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Gasoline Alley, 6/27/06

LOCAL TODDLER EATEN ALIVE BY BEARS

Grief counselors to help grandfather deal with the humiliation: ‘It’s important to help him feel good about himself again’

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Dennis the Menace, 6/26/06

Here’s one for the Crappy Coloring Chronicles: does poor Ruff have mold growing in his fluffy white coat? One of the fraternities at my college had a St. Bernard that they used as a mascot but otherwise left to wander the campus unattended, and he often had something greenish and inappropriate growing in the folds of his fur, so it can happen, but Ruff is the cared for by an Eisenhower-era nuclear family unit, not twenty or so perpetually drunk and irresponsible 19-year-old layabouts. This actually reinforces my belief that the coloring of the daily comics is done in some steamy tropical locale where the wages are shockingly low and mildew grows in everything. Either that, or it’s done by robots who are wholly unfamiliar with carbon-based forms of life.

Mary Worth, 6/26/06

I know it’s really just the crappy quality of this graphic, but I’d like to believe that Mary’s eyes are rolling back in her head as she struggles to comprehend the fact that Dr. Jeff has finally managed to extract himself from her clutches. The bold-italics of that last phrase in Jeff’s word balloon implies a certain note of triumph, and the way he holds up his wine glass for a toast shows that he’s going to do this dump job in style. Mary is enjoying a glass of human blood, as is her wont.

Gasoline Alley, 6/26/06

Meanwhile, in Gasoline Alley, a small child is about to be eaten by a bear.

Six Chix, 6/26/06

In Six Chix, a proud young person punches an old woman in the face.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 6/26/06

And in TDIET, a German family is baffled by the idea that non-Germans might be of interest to anybody.

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Gasoline Alley, 5/19/06

If you weren’t paying attention (and you almost certainly weren’t), Gasoline Alley had a halfway exciting plotline going on a few months ago: Sheezix and Gertie were in a dark, scary forest, tangling with what they thought was an escaped psycho killer.

Then the supposed psycho killer turned out to be a cop, who was looking for the real psycho killer. Then he noticed that Sheezix’s driver’s license had expired, so Sheezix had to hire Gasoline Alley’s two horsedrawn hillbillies to tow his car home. Then he had to go get his driver’s license renewed, which meant that he had to get info from the Social Security Administration, which meant…

Well, what it really meant was that a storyline that contained suspense and action and the threat of violence was transformed by degrees into a storyline that involved an old man doing battle with surly government bureaucrats trying to get his paperwork in order.

Which brings up a question: Could this storyline be made even more boring? “More boring that the DMV?” you ask. “That’s a tall order!” Well, perhaps. But I’ve got some ideas!

• On his way out of the DMV, Sheezix has his pocket picked. Now he has to go through all the stuff he just went through to get his paperwork in order again, plus he has to go down to the police station to file a report with a bored desk jockey.
• On the street, Sheezix bumps into an old friend. “Hey, Sheezix, what’ve you been up to?” he asks. Sheezix proceeds to tell him, in great detail.
• Sheezix gets home to find that his wife is having the house repainted. “Don’t touch any of the walls until the paint dries!” she says. He sits down to watch and wait.
• Sheezix dies. His body is embalmed, placed into a coffin, and buried in the soil. Over the course of years, the wood of the coffin rots, and his corpse decays to its organic components, nurturing the soil. Some four billion years later, the Earth’s sun becomes a red giant, and the Earth is destroyed.

Also, in Rex Morgan, M.D., we learned that Dr. Troy likes clown art:

I don’t know what the hell this means, but it can’t possibly be good.