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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/6/12

Everyone’s face in the second panel is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a scene in which three desperately poor people are about to eat a canned bean dinner in a dilapidated shack in an isolated rural hamlet. Where do you suppose Snuffy is? Jail, again? Do you think they’re sadder that one of their family members can’t be there, or happier because he’s a useless criminal and his absence means more beans for them?

Archie, 10/6/12

Notice that by the time Archie blows that whistle in the first panel, Moose is just standing around looking sheepish. Despite Archie’s ostensible attempts to impose some sanity on this “friendly” game of touch football, he knows better than to interrupt Moose when he’s in the midst of whatever violent whole-body fugue state resulted in the terrible injuries revealed in panel three.

Pluggers, 10/6/12

Speaking of looking sheepish, normally I find the faces of the various man-animal abominations who inhabit Pluggers to be fairly inexpressive, but both father and cub here are wearing pretty piercing looks of shame — poo-based shame.

Herb and Jamaal, 10/6/12

Are rising energy prices starting to degrade vital government services? Or is Jamaal just letting some guy’s house burn down, for fun?

Gil Thorp, 10/6/12

If you’ve ever wondered what it would like to perch on the belt of a guy who is really, really psyched about the terrible micksploitation slogan he’s come up with for a high school football team, and is also wearing a waistcoat for some reason, then today’s Gil Thorp is for you, my friend.

Beetle Bailey, 10/6/12

How is it that whoever wrote this cartoon doesn’t cry themselves to sleep every night, just like Mrs. Halftrack? This is probably the saddest thing I’ve seen in the comics in months, and I read Funky Winkerbean daily.

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Gil Thorp, 10/2/12

If there’s one thing I genuinely love about Gil Thorp, it’s that it keeps track of a bewildering cast of characters who stick around over multiple storylines. At the end of the summer storyline, Gil offered embittered one-armed Milford alum Steve an unpaid coaching gig of the sort that he often hands out to the strip’s over-18 hangers-on. In a lesser strip, this would have been the resolution to Steve’s storyline and we would have quickly forgotten about him, but instead we see that this tiny modicum of power has transformed him into a cultish dictator. “We move together,” he shouts, waving his single fist in the air, “as one unit, one people. We hear the count in our mind before it is uttered. We present an unbroken wall of flesh to our enemies. We leave behind any family who may have once loved us, as we are all the family we need. After practice, each of you will chop off the arm of the man to your right, to make our union as real as the flesh and blood we sacrifice to the greater good.”

Mary Worth, 10/2/12

Haha, Mary Worth is really gunning hard for a spot on The Discovery Channel’s History’s Greatest Monsters this season! “Mary, my friendship with Jim is based on shared interests and experiences, not any sort of pity I have for him because of his injuries.” “That’s nice, dear, but have you considered that Jim is a charity case and that your friendship is a precious gift to him, much more valuable than his is to you? Don’t think of him as a person; think of him as an opportunity to give of yourself selflessly and condescendingly. Remember, he only has one arm!”

Apartment 3-G, 10/2/12

Not to go on too much about my “process” or anything, but when I made jokes yesterday about Evan cowering unseen in the corner while Margo and Greg bickered, it was funny because of course he wasn’t actually in the room while this was all happening! That would be super awkward! Except, um, apparently he was? Today’s first panel dialogue also nicely heads off any further jokes I might make about Margo and Evan’s twisted S&M relationship. Anyway, my point is that Apartment 3-G is getting dangerously close to producing self-aware camp and putting me out of business.

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Mark Trail, 9/24/12

I had almost forgotten that Rusty had blabbed to Cherry and Doc about the sheep-killing miscreants, which I think is understandable because it’s natural to assume that even Rusty’s adopted family would want to keep interactions with him to a minimum. But anyway, this explains my initial confusion at Cherry calling the men stealing away her ward as “poachers” rather than, say, “kidnappers.”

Though considering the Trails’ wildlife focus and their apparent refusal to legally adopt Rusty or send him off to school or anything one normally does with a child, perhaps poaching is a good word for what Cherry thinks is happening here. “Oh, no, those poachers have got the Rusty! It’s a particularly ugly specimen so it’s not much of a trophy, but its pelt and gallbladder could probably sell for good money on the black market.”

Gil Thorp, 9/24/12

Whoah, you guys, it turns out that Irish people don’t just call cookies “biscuits”; they also have different parenting styles! I see some cross-cultural misunderstanding hijinks in the making here. Is the lesson of this fall plot going to be “American teens have their souls crushed because their parents don’t want them to die” or “foreigners don’t love their children enough to smother them”? Or will we lose interest three quarters of the way through the season when the Mudlarks make a half-assed run at the playdowns?

Marmaduke, 9/24/12

I have to admit, I’ve been reading Marmaduke for years and never knew that the next-door neighbor guy’s name was “Snyder.” Do you think that’s always been the case or that the cartoonist finally decided to give him a distinct identity within the strip? Oh, also, the dark light of a thousand demons is about to start radiating out of Marmaduke’s skull, so all humans need to cower indoors if they want to survive.