how they do it.

Judge Parker, 3/10/11

Judge Parker lards on peripheral characters and extraneous plot elements until the whole toddering edifice collapses, then just sorta walks away whistling.

Here, the MIT graduate student Rasta chauffeur who reviews all the books for a prestigious publisher argues with the perky but stiffly formal PR genius coed intern he’s known from childhood, whose first boss died in a bus crash, whose “other boss” is giving birth, and who apparently maintains a valuable baseball card collection, about whether he should tell the firm’s owner to let the intern keep doing the thing the owner has no idea she is doing in the first place. The outcome of their discussion is of absolutely no consequence to the “main action”, which consists of the Judge sitting at a table behind a “Meet the Author” sign in a Borders that hasn’t got the word yet. So I’m on the edge of my frickin’ seat, yo.

Hey, remember the buxom multilingual “former” CIA operative who’s going to introduce the shoe-designer’s not-girlfriend to some friends at the World Bank? The one who’s dating the gun-totin’ Junior Judge and being followed by the mysterious shadowy guy, except maybe he’s really following the Judge? Yeah, neither does anybody else. And that was yesterday. That’s just how Judge Parker rolls.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/10/11

Rex Morgan freezes time the way some Eastern mystics do, by practiced, sustained, focused, utter inactivity. Rex and June never do anything — they follow along only to observe, sometimes disappearing for months on end with no appreciable impact on the, um, “action.” In the current story, they’ve subcontracted what passes for a plot to “irresistible force” shrieking hysteric Berna and “immovable object” belligerent loser Dex, who bicker about lottery winnings that are distinctly not in evidence. There’s as much chance this plot will move off the dime as this pair will ever see one.

Gasoline Alley, 3/10/11

Gasoline Alley has aged its characters pretty much continuously since the end of the First World War: check out its timeline. Patriarch Walt — now the sole living U.S. veteran of that war — will be 111 by the end of this month. But the strip still manages to find time for long narratives about the family’s even more distant past, which it gradually wearies of, then abruptly drops. It’s almost as though

Apartment 3-G, 3/10/11

Apartment 3-G stops time by having someone ask about Tommie’s love life — always good for a week or two of slack-jawed staring, and maybe a bonus couple days of weeping.

— Uncle Lumpy