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Ziggy, 4/1/09

That’s right, Ziggy! Borneo has many exotic and exciting tourist attractions that might be just a thing to put a smile on your face! Would you be interested in going on a jungle trek or swimming with dolphins? Perhaps a big city is more your style — you might want to experience historic Kuching, with its fascinating cuisine that reflects the region’s cultural mix! Or maybe you just want to relax on the beach. Borneo has it all! If you’re after a good exchange rate, well, depending on which side of the border you travel to, the Indonesian Rupiah is currently at 11,500 to the dollar, and the Malaysian Ringgit at about 3.60 to the dollar — definitely high historically, but better than it was six months ago, that’s for sure — and your money still goes much further than it would in Europe or the Caribbean!

Oh, wait, isn’t there supposed to be a joke here of some sort? Uh … ha, ha, that man accidentally left the house with no pants on!

Hagar the Horrible, 4/1/09

Oh, look, yet another cartoon character is begging her God for release from the terrible situation that defines her role in the strip. Poor Helga, who was no doubt either captured by Hagar’s viking band in a raid that left her village destroyed or handed over to the Norse chieftain by her father in order to avoid such an attack, has no recourse to improve her life but divine intervention. I’m curious as to which religious hierarchy she’s beseeching here, though. Is it the new God and his Son, recently imported from the south, or is it Odin and his pantheon, the old Gods of her people? If the latter, her requests might be bumped a little further up the queue with a human sacrifice or two. Surely her pacifist son Hamlet would make a choice offering?

Apartment 3-G, 4/1/09

See, there is an advantage to living with Margo: you can have conversations with enraged, half-asleep, foul-mouthed, possibly drunk or high women in their underwear, and still maintain that vacant little smile, unfazed, as if this happens to you every day, because it does.

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Apartment 3-G, 2/19/09

No Apartment 3-G girl can find happiness in love, so obviously the next box Margo receives will contain Eric’s neatly packaged non-transplantable organs, courtesy of the Chinese government, but for the moment let’s just appreciate this gesture, in which he lets her know that her many, many previous sexual partners don’t bother him. If we’re really lucky Margo will let Tommie play dress-up with it, to mock her, because it’s the closest she’ll ever come to getting married, or having anyone love her.

Baldo, 2/19/08

Notice that the customer is blushing in the final panel. The only legitimate response to a sub-pun this awful is to be terribly embarrassed for the perpetrator.

Crankshaft, 2/19/09

Oh, that Crankshaft, always combining corny, unoriginal jokes with death! Our flight attendant looks wholly uninterested in saving her own or anybody else’s life in the case of emergency, and will probably cap off her little safety talk by hanging herself with the demonstration seatbelt.

Family Circus, 2/19/09

“No, Jeffy! You know full well what the judge said.”

Marmaduke, 2/19/09

“Why are you so restrained, for once?” Phil thinks. “Go on, eat him!”

Hagar the Horrible, 2/19/09

HAW HAW HAW THE FEMINISM

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Mark Trail, 12/15/08

A couple of months back, I posited that this could in fact be the ultimate Mark Trail storyline, including as it does all of the strip’s favorite plot devices — gentle forest hermits, rapacious mustachioed developers, a “hot” chick who wants to do Mark, terrible pet-napping hillbillies with sinister designs and stupid names, etc. In fact, there’s only been really one major Trail bugaboo missing, and that’s Indian artifact smuggling! So naturally Mark, in an attempt to fit his terrible ordeal in with the nature of the world he knows, assumes that Salty and his gang are “smugglers of some sort” (hint: the sort that smuggle PRICELESS INDIAN ARTIFACTS!) despite no evidence pointing in that direction. Maybe they’re just run-of-the-mill baddies who tie up local irritants on their disused shrimp boat, then fall asleep, for money!

Also absent in this storyline, up until today: a word balloon emanating from Andy’s crotch. So, there’s that.

Mary Worth, 12/15/08

Poor Lynn is starved for the human affection conveyed by simple hug, since everyone in her life (“everyone” consisting entirely of her father, ever since he had the brake lines cut on Greg’s brother’s car) is repulsed by such niceties as “physical contact.” Our heartbroken skater calculates (probably correctly) that Mary is in the “no touch” club, so in panel one she skillfully feints a dramatic pose against a convenient tree before pivoting and hurling herself into Mary’s arms. I give it a 9.8 (ideally her left arm would have come in below Mary’s right).

Another possibility is that Lynn is speaking literally when she says that her heart stopped when she heard about Greg’s death; this whole boring story was meant only to lull Mary into complacency, and now Zombie Lynn will lunge at her victim and feast on her brains.

Hagar the Horrible, 12/15/08

Oh, Hagar the Horrible, what a pretty and atmospheric winter scene you have for us here! It almost seems petty to point out that you seem to have forgotten to include a punchline of any sort in today’s strip.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 12/15/08

This is today’s Mother Goose and Grimm. It’s about dog-on-tree necrophilia! Yes, Ralph, it’s no coloring error that those hearts above your head are inky black, as your love for Lana is dirty and shameful.