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Archie, 2/13/14

Good lord, Pop’s facial expression in that last panel chills me to my very core. “That’s right, Archie, Mr. Lodge doesn’t like you,” he thinks. “None of the adults in this town like you. Your time as a teenager, during which social convention demands that we be halfway pleasant and encouraging to you, is almost over. Prepare yourself for adulthood. Prepare yourself for … the shunning.”

Judge Parker, 2/13/14

So we’ve finally met April’s mysterious dying-of-cancer dad and he’s … one of the greatest things Judge Parker has ever seen? I’m not sure if he’s based directly on Hunter S. Thompson or if he’s been filtered through Doonesbury’s Uncle Duke, but he’s fantastic and I want him in every panel from now until the heat death of the universe finally brings this storyline to a close. My only regret is that April has actually drawn attention his tarantula companion; I sort of wish that it had just sat there on his shoulder, unexplained, for the next few weeks’ worth of strips, with everyone he meets reacting to it with silent but visible disgust.

Mary Worth, 2/13/14

Yep, Tommy’s coming back to Charterstone, all right! By the expression on her face you can tell Mary is almost as excited as I am.

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Shoe, 1/31/14

Comics and other media that present us with a world of anthropomorphic animals generally elide the problem of what that universe’s relationship between predator and prey is like. But it’s hard to avoid if you spend any amount of time thinking about it. Take the birds of Shoe, for instance: the Perfesser is an osprey, according to this unsettlingly detailed chart on the strip’s Wikipedia page. What about the sea life that forms his natural diet? Did they have hopes and dreams? Did any of those fish or mollusks have mothers that they loved? Did they ever feel the stirrings of romance or the icy breath of their own mortality? Today we learn the awful truth: that the squid do indeed have their own independent society, an undersea counterpart to the Shoe gang’s Treetops, and that its leaders are happy to lead predator birds to the regions of that nation where the most vulnerable take shelter. The poor, the mentally ill, the squid who fall through the cracks? They aren’t Squidtown’s problem. They’re food for someone else. And if the squid leadership looks the other way, then the rest of their culture is left alone. This is the worst kind of nightmare.

Apartment 3-G, 1/31/14

Speaking of the worst kinds of nightmare, who on earth could look at the awful top half of that deer head and think “she’s beautiful” and not “AHHH AHHH AHHH GET IT AWAY FROM GET IT AWAY FROM ME”? To be fair, Lu Ann used to be (still is? who even knows) a kindergarten art teacher at a fancy Manhattan school, which means that she probably needs to be very good at smiling and saying nice things about little monsters.

Judge Parker, 1/31/14

Ha ha, look at Judge Parker Senior’s face in that last panel! I’ve decided I’m just going to stop worrying and learn to love his hilariously oblivious privilege-stumble through danger. Car chases? Whee! Snakes? Lovely! Forming an uneasy alliance with narco-terrorists? Charming! It’s not like he’s in the law enforcement game anymore, is he?

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Apartment 3-G, 1/30/14

Oh, man, I have to say I’m seriously disappointed that Margo has been tricked so easily into allowing a literal wild animal to roam free inside their apartment, defecating freely and infecting roommates and visitors with Lyme disease willy-nilly. Margo is not the sort who enjoys the act of breaking rules for its own sake; she merely disregards those rules that she deems inconvenient, while ruthlessly enforcing the ones that serve her interests. In fact, one would assume that Margo helped write the rules about ruminants living in their apartment building, since she and the other Apartment 3-G gals (and maybe everyone else who lives there, who knows) own the building, according to this strip from 2004 where Margo angrily imposed some worksite safety guidelines. The building’s ownership situation has literally never come up since then, but I don’t think they’ve sold it or anything?

Anyway, the only way this makes any kind of sense is if Margo is one of the very few owners of the building, and she’s going to use this deer thing as a way to establish that rules are things she imposes on other people, not things she has to obey. “Oh, hello, Mrs. Jones,” Margo says to a tenant whose beloved but lease-violating cat she had seized by animal control the previous week. “Terrible weather we’ve been having, isn’t it?” The baby deer pees on the hallway carpet right in front of them, but Margo never breaks eye contact.

Judge Parker, 1/30/14

Huh, I was really pretty sure that April’s last name was “Bowers” and her dad’s compound was in the Yucatan, but Judge Parker plots are incredibly slow, so who can even remember these things? The Atlantic/Pacific question can at least be chalked up to the slow tectonic shifts that have taken place over this storyline’s millions of years.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/30/14

Haha, Jughaid, while it is just like a woman to violate the expressly stated rules of her Creator and then browbeat her hapless man into joining her in her monstrous act of sin, I think you’ve misunderstood the parson’s question! He’s not asking about the first commandment, but rather the furst commandment — in other words, the command of the Fürst, the Germanic princeling under whose sovereignty Hootin’ Holler lies, due to quirks of feudal law. Sorry, Jughead, his Serene Highness has declared his dominions to be at war with the Count Palatine of the Rhine. To arms! Say farewell to your family and prepare for combat!

Phantom, 1/30/14

As you may or may not have been able to tell from that last bit, before I got into the go-go world of online content creation, I made an abortive attempt at an academic career, although my speciality was not early modern Germany but rather late antiquity. So, is the Phantom (the strip) attempting to catch the interest of America’s #1 comics blogger by having a plot point about manuscripts and artifacts from the early middle ages? Maybe! Unfortunately the Phantom (the character) is singularly failing to catch the interest of our snoopy reporter lady, if her facial expression in panel two is any indication. Maybe instead of erasing her mind with “Bandar medicine,” he’s just planning to bore her into a coma.