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Pearls Before Swine, 8/12/09

Hello, anonymous rude denizens of the Internet! You have driven Stephan Pastis into his Internet Happy Box, so I hope you’re satisfied with yourselves. Actually, when people started emailing me about this strip this morning, I had a weird moment of déjà vu, as I thought this had run months ago. In fact, Stephan e-mailed it to me when he drew it, but that was back in April thanks to the high-tech distribution system that underlies the newspaper comics industry. Anyway, at the time I promised to rip him a new one when this came out, except he hasn’t been doing any of the terrible pun strips lately. SO UNTIL NEXT TIME PASTIS. You stay in that box just to be safe, though.

Baldo, 8/12/09

I went to college at Cornell, which is in the absolutely lovely (some might even say “gorges” HA IT’S A PUN GET IT) city of Ithaca, New York, which, despite being lovely, does not have much going for it in the way of malls. When you grow up going to Cheektowaga’s fabulous Walden Galleria, it’s a bit of a letdown doing all your enclosed chain-store shopping and food-court dining at the Pyramid Mall. This establishment appears to have since changed its name to “The Shops At Ithaca Mall,” which I find extremely amusing — oh, there are shops at the mall, you say? Anyway, I always used to mock the Pyramid Mall’s smallness by referring to it as the “Petite Mall”; I thought this was hilarious and everyone else was either more or less indifferent about it or thought it was actively offensive to people who have seizures. This is a roundabout way of saying that, why yes, I do feel validated by having essentially the same joke used in a Baldo strip 15 years later, thanks for asking!

I originally felt like there might be only about fifty-fifty chance that my terrible seizure joke was in fact the intended reading of this strip, but then I realized that there was no other obvious humor content here, so I figure that has to be what’s happening.

Hi and Lois, 8/12/09

It has not escaped my notice that quite a few of the recent Trixie-centered Hi and Lois strips have featured the pre-verbal infant girl wandering around outside apparently unattended. Maybe her parents are hoping that she’ll be adopted by a local wolfpack or some other band of animals and they’ll be relieved of responsibility for her; unfortunately, they hadn’t counted on the effectiveness with which the builders of their suburban subdivision cleared it of most wildlife. Trixie’s only option is to take up with a colony of frogs, which will go fine until she hits puberty and heads to the culvert under the arterial road with amplexus on her mind, only to be bitterly disappointed.

Hagar the Horrible, 8/12/09

Ha ha! He finds his wife’s mother so irritating that he’s going to hand her over to savages who will use her as a slave or a sacrifice to their pagan gods! MOTHERS IN LAW, am I right, people?

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Hi and Lois, 8/6/09

Hmm, something has gone very, very wrong in the relationship between Trixie and sunbeam. It used to be that she’d welcome sunbeam through the windows whenever it wanted to come in, and missed it when it was gone. But now she’s actively trying to flee from it, huddling behind a tree in hopes of remaining undetected. Has she realized that sunbeam is a little too persistent? That hanging up heavy curtains is too high price to pay for privacy? Is Chris Hansen going to show up with a camera crew at any moment? “You knew this innocent young girl wanted you to stop coming in through the window, and yet you persisted! Why? Why? Your silence convicts you!”

Crankshaft and B.C., 8/6/09

Well, since I made everyone who may have been avoiding it look at a snake attacking a little dog, I feel obligated to inform you that, against all odds, a pup who can’t weigh more than about ten pounds is going to survive a dose of snake venom that would have felled a full-grown man who has been kept alive for decades longer than his natural lifespan by an unkillable core of pure spite. Don’t take this as evidence that the Winkerverse will cease to be a abattoir of soul-slaughter, though; it’s just that in drama you can get away with doing awful things to people that you could never do to animals, as B.C. seems to have figured out, albeit belatedly.

Mark Trail, 8/6/09

“God, these gangsters have such a terrible grip on me … it’s like they’ve got my nuts locked between their teeth! Sorry for the weird metaphor, sis, but it just popped into my head for some reason.”

Beetle Bailey, 8/6/09

Beetle’s right to be freaked out. Everyone knows it only starts being gay when you can see the other dude’s face.

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Mary Worth, 8/4/09

Well, it’s been a long, exciting, and baffling adventure for our Delilah, but she’s learned some important things about life, and a woman’s place in it. Specifically she’s learned that, as a woman, she has exactly two choices in this world: she can be married to a decent, successful husband who’s never home, with whom she shares no real emotional intimacy, and with whom she’s never really figured out how to communicate properly, or she can be subject to the predatory lusts of a hedonistic child-hating alcoholic porn addict. (It is interesting to note that she will be listening to Rogers and Hammerstein in either scenario.) Having chosen wisely, she at least has something to look forward to on the horizon: the day her much-older husband drops dead, leaving her a comfortable inheritance that will allow her to live independently and act as a puppet master, manipulating the lives of hapless others.

Speaking of which, Mary sure is looking pretty quietly smug in that first panel, isn’t she? She appears to have gone to the trouble of putting on lipstick, because it’s always nice to look your best as you reflect on your own awesomely good sense and good judgment.

Gil Thorp, 8/4/09

Aw, isn’t that cute? Gil’s decided to adopt a violent, penniless 24-year-old burnout. Like Mimi, you might think that this is a rash and foolish decision, but he’s really just filling the hole in his life left by his own children, who, outside of the occasional Christmas card, haven’t been seen in the strip for nearly three years.

Shoe, 8/4/09

Ha ha, it’s funny because they’re begging for their lives!

Is this any creepier because the lobsters are going to be eaten by anthropomorphic birds? It’s not like they’re even the same phylum or anything.

Hi and Lois, 8/4/09

“You might also want to pretend that you’re swimming in water, rather than in the thick, viscous oil that I’ve filled the pool with for some reason.”