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Lockhorns, 7/25/11

I am absolutely in love with the enormous frown on the kid’s face in this panel. It’s like, he’s just gone down to the newsstand to buy the latest Superman comic (because like all of today’s youth he loves twee retro affectations). He didn’t expect to be harassed by some squat middle-aged stranger. Certainly he didn’t expect to be offered an observation so dense with emotional anguish and post-love ennui; he’s far too young to really understand it, but he feels the pain of it flowing out of Leroy and crashing over him in waves. He’s going home a changed person, and he’s going to be looking in his funnybooks for the real stories, the stories about what makes people human (hint: it’s suffering).

Slylock Fox, 7/25/11

Once again, Slylock proves that he simply can’t stop with the sleuthing after tiny clues, even when it isn’t necessary. I’ll bet he makes the poor techs down at the CSI lab work for days with him on figuring out the make of the tires that left those treads in the concrete before finally admitting that he also has access to the perp’s license plate, which they could connect to his registration and home address by spending about thirty seconds in front of the computer. I’m less interested in his sad and increasingly desperate little game than I am in the nattily attired duck standing on the corner. While everyone else in the neighborhood appears traumatized by the reign of automotive terror that just blew through the subdivision, he just stares forward with big, soulless eyes, like he’s a jarring minor character from a David Lynch film.

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Mary Worth, 6/22/11

Today’s Mary Worth brings us a valuable lesson on how to enjoy Mary Worth — and indeed, explains one of the reasons why Mary Worth enjoys being Mary Worth. Variety is the spice of life, and thus every meddle is different. If they were all the same, what joy or texture would there be in Mary interfering in the lives of her hapless victims? No, she doesn’t know until she’s in the thick of it whether the meddlees will need to literally drink themselves into the gutter before they’re receptive to Mary’s life-molding or whether they’ll just burst into open sobbing and oversharing the minute she asks her first gingerly probing questions. Do you think Mary’s taken aback that Liza has opened up so easily? Don’t worry, Mary, I feel confident that there’s an emotional roller-coaster of insanity in your future, as Liza imprints on you as her new guru/love object and refuses let you out of her sight.

Family Circus, 6/22/11

The fact that very long-running strips reuse art and even whole gags is obviously not news. Certainly today’s Family Circus panel, which features the red-headed children dully staring at an enormous console TV that they’re way too close to has the vibe of decades-old art, although for all I know it could have been drawn last month (but surely that would have been a terrible waste of effort?). Anyway, it got me thinking about how there must be endless material to be mined from dead-eyed Keane Kids watching television and saying vaguely cute/precocious things about it, so look for this panel to appear again and again, long after most Americans have forgotten that “televisions” used to be a distinct piece of free-standing electronic equipment, rather than a series of screens built into every wall of every home, switching on and off as you moved from room to room, making sure you were never without entertainment.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/22/11

Have you ever seen a movie or TV show where somebody interacts with the main characters without speaking, even though that seems kind of off? Once an actor starts talking, they move up to a whole different pay scale, so generally there’s some financial reasoning behind it. Comic strips don’t really work on the same economic logic, though, so that doesn’t explain why Sullen McMaybepregnant here silently thrusts a note a Les before stalking off. Presumably she’s disgusted beyond words that the entire school has been inexplicably driven into a frenzy of arousal by the Les-on-Susan smooching pic that’s been making the rounds.

The Lockhorns, 6/22/11

Oh, isn’t that cute! Despite it all, Loretta still believes that Leroy will become a beautiful butterfly. I hope he does too, in the sense that I hope that his squat, misshapen husk of a body will one day split open, revealing an enormous, terrifying insect within.

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Momma, 6/8/11

I spent last weekend in Rehoboth Beach in Delaware, and it was too cold to swim (which was just as well, seeing as the water was apparently full of dead fish), so I mostly sat in a chair on the beach, reading and relaxing. One feature of Rehoboth that I find charmingly old-school is that the beaches are buzzed on a fairly regular basis by little planes dragging advertising behind them. The three ads I saw most often were for:

• Wawa’s “Hoagiefest,” a sale on sandwiches at a chain of gas stations;
• The Hair Cuttery, a mall-based salon that charges $11 and attempts to give you a haircut as fast as humanly possible without actually stabbing you in the eye; and
• A local bar advertising a special on Natty Bohs, which, though as a Baltimorean I appreciate their social significance, I must point out are especially cheap and shitty beers.

Though I try to avoid thinking profound thoughts about the world while on vacation, I really couldn’t help but wonder at how such apparently chintzy retail establishments could afford the hundreds if not thousands of dollars necessary to fill an aircraft with fossil fuels and have it fly a sign back and forth for the benefit of what couldn’t have been more than a few hundred beach-goers on a not particularly warm non-holiday weekend. It made me realize that, no matter how much the economy is contracting, we live in a society of incredible affluence, on an absolute scale. And in such a society, isn’t there at least one job that could employ Francis? Or maybe couldn’t someone just pay him minimum wage to leave his mother alone? Couldn’t his mother have paid him to busy himself, with the money she spent on this aeronautical advertising gig?

The Lockhorns, 6/8/11

Loretta is addicted to porn sites featuring sexy black men, which, since one must assume that her sex fantasies involve people who are pretty much the opposite of her squat, pale husband, makes perfect sense.