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Lockhorns, 8/8/12

The Lockhorns isn’t just another comic panel; it’s one of the grimmest and most unsparing glimpses into the ways that the absence of love can wear you down into a sense of misery that’s so all-pervasive that you don’t even realize anything else is possible. I love how dead everyone looks in this panel. Leroy is so far gone he can’t even imagine how pathetic and small his request makes him look in front of a stranger; Loretta is dying of embarrassment but can’t summon up the words to explain why; and the pizza delivery kid, slouched over and numb, gets another glimpse of what appears to be the universal soul-crushing awfulness of adulthood, and is getting a crappy tip to boot.

Curtis, 8/8/12

Just a little whimsy in Curtis, where the Wilkins boys help out an old cat lady with some chores and then she drops dead! The facial expressions in the final panel are so great that I feel comfortable forgiving future Weekend at Bernie’s-style zaniness in advance.

Pluggers, 8/8/12

You’re a plugger if you remember when you used to eat at actual restaurants that served recognizable food, but a fried chicken dinner at one of those places cost like $9 plus tip, whereas you can get a 10-piece Chicken Nugget meal for $6, and sure it’s not “chicken” so much as “processed reformed chicken meat” but you get more of it plus it’s a lot faster and you can order right from your car, what does anyone expect you to do, what do you look like, some kind of big city elitist?

Ziggy, 8/8/12

Ha ha, it’s funny because Ziggy has finally realized he’s a slave to global capital!

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Herb and Jamaal, 8/1/12

Herb’s mother-in-law Eula, who both lives and works with him, is always on his case, constantly. One could write this off as just part of the eternal conflict between a mother-in-law and her child’s spouse, or, perhaps more accurately, as a tired, stereotypical retreading of the supposedly eternal conflict between a mother-in-law and her child’s spouse. Or, as today’s strip demonstrates, it could be that she’s terrified by Herb’s obvious emotional and sexual connection to his “best buddy Jamaal,” and will do anything to distract him from it, in the vain hope that she can keep her family together.

Lockhorns, 8/1/12

Call the Lockhorns hackneyed if you must, but it can still take us to depths of relationship hell that we never imagined existed. I mean, just think if you were at a place in your marriage when you thought, “God, I wish we had gotten that murder-suicide pact nailed down when the time was right. But what’s the point, now?”

Marvin, 8/1/12

It’s Marvin’s 30th anniversary, and from this day forward, I will no longer think of him as a horrible brat-child glorying in his inability or refusal to poop in a toilet. Instead, I will pity him as a victim of a capricious creator who for whatever perverse reason delights in forcing him to stew in his own excrement.

Shoe, 8/1/12

You may be alarmed to learn that Shoe is having sex with his golf clubs. Personally, I’m even more unsettled to discover that he’s getting emotionally attached to some of them.

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 7/29/12

I don’t even want to get into the sad, sick nature of Slylock and Cassandra’s relationship, in which she’s sexily guilty so long as Slylock can show that it’s not impossible for her to have committed a crime. I more want to point out three actual crimes happening in this panel right now: (1) that seagull is stealing Max’s hot dog (in a world where a fox can arrest a cat, surely he can also arrest a bird); (2) that stand is grotesquely overcharging for one-scoop ice cream cones at $5 a pop; and (3) Slylock thinks wearing a cape with no shirt is somehow an acceptable fashion choice, what the hell.

Panel from the Lockhorns, 7/29/12

The meaning of this Lockhorns panel is 100% opaque to me, and since Lockhorns panels are generally not subtle, I assume that there’s some bit of cultural ephemera that I’m not hip to that this is a reference to. Is there a popular show about an identity-stealing person with a shaved head, on the TV? Am I actually too square to get the pop culture references in the Lockhorns? Or is this just some weirdness about how … Leroy is bald and thinks people pretending to be bald are pretending to be him? No, still doesn’t make any sense. I like the way the bald guy is theatrically musing on his coffee options and pretending he can’t hear Leroy and Loretta’s insane mutterings, though.