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Heathcliff, 3/11/14

One of my favorite Heathcliff running gags is “Heathcliff hangs suspended in midair, about to land on his victim and slash at their tender, exposed flesh, but in that terrible moment a member of Heathcliff’s family takes the opportunity to drolly explain what’s about to go down.” We saw it before when some visitors made the mistake of revealing their canine sympathies, which seems like the sort of thing that would piss Heathcliff off, and thus I assumed his attack was self-directed. However, I doubt Heathcliff has much by way of cultural-linguistic peeves; instead, it’s his cranky old owner who seems smug that this young bro-sayer is about to get a faceful of claws. Is it possible that Heathcliff’s access to the family finances comes at a price, and that price is the willingness to do awful violence to the family’s enemies?

Family Circus, 3/11/14

I was going to go on this long riff about how the answer to this question depends on how far artificial intelligence will advance and your opinion on the likelihood of a coming Singularity, but then I realized this is Dolly we’re talking about, so: no, sorry Dolly, the phone will still be smarter. Much, much smarter.

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Judge Parker, 3/7/14

April’s dad may be an amoral arms merchant who deals with ex-Romanian secret police and has a “retirement fund” made up entirely of blood diamonds, but at least he likes Judge Parker Senior’s terrible book, which puts him one step above the real monsters: liberal Ivy League college professors.

Heathcliff, 3/7/14

Heathcliff only loves his owner-family for financial reasons.

Herb and Jamaal, 3/7/14

Herb has been having sex with the restaurant’s catering truck for years, but is now starting to question his auto-monogamy.

Pluggers, 3/7/14

Pluggers’ electronics are covered with more disgusting slobber and drool than you can imagine.

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Heathcliff, 2/6/14

One of the keys to the Heathcliff mythos is the title cat’s extreme sangfroid: despite the madness going on all around him, even when it’s madness he’s implemented, he keeps his cool. Whether he’s meeting the Garbage Ape’s new sidekick or being worshipped as a god, he tends not to get really worked up about anything. Thus today’s panel, which I assume to be some kind of drug-induced hallucination, makes total sense to me. Not only is Heathcliff himself largely unimpressed to discover that a hitherto inanimate ball of yarn has somehow sprouted a face and is speaking to him, but the yarn-face itself — which, I must emphasize for my own sanity, I believe to be a mere projection of Heathcliff’s chemically-altered subconscious — appears pretty blasé about its unexpected and horrifying existence. “Yeah, you should probably bat me around or whatever,” it mumbles affectlessly. “Hey, if I unravelled, would the individual components of my face become separated from one another, and each have its own eerie detached existence somewhere on the long string of yarn spread haphazardly across the room? Boy, that’d be a thing, huh.”

Better Half, 2/6/14

This seems like exactly the sort of dumb tchotchke financial services firms would give out to their lowest-profit clients, so I’m not exactly sure what the joke is supposed to be here, unless it’s that Stanley has taken the ham-handed metaphor seriously. And, honestly, wouldn’t some kind of time-travel device be the best investment aide you can imagine? Only the top customers get the backwards-pointing chrono-compass, which allows you to get in on the ground floor of surprisingly high-performing stocks; but by jumping ahead decades into the future, Stanley and Harriet can let compound interest create the sort of retirement cushion that they could never have otherwise hoped for.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/6/14

“Your precious Lisa dies at the end, right? You’d better believe I want some popcorn for this.”