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Beetle Bailey, 9/18/09

Wow, I’m not sure who reeks of desperation more here: Sgt. Snorkel, wandering despondently around Camp Swampy in the middle of the night because he can’t be with his true love Beetle, or Sgt. Lugg, who has given up on having Sarge acknowledge any kind of affection for her and is now just offering no-strings-attached sex. Sarge is sad and lonely enough to take her up on it, but obviously he needs to get himself good and drunk first.

Blondie, 9/18/09

I’m a 35-year-old who spends much of his time writing a blog about Mary Worth and Apartment 3-G, so obviously I’m not “hip” and “with it” when it comes to the kids today, but: really? I always thought of Crocs as being dorky and suburban, not the sort of thing the kids would use to drive teachers crazy and “push the buttons” of anyone in authority. (Thanks for using the quote marks there, Blondie, as otherwise I would have assumed that some literal button-pushing was going on.) I suppose upon reflection that Crocs have all the necessary attributes for being a punk rock accessory, seeing as they’re both ugly and uncomfortable.

Hi and Lois, 9/18/09

Speaking of punk rock, here’s one of those scary, crazy, anything-goes Webcomics artists! Man, they’re a bunch of angry radicals, aren’t they! And why wouldn’t they be, with their failure to make as much money as the 50 or so widely syndicated newspaper comics artists? Don’t worry, my pink-haired friend; someday your son will be smugly paying gag writers to churn out daily installments of the strip you created before heading out to the golf course, right up to the point when the medium in which its published goes bankrupt.

Family Circus, 9/18/09

“I’m diggin’ up all the pets we buried and piecing together bits of their corpses to make a Frankenstein animal monster! Should I reanimate the dead matter using dark magic or perverted science?”

Ziggy, 9/18/09

Ziggy thinks that his parrot should know something about Quetzalcoatl, the fearsome flying snake god of the Aztecs! That’s because Ziggy experienced a psychotic break from reality, many years ago.

Speaking of breaks, psychotic and otherwise … I’m takin’ the next week off! But don’t worry, your favorite Uncle Lumpy will be here to amuse you. See you next Saturday!

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Archie, 9/16/09

You know that scene towards the end of Stanley Kubrik’s version of the Shining, when everything’s going all crazy and Shelly Duvall is running screaming through the demon-haunted Overlook Hotel, and she suddenly turns and sees two figures in a side room, one in a tuxedo and one wearing some kind of bear suit? Apparently exactly who or what these people/ghosts/things are is discussed in detail in the novel (which I haven’t read), but their weird, jarring, unexplained appearance in the movie was unspeakably creepy to me.

Anyway, I think it’s pretty obvious why I’m bringing this up, which is because HOLY CRAP WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS THAT GIANT SQUIRREL FURRY DOING LURKING BEHIND ARCHIE IN PANEL ONE? As if its unexplained presence weren’t unsettling enough, we also have to deal with those eyes peering silently out of its neck-hole, and the fact that it appears to be carrying a truncheon of some kind. Does this hell-monster exist only in Archie’s mind, lurking on the periphery of his subconscious? Is he savagely smacking his own skull in the hopes that the shock will drive the nightmarish vision back into the depths from which it came? It’s all so unsettling that I almost didn’t notice Betty’s t-shirt, which appears to depict a fork-tongued devil-cat. Jesus, this strip is terrifying.

Hi and Lois, 9/16/09

I really don’t watch a lot of TV, and I’m always hesitant to say that because I don’t want to be One Of Those People who smugly says, “You know, I don’t watch a lot of TV, which makes me better than you.” Really, I don’t! I mean, my mindless evening entertainment generally consists of reading and correcting Wikipedia articles about obscure European nobility and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes, which I in no way think of as being morally superior to, say, watching According To Jim. I only bring this up because I have no idea what Hi and Lois are on about as they stare numbly at their TV set and talk about “pop-up ads on TV.” What can this even mean? Like, do little ad-bubbles actually appear on screen in mid-show now, obscuring part of the programming you’re watching? When did that start? Why didn’t Americans, well known for their TV-loving ways, rise up in violent revolt against it?

