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Blondie, 3/24/09

It looks like somebody got a copy of A Child’s Treasury Of Hobo Lore for his birthday! Yes, we all harken back to the Good Old Days of the Great Depression, when a quarter of the country was out of work, and starving men snuck onto filthy freight cars in a desperate search for gainful employment, or maybe just a warmer and drier climate more conducive to sleeping outside. The chances of getting your head bashed in by the railroad police were generally no better than one in four! And then there were the delightful hobo jungles, with the camaraderie, the music, the piles of garbage, the drunken brawls, the teenage boys trading sexual favors for protection — a great time had by all, and nobody with a care in the world! Well, don’t worry, Elmo, if things keep going like they’re going now, we’ll have those times back soon enough!

Hi and Lois, 3/24/09

Hi and Lois dares to show us the how truly grim the economic downturn is: not only are we losing work, and thus economic security, but we’re also losing the one excuse we have to avoid our hated homes and families.

Crankshaft, 3/24/09

The ’Shaft’s son-in-law is horrified by the terrible old man’s stated intention of living for another half-century. It looks like Operation Poisoned Hat is back on the agenda.

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New comics coming shortly, but first there’s a couple of things I meant to put in yesterday’s COTW post and forgot.

First, faithful reader yellojkt as ever is running some comics bracketology on his blog to go along with the NCAA basketball tournament. This year’s tourney is the National Kinkiest Komic Karacter Kick-Off, and you can vote! Voting is already open for Kinkiest Kouple, Hottest Soap Hunk, and Hottest Comics Barely Legal Babe, with more to come, including Best Bear and Most Dutiful Dominatrix. Vote early, vote often!

Also! I’ve been meaning to put this up for a bit … you might remember a few weeks ago when I compared Hi and Lois to Revolutionary Road. This elicited an email from faithful reader zooby, who found that dialogue from the latter worked quite well in the former. Check it out!

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Mark Trail, 3/18/09

Thank goodness Mark Trail has given up on its attempts to depict all-too-realistic and depressing human behavior and is going back to its bread and butter: attempting to depict hilarious and completely incomprehensible human behavior. Because the following list of activities is in order of increasing conspicuousness, obviously:

• Two dudes hanging around in a restaurant in broad daylight, drinking coffee and wearing hideously colored shirts.
• Two adults accosting a child they don’t know and offering obscene sums of money buy his camera.
• Two random people appearing in the background of a terribly composed picture, which will be printed automatically from a machine and put into a sad little scrapbook by a neglected orphan who lives in the woods and has no friends.

Luann, 3/18/09

OK, so Luann is clearly never going to give us less of … this, so from here on in, I want more. More, do you hear me? The only way this strip’s never-ending stream of queasy sexuality will become palatable to me is if it just goes completely over the top, turning the whole thing into some ludicrously repulsive French sex farce. I want to see Mrs. DeGroot seducing TJ for information (“TJ, I can’t stop thinking about the other day in the bathroom … but my fantasies would be so much hotter if I knew what you did for a living!”). I want to see Brad accidentally invite Toni to dinner at an S&M club (“Gosh, I thought that meant they served salad and macaroni!”). I want to see Bernice arrange a tryst between her soldier brother and Delta — and then retreat back to her room to watch via the hidden cameras and masturbate furiously. I want to see Gunther at the San Diego FurCon ’09 after-party, grinning bashfully while being serviced by dozens of obedient piggies. I want to see Luann and Elwood … no, wait, never mind, even I have my limits.

Hi and Lois, 3/18/09

Sunday’s neglect-o-thon made the case for a Child Protective Services visit to the Flagston residence, and today that case just got a little bit stronger. As Trixie sits alone in the middle of the floor, surrounded by scattered toys, she notes that her family “disappears” every day, but doesn’t mention anything about anyone coming to her house in their place.

Curtis, 3/18/09

Barry is right to be concerned. Curtis does not have the right attitude to find much financial success as a prostitute.

Ziggy, 3/18/09

Even Ziggy’s computer is repulsed by his sexual advances.

Pluggers, 3/18/09

Sure, they eventually put on the belt, go to their soul-killing jobs, then come home and eat pizza and drink beer in front of the TV until they doze off; but for most pluggers, that moment in the morning when they contemplate suicide is, perversely, the high point of their day.