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Gil Thorp, 3/18/14

Wow, here’s some serious narrative compression, nicely mirrored by matching enormous facepalms in the outside panels. Baseball season begins, and the highlight of the Ritual Roster Reading is the need to cover third base using accident-prone “Lucky” Haskins, whom we met yesterday losing an encounter with a kitchen cabinet door. Fast-forward to “Sure, Milford lost the playdowns, but Haskins wasn’t to blame, because baseball takes more than luck! It takes skill, and practice, and dedication, and we have none of those things! Oh yeah, and coaching – how did I even forget that?”

Kaz is going to kill himself if he keeps lifting like that.

Hi and Lois, 3/18/14

Made over, made up, and drowsy with happiness in her new home in the Valley, Irma Thurston tells Lois how she dumped Thirsty for a career in porn, as one of her co-stars wanders through with a prop.

Mark Trail, 3/18/14

Whenever one of his stories gets complicated, Mark calls a real journalist like this guy.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Beetle Bailey, 3/8/14

Saturdays in Beetle Bailey are for the grandiosely dysfunctional Halftrack marriage; today’s installment at least has something resembling mean-spirited cheer compared to some of the more frankly traumatizing examples we’ve seen. Anyway, I’m not sure what interpretation here is more unsettling: that Mrs. Halftrack is desperate for sexual validation and doesn’t know what “person of interest” means and, as revenge for everything, the general refuses to tell her, or that Mrs. Halftrack and the local constabulary have some weird erotic roleplay going on and she’s rubbing it in her husband’s face.

Hi and Lois, 3/8/14

Still, today’s Hi and Lois wins the coveted award for Most Chilling Marital Misanthropy In A Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC Strip. I’m genuinely impressed by the attention to detail shown in panel one, in which Irma has the key to her husband’s basement prison casually dangling from her wrist. “She’ll let us out in a few hours!” Thirsty proclaims cheerfully, not realizing the he will never see the sun again.

Judge Parker, 3/8/14

Yes, the invention of armed, remote-controlled unmanned drones raises troubling questions about the future of armed conflict and the ability of hegemonic states to prosecute low-intensity warfare against non-state actors largely in secret, without expending much by way of blood or treasure. But if this technological advance leads to the insufferable Parkers being blown to bits by a remotely launched Predator missile, couldn’t we say that it was all, in the end, worthwhile?

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/9/14

Oh hey, remember how Sarah Morgan, who is a child, got a lucrative book deal from a museum for her horsey drawings, but it came so easily to her that she was wracked with self-doubt? Well, just because she may be undergoing some internal self-reassessment doesn’t mean that it’s okay for the people paying her money for a book to assign her an God-damned professional editor to supervise the process just like they would for literally any other writer they publish, including adults who have already written multiple books. Just look at her face in that last panel! You’re dealing with Sarah Morgan, motherfuckers, and her lawyer is going to make sure you regret everything about this decision.

Beetle Bailey, 2/9/14

Speaking of regrets, I sure regret reading this comic, because now I can’t stop thinking about Otto the dog suddenly growing to full human size and asserting his right to bring lady dogs to the barracks, for sex.

Hi and Lois, 2/9/14

Ha ha, an adorable child in a comic is talking about “promoting my brand,” time to break all the computers and move to an island far away!