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Heathcliff, 12/2/12

Ha, what’s this? Something has gone terribly wrong with the Heathcliff coloring process — and by “terribly wrong” I mean “delightfully right,” obviously. Someone who knows more about this than me should chime in, but I’m guessing what we’re looking at is an image file that only contains some of the Photoshop layers that went into the strip. It’s totally incomprehensible and actually amazingly beautiful, as far as I’m concerned, with the pastel-y vibe and the large, unsettling white spaces on the cat’s faces. This should be hanging up in some little avant garde artspace downtown, but instead it will have probably been “corrected” online to the usual Heathcliff banality by the time you read this.

Mary Worth, 12/2/12

Gosh, whaddya know! Jim’s down at the pier and he’s not panicking or freaking out at all! I guess he managed to cure himself of being a trauma-haunted, semi-delusional control freak with years of therapy with a trained professional by just sucking it up and going down to the pier and realizing it’s not so bad. Problem solved! Now he’s going to point at a bunch of people, just to prove that, despite his missing arm, he can point with the best of them, just like any two-armed man would.

Marmaduke, 12/12/12

Marmaduke didn’t like playing cowboy so much. His task was to send humans down the infinitely deep pit to the hell-dimension that was his awful kingdom, not other dogs. Why did the dogs provoke him? Never again, he thought, as he watched the hat fall downward, ever downward, to the chamber of eternal agony. Never again.

Luann, 12/12/12

Yes, Mr. DeGroot! Burn it. Burn it all! Burn everything down.

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Heathcliff and The Family Circus, 12/1/12

Celebrate, everybody! Three and half weeks of the Holiday Season lie before us, and if these whimsical one-panel cartoons for children are any indication, they will be a singularly grim and joyless affair. Billy is rooting through his box of toys so he can make his list of gift ideas; he literally has so many geegaws that he’s in real danger of getting duplicates. His toys may be spilling out of the top of a box that comes up to his shoulders, but they can never fill his bottomless need. Dolly looks on, expressionless. Meanwhile, Heathcliff, who is a cat and therefore not a participant in human religion or holiday celebration, merely sees the hustle and bustle at the mall as another opportunity to assert his dominance. He’s disrupting a farcical Christmas tradition meant to generate more sales revenues, and neither the bored mall Santa nor the stoop-shouldered children waiting in line can work themselves up to be even slightly upset by his antics.

Archie, 12/1/12

I bet you thought that yesterday’s late-night recycling laffs were just a one-off Archie joke, but no! Morning has come and now Archie and his dad are going down to the recycling center to return … the papers … which are now pamphlets about environmentalism? Or maybe the newspapers are being turned into the pamphlets, right there, at the recycling center? Anyway, the point is that recycling’s for chumps, kids, make sure your newspapers end up in a landfill, or, to go that extra mile, find a small endangered bird and smother it with the sports section!

Herb and Jamaal, 12/1/12

Do people outside of wacky fictional settings ever do elaborately sarcastic performances like this? I mean, it’s one thing to mock your lonely, heartbroken friend by telling him he’s having a “pity party,” but it’s quite another to take off your apron and leave the room and announce that you’re going to make actual concrete preparations for such an event. I certainly hope Herb has the determination to see this thing through to the end and really go to Kinko’s to have something printed up, or at least create a Facebook event and send invites to everyone Jamaal knows.

Ziggy, 12/1/12

God, this squirrel is quite the little name-dropping asshole.

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Heathcliff, 11/23/12

Newspaper comics are an incredibly conservative art form — not in a political sense, necessarily, but in the sense that visual signifiers and little building blocks of jokes that haven’t existed in the real world for literally years are still just taken for granted in comics, because they’ve become established running gags during the strips’ decades-long run. Take, for instance, the idea that you’d put your cat or dog out at night. This was, I guess, an unremarkable aspect of pet ownership at one point; but today, anyone living in an urban or suburban area would be judged rather harshly if they just let the dog roam free at night, and while plenty of people do have indoor-outdoor cats, even in the city, plenty don’t, and those that do almost never actively kick the cat out at night. This change in attitude happened long enough ago that, when I was a child in the early ’80s, I had to have my mom explain to me why Fred Flintstone dropped Dino on his front step in the opening sequence of the Flintstones; yet here we are 30 years later, and Heathcliff is still being comically bounced across the lawn, and Dagwood’s suburban cul de sac is haunted by packs of feral dogs at night.

Wizard of Id, 11/23/12

Meanwhile, newspaper comics are apparently forbidden to use the word “hell,” even when it’s the name of a place of afterlife punishment rather than a curse word. There are probably plenty of other perfectly understandable substitutes that could have been used instead (“Hades,” “The underworld”, etc.), but heck, let’s go with “heck,” a euphemism for the swear word that’s never, ever used to refer to hell-as-a-place, just to confuse and irritate everybody.

Apartment 3-G, 11/23/12

Haha, wait, what? Greg is the new James Bond? Is he even English? Is he even attractive? Wouldn’t he be able to afford a better apartment than a third-floor walkup in a building where teachers and nurses live? I guess this does at least explain why Margo hasn’t been putting any effort into publicity, because having the new Bond in your stable of clients is probably a license to print money, assuming that the film doesn’t flop because it turns out its new star is a bland American who goes around wearing sky-blue turtlenecks.

Meanwhile, Skyler is the victim of a abrupt hair color shift, but as a young Hollywood starlet this is actually one of the more realistic instances of this typically A3Gian blip.

Gil Thorp, 11/23/12

Gil Thorp’s storyline continues to be not even interesting enough for me to bother summarizing for you, but in the interest in keeping you up to date on what’s really important, here is a sexy closeup on Gil’s sweaty face!