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Mary Worth, 3/25/14

Oh, hey, what’s going on with Tommy the ex-con’s failing attempts to reintegrate himself into society? Well, today what’s up is that Tommy was sitting on his mom’s bed looking at Internet pornography all day instead of trying to find a job. As hilarious as Tommy’s facial expression in panel two is, I’m mostly fascinated by his feet in panel one. I know in my heart of hearts that he’s just supposed to be wearing white tube socks and there’s a little bit of a shadow falling from his feet onto the sheet, but it really looks to me like he owns white patent leather shoes with dark heels à la Pee-wee Herman and has chosen to wear them while sitting on his mom’s bed and looking at Internet pornography.

B.C., 3/25/14

One of the things that amuses me about my relationship with B.C. is that I’ve read it daily for more than a decade and yet there are multiple named characters that I literally have never been able to tell apart in any way. I mean, I know that these two here are “Clumsy” and “Curls,” because they actually have distinct character designs, but there are also “Peter” and “B.C.” and (I think?) “Thor” and I cannot tell you anything specific about any of them. This may explain why one of those guys died in fiery agony almost a year ago and I never even noticed he was missing.

Hagar the Horrible, 3/25/14

The thing I like about today’s Hagar the Horrible is that invites you to imagine the hours of inept rowing leading up to this exchange. “Okay, they … they still haven’t figured it out,” Hagar thinks. “Should I say something? No, they need to learn for themselves. If they ask, I’ll say something. God, they’re still doing it. Is this the dumbest Viking band in all the North? Was it even worth it to brutally kill my father’s cousin in single combat to win their loyalty? Don’t say anything, don’t say anything, don’t say anything, let them ask, let them ask, let them ask…”

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Family Circus, 3/5/14

Haha, look at Dolly panic! She’s only beginning to grapple with the plight of the fictional character, who, despite the promise of “Happily Ever After” at the end of their tale, has no existence outside the narrative written for them, and is forced to relive it, ignorant of what awaits them, every time someone picks up the book. “Time is a flat circle,” as Rust Cohle said on True Detective. Dolly’s real fear is not for Snow White, who is barely real for her, but for herself, and that fear is fully justified.

Apartment 3-G, 3/5/14

Whoops, looks like we’ve gone from “Tommie has a fiancé” to “Tommie’s fiancé died in a plane crash” in a mere nine weeks! And since Tommie delayed Jim with “love-drowsiness” and caused him to miss his plane in the first place, there’ll be some nice guilt to motivate her character into epic fits of maudlin ennui for months and months! First up: Tommie’s story shifts from “My fiancé is a real human who exists” to “My fiancé died in a plane crash that was definitely not made up boo hoo hoo I’m so sad I can’t possibly do my share of apartment chores for the next several weeks.”

Beetle Bailey, 3/5/14

Right you are to “?”, Beetle! This is the focus for the strip today? Isn’t there something even vaguely zany happening anywhere else?

Hagar the Horrible, 3/5/14

Do you think Hagar had to kill everybody in the waiting room in order to get in to see the doctor? Or did he only murder a few, at which point his intentions were clear and everyone else just fled in terror?

Crankshaft, 3/5/14

Funky Winkerbean is spending the week focusing on the collapse of a longtime character’s dreams and sense of self. Crankshaft, Funky’s zanier sister strip, is more into physical comedy, like this gag, where the strip’s main character’s bad back is causing him so much physical agony that he’s reduced to crawling on the floor.

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Pluggers, 2/22/14

“Reflective” is not usually a term we normally associate with pluggers, but you have to admit that there appears to be a certain amount of self-reflection going through this plugger-cat’s mind as he stares at his pill container. Self-reflection and regret. “Boy, reefer and LSD sure seemed real scary back in college,” he thinks. “Seemed real important to keep away. These things are safer. That’s what they tell you. The government says so, so I guess it must be true. D’you think the guys who smoked grass are taking any more of these pills today than I am? Or the gals?” He thinks about a girl from his junior year, who had been in his math class — he never was very good at math, and she used to help him with some of the problem sets sometimes — and how he saw her at that party, and she smiled when she saw him and tried to hand him a doobie, or whatever they called it, and he stuttered and made an excuse and left, then avoided eye contact with her for the rest of the semester. What do you suppose she was up to? Did she have a daily pill organizer too? Did she ever get married? Was she on the Facebook? What was her name, again?

Blondie, 2/22/14

Blondie has been serving up non-stop Olympics jokes pretty much since the Games started, each cornier and more Olympo-sycophantic than the last, to the extent that I’m now just completely assuming that a fair amount of money changed hands between the International Olympic Committee and whatever Cayman Islands holding corporation owns the rights to Blondie’s intellectual property.

Hagar the Horrible, 2/22/14

It’s Hagar the Horrible! He’s just like you, except that he lives in a anarchic, violent, Hobbesian hellscape.