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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/24/08

When I first read this comic, I missed the joke, reading the dialog of the last two panels like this:

“Really? Your dad’s a traveling salesman?”

“No, just kidding! He’s just the regular kind of dad you’d find in this blighted hillbilly shantytown: a toothless, semi-literate chicken thief with no visible means of support and a terrible gambling problem! He’s never home because he’s usually in jail, or at a whorehouse!”

I did get my head around the punchline in short order, obviously, but then, because I’m a fancy east coast urban elitist (if that wasn’t obvious from my initial interpretation), I became resentful about being befuddled by a strip about rustic morons. Damn you, you clever mountain folk!

Gil Thorp, 9/24/08

You know, if Cully Vale had been caught looming menacingly over the shattered form of one of his hapless backyard wrestling victims like monstrously large defensive back (or something?) Jeff Ponczak is doing in panel two here, he’d have been put away for life. But because Jeff’s assault took place in the context of a school-sanctioned athletic competition, he gets the cheers of thousands, and everything is A-OK! Instead, it’s the third panel of today’s Gil Thorp that’s really disturbing. Let’s count the ways!

• Jeff is gazing rapturously heavenward with the sun (or possibly the stadium lights) beaming down on his face, as if he were in a propaganda poster urging the workers and peasants to redouble their efforts to meet the goals of Stalin’s latest Five-Year Plan.
• Some sort of terrifying bandage-wrapped hand is resting on Jeff’s shoulder, as if he were being accosted by a leper or a mummy or, worse, Spider-Man.
• Jeff is being showered with approbation in the form of a series of epithets that reference his quarterback-tackling prowess, all of which will unfortunately force you to contemplate Jeff’s scrotum.

Mark Trail, 9/24/08

And with the arrival of a mustache, we now have this storyline’s sinister villain, in the form of the random white dude attached to the aforementioned mustache. I can’t wait until we find out that the “right people on our side” are the lawyers who have meticulously worked with state and local governments and environmental groups to get the permits necessary to drain the grassland and build something nice on the land legally owned by Mr. Mustache and Mr. Guy He’s Talking On The Phone To Who Probably Also Has A Mustache. “But, Mr. Trail, I think you’ll find that all our paperwork is in order…” “Paperwork does not impress me! You drained a friend of mine’s land’s neighboring wetlands!” *PUNCH*

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Apartment 3-G, 9/18/08

Enjoy this moment of the Apartment 3-G Crazed Dopeheads On Parade storyline. We’re sliding through deliriously wonderful high camp right now, but we’ll no doubt end up in awful kitsch soon enough.

Beetle Bailey, 9/18/08

I find it kind of poignant that Otto is staring at the newspaper in the first panel, despite the fact that his thought balloon implies that he’s illiterate. I find it kind of confusing that he says “astrology forecast” instead of “horoscope.”

Gil Thorp, 9/18/08

“But then I noticed she was wearing some kind of terrifying vest-thing with a skull and crossbones on the front and a heart on the back! So now I’m just hiding behind these bushes until she goes away.”

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Gil Thorp, 9/11/08

Thank goodness that the huge Satan-worshipping fire orgy that rings in Milford’s football season has now become an annual event. God only knows what exactly is burning in the background of panel one — probably the high school, or perhaps the entire neighborhood surrounding it — but I kind of love Gil standing on his makeshift platform exhorting his crazed minions to ever-higher levels of ecstatic bloodlust. You’ll note that at least one devotee of the flame is flashing some devil horns at the end of her jelly-braceleted arm, indicating her devotion to the archdemon Astaroth. The fact that Cully has been given temporal dominion over the football team is a sure sign of the carnage that will conclude the evening, as he fallaway slams the unwitting victims directly into the inferno, ensuring that the Dark Lord will smile on the Mudlarks this fall.

Mark Trail, 9/11/08

After much promise, the just concluded Kelly-versus-Cherry storyline rapidly declined into a total snoozefest, but I’m still holding out high hopes that we’ll get some action out of this modern day St. Francis, his adorable daughter, and their sinister raccoon familiar. So far our gentle baldy has cunningly used the passive voice to explain the plight of the thirsty, thirsty animals, noting only that the water is being “drained away.” Eventually, though, the little tyke will want to know who is doing the draining, and he’ll have to admit that it’s the humans, with their endless appetite for well-watered suburban lawns and Bed, Bath, and Beyond-bearing strip malls. Presumably the two of them will then silently watch the dehydrated beasts in panel two stumble around in the vicinity of their cabin for a bit; next, the raccoon will chitter menacingly, they’ll nod their heads in agreement, and the killing spree will begin.

Apartment 3-G, 9/11/08

Lu Ann is capable of such charming depths of self-deception that I was hoping she’d take her initial thought balloon to its logical conclusion. “Beer cans, wine bottles, and pizza boxes! It looks like a scene from a frat house movie. That’s it! Alan is allowing a major studio to use his apartment as a set for a frat house movie! It all makes sense now!” It would also explain the terrible state of the curtains; as any good set dresser knows, the stereotypical denizen of a frat house in a frat house movie is such a seething cauldron of homophobia that he would literally have a stroke if he attempted to contemplate window treatments.

Marmaduke, 9/11/08

I originally read this caption as “Why don’t you bury him in his own lawn chair?” Which you have to admit makes sense, as Marmaduke appears to be dead.