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Shoe, 10/20/12

I have no information one way or another as to whether the art and writing in Shoe are done by different people who barely speak to each other, but it sure would explain a lot about this cartoon, in which a mild joke one step removed from the classic “seafood diet” gag is paired with a scene of spectacular gloom. “If you’re ‘watching’ what you eat, I guess we’ll need to schedule an eye exam, because you seem to be eating pretty poorly! Hahahaha! Get it, it’s a play on words! So, anyway, like I said earlier, you’re dying of colon cancer.”

Herb and Jamaal, 10/20/12

“Uh … hello, Michelle, this is Jamaal — I was wondering if you’d be interested in going on a date with me. Could you say that again? This comic has four panels so we need to pad things out a bit. Yeah, we could redraw them, but that’d be tons more work than it’s worth.”

Dennis the Menace, 10/20/12

“Yep, ‘prone to over-the-top, irrational violence when frustrated over trivial matters,’ that’s what they say about the Mitchell boys!”

Family Circus, 10/20/12

Billy has come to the conclusion that the only way out of the hellscape of institutionalized education is suicide.

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Hagar the Horrible, 10/7/12

At last, a definitive answer to the question I’ve been musing on for years: Are Hagar and his entourage Christians or pagans? Hagar, at least, appears to still worship the gods of the old Norse pantheon, as is perhaps befitting for the bloodthirsty leader of a violent war band. Given the lack of intra-Norse civil strife and the friendly relations between Hagar and Brother Olaf, we’ll just have to assume that the action of the strip takes place during one of the more peaceful lulls in Norway’s transition to Christianity, which generally involved one side gaining dominance and attempting to violently suppress the other. Indeed, today’s strip shows how hearts and minds can be changed without use of force, as Hagar begins to question his allegiance to deities that were explicitly believed by their worshippers to not be all-powerful or all-knowing.

Herb and Jamaal, 10/7/12

So I read this strip and thought “Haha, at last, I get to see the moment when Herb and Jamaal goes completely nuts,” but then … it turns out this quote is in fact floating all over the Internet as attributed to Desmond Tutu? There’s never any explanation of the context in which he said it, though, which sets my “let’s attach a quote we like to a random famous person” alarm bells going off. Still, the good Archbishop is a cyclist, so who knows! Anyone who can confirm or deny this quote gets a shiny Internet quarter.

Edited to clarify: The “give a man a fish…” phrase is as old as the hills and clearly not originated by Tutu. I’m specifically wondering if he was the one who turned it into a joke about bicycling.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/6/12

Everyone’s face in the second panel is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a scene in which three desperately poor people are about to eat a canned bean dinner in a dilapidated shack in an isolated rural hamlet. Where do you suppose Snuffy is? Jail, again? Do you think they’re sadder that one of their family members can’t be there, or happier because he’s a useless criminal and his absence means more beans for them?

Archie, 10/6/12

Notice that by the time Archie blows that whistle in the first panel, Moose is just standing around looking sheepish. Despite Archie’s ostensible attempts to impose some sanity on this “friendly” game of touch football, he knows better than to interrupt Moose when he’s in the midst of whatever violent whole-body fugue state resulted in the terrible injuries revealed in panel three.

Pluggers, 10/6/12

Speaking of looking sheepish, normally I find the faces of the various man-animal abominations who inhabit Pluggers to be fairly inexpressive, but both father and cub here are wearing pretty piercing looks of shame — poo-based shame.

Herb and Jamaal, 10/6/12

Are rising energy prices starting to degrade vital government services? Or is Jamaal just letting some guy’s house burn down, for fun?

Gil Thorp, 10/6/12

If you’ve ever wondered what it would like to perch on the belt of a guy who is really, really psyched about the terrible micksploitation slogan he’s come up with for a high school football team, and is also wearing a waistcoat for some reason, then today’s Gil Thorp is for you, my friend.

Beetle Bailey, 10/6/12

How is it that whoever wrote this cartoon doesn’t cry themselves to sleep every night, just like Mrs. Halftrack? This is probably the saddest thing I’ve seen in the comics in months, and I read Funky Winkerbean daily.