But, casting that aside for the moment, the second panel of today’s Hi and Lois indicates that the Flagstons live in a Matrix-style computer simulacrum, and are probably themselves either poorly programmed AI constructs or Cheeto-encrusted gamers sitting in a dark room somewhere playing the most boring MMORPG imaginable. How their mysterious puppetmasters intend to monetize in-game ads aimed at infant avatars ought to be a troubling question for the venture capitalists providing the funding for this enterprise.

Gil Thorp, 9/16/09

Huzzah for the now annual scene of fiery anarchy that will apparently be heralding the arrival of football season each fall! Remember, it doesn’t matter if your team is terrible if you get to immolate half the town before any games are even played. Then you can blame the losses on the third-degree burns covering the bodies of most of the starters!

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Crock, 9/2/09

My maternal grandmother grew up on a farm in Oklahoma, and after a brief but exciting (and husband-netting) stint working in Los Angeles during World War II, moved to a very small town in Ohio where she would live for the rest of her life. She was never an early adopter when it came to gadgetry and was in fact pretty technophobic — I’ll always remember when, as a teenager, I tried for the third or fourth time to explain to her what the buttons on her VCR did, and said “It’s just like on a cassette player!” and she admitted that she had never figured out how to work her cassette player either. That said, one futuristic appliance that she did buy before anyone else I knew was a microwave oven. I literally cannot remember a time when her beloved “micro” wasn’t on its little stand next to her kitchen table, which means that she must have bought it by 1982 or so at the latest. And it kept right on working, as near as I can remember, until she passed away in 1998, an awful good run for an appliance (and a marked contrast with my current microwave, which we got as wedding present less than four years ago and which is already flaking out, though that’s a rant for a different time and place, the place presumably being a long, detailed diatribe to be sent registered mail to the Panasonic Corporation). Perhaps one of the reasons that my grandmother, who was born in 1922, was able to easily integrate this modern wonder into her workflow was that all of its features were controlled by knobs, like the conventional oven that she was already familiar with, but unlike, say, every microwave sold anywhere for the last fifteen to twenty years.

In case you’re wondering what the point of all this is, I’m trying to say that the creators of Crock are unfathomably old.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/2/09

Rex Morgan didn’t waste any time taking story elements that should be interesting — the plight of our seniors, a marriage troubled by adulterous yearnings — and making them incredibly boring, so boring that these ladies eating out at some midscale Italian place actually means that things are looking up. I’m sure that I’m going to get dozens of irate letters defending the genius of various Italian grandmothers for this, but alfredo sauce, satisfying as it almost always is, doesn’t really leave tons of room for subtle, secert variations, in my experience. It’s pretty much just cheese, cream, garlic, and butter, right? Still, deceased Yugoslav President for Life Tito’s recipe must have been pretty good to get Berna free restaurant meals out of it; or, alternately, it may have been actively poisonous, which would explain why Berna looks like a deranged serial killer in panel two, and why Becka calls it “wicked.”

Apartment 3-G, 9/2/09

Speaking of rapid descents into boring, it’s taken only 48 hours for the Professor to botch his potentially interesting prescription drug abuse storyline by maundering off into a bunch of snoozeville blah blah about Greek surnames. That knocking at the door is an Apartment 3-G producer, come to tell the Professor that his tryout as a central character is now concluded, and to remove him with an enormous vaudeville-style hook if he doesn’t come quietly.

Dennis the Menace, 9/2/09

Either that or he’s decided to skip “menacing” and head straight on into “troubling paranoia.”

Hi and Lois, 9/2/09

While I don’t condone property destruction to prove a point, it is worth noting that Trixie has been the same height since this strip debuted in 1954. She’s probably not getting any taller, and it’s about time the family recognized that and added some accommodations in their home for her condition.