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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.

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Family Circus and Hagar the Horrible, 9/27/08

Two legacy strips check in with mind-bending unjokes today. Little Billy, having grown bored with physical violence, threats of physical violence, and crude insults, has decided to use some Philosophy 101 semantics and ontology to harass his sister. “Dolly, when is a thing not a thing? When do names not encode true meaning? Huh? Huh? Do you get it? Do you?” Dolly’s expression of anxiety proves that her big brother’s reign of terror is continuing on unchecked — only this time, she’ll have no bruises to show Mommy, so the torture will continue.

Meanwhile, Hagar is forcing an existential dilemma on his poor dog. “Why do you have to be what you are? Why can’t you be something else?” The idea that a question like “why” can even be applied to the essence of existence is enough to send anyone into paroxysms of depression — I didn’t make me! Why can’t love me as I am! Fortunately, Snert seems to have a great deal more self-assurance than Dolly, and is unfazed.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/27/08

You hear that, doc? You stay away from Niki, if you like that pretty little face of yours! And if there’s one thing we know about Rex, it’s that he likes that pretty little face of his.

Shoe, 9/27/08

I always assume that, when it appears in a newspaper comic strip, “dating” is a euphemism for “fucking,” which assumption really pays off when it comes to making this strip funnier. There’s a joke about hitting balls with clubs to be made here as well, but I leave that as an exercise for the reader.