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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.

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Mary Worth, 5/28/11

Oh, well, this isn’t terrifying at all. Just Dr. Drew thinking about how he needs to explain to Liza in excruciating detail how “breaking up” works, while, unnoticed, Liza, who has managed to surreptitiously burrow under Drew’s flesh, bursts out triumphantly, like Athena out of Zeus’s brow. Only stalkier!

Spider-Man, 5/28/11

Yes, Spidey wasn’t able to save the one Dr. Morbius loved — you know, Martine? The one who was a real, actual vampire? I’m not vampire expert (nosferatologist?) or anything, but I’m pretty sure that one of the scary things about vampires is that they’re mostly immortal, and can only be killed in a certain limited number of ritualized ways, and none of those ways are “being dropped off a building.”

Lockhorns, 5/28/11

The Lockhorns may fight all the time and hate each other so, so much, but that doesn’t meant that they don’t share some pastimes. For instance, they enjoy going down the park and making snide comments about the way the Kids Today dress, all the while looking very much like they want to kill themselves.

Family Circus, 5/28/11

This would just be run of the mill Keane Kids Saying The Darndest Things if not for the look of genuine embarrassment on Barfy’s face. Ha ha, no resident of the Keane Kompound can escape the omnipresent crushing body shame!

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Wizard of Id, 5/17/11

One wonders why today’s Wizard of Id, having annotated with blunt-force onomatopoeia actions in the first two panels that would have been easily parsed as drawn without explanation, then goes on in panel three to illustrate … something … with a series of mysterious radiating lines. Are these supposed to represent light — a glow from within the bathroom, along the lines of the nuclear whatsit in Kiss Me Deadly, or a more abstract representation of the gargoyle’s shocking ugliness? Do they indicate sound, perhaps the gargoyle’s inarticulate shrieking? Or, considering that the magical beast has been interrupted on the toilet, maybe they’re stink lines? They’re stink lines, aren’t they? Since that’s the grossest possible answer, I’m going to assume that’s the case.

Apartment 3-G, 5/17/11

My favorite part of this strip is not the fact that Paul caught the bouquet (although it does make one smile to imagine his bridesmaids’ dresses, just as hideous in design as the one Lu Ann has on now, only they’re the same hideous orange creamsicle color as his suit), but all the single ladies flailing wildly about in the background, a full ten yards from anywhere the bouquet could have possibly landed. It’s like they’ve all been turned off marriage forever by the horrorshow before them, but feel they need to participate in this antiquated patriarchal ritual, for appearance’s sake.

The Lockhorns, 5/17/11

Who says the Lockhorns is out of touch? It takes someone with a near anthropological understanding of the nuances of modern American life to grasp the distinction between a “dude” and a “bro.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/17/11

Gosh, it looks like the whole rest of the week is going to be dedicated to the funeral of poor cuzzin Travis. Today, the town preacher implies in front of Travis’s whole family that he’s being tortured forever, in hell!