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Mark Trail, 7/19/08

Smart thinking, Kelly! After all, if you’re a foolish young woman prowling around at night with a forty-year-old camera and an off-tan slab of bacon, the last thing you want is to be surprised wearing only your sexy body-shaping slip. No, it’s best to put on your mom jeans and tuck in your shirt. But be careful! Make sure you don’t wake up your fellow campers with the sounds of rustling polyester as you tie your cravat and adjust it to that kicky angle that all the boys like.

Beetle Bailey, 7/19/08

At last, the idea that Beetle Bailey is completely out of touch with today’s military has been disproved! Obviously General Halftrack refuses to be shown up by those jerks over at the Air Force and has managed to divert Camp Swampy’s allotment of anti-terrorist money to the construction of his own comfort capsule.

Hi and Lois, 7/19/08

Today’s unsettling thing that sounds like the title of ’70s exploitation movie about prostitution and should not be coming out of the mouths of little girls in the comics: “Torn between profit and pleasure.”

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Mark Trail, 7/15/08

I knew there was something missing from this storyline, and at long last we have it: a heavily armed Cherry Trail! Once she fells the charging moose with her shotgun, it will obviously be time to turn her weapon on the woman who’s tormented the whole expedition with her antics. Then comes the shallow grave, and the Oath of Silence.

Crankshaft, 7/15/08

OK, I’ve come to terms with the fact that we will occasionally be reminded that the Duncans (of Zits) enjoy getting their legally-sanctioned marital freak on, and that the Forths (of Sally Forth) are actually experiencing the joys of intimacy more frequently than usual, what with the baby-making attempts and all. But … but … please don’t make think about the ’Shaft-in-laws getting it on mopily, their owlish glasses clinking against each other as they do it, OK? Please? Please?

Cathy, 7/15/08

July 15, 2008, will go down in history as “the day we saw Irving’s ass crack.” Will the interminable and all-too-frequent “Irving and Cathy try to sort their digital photos” strips be made somehow more palatable, or at least more intriguing, by the knowledge that Irving probably isn’t wearing any pants while they ACK at their laptop? Does the fact that he isn’t wearing pants tells us something about the content of those digital photos? The mind boggles.

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Family Circus, 7/12/08

Since the America-hating ACLU prevents the Keane kids from forcibly saving the souls of their classmates during school hours, and no other children voluntarily spend time with them outside of the classroom, they’re left with only one target for their relentless soul-saving agenda: their pets. While their attempts to wash away the sins of their demon-spawn cat went horribly awry, Dolly is thinking that they might have better luck with the dogs. I urge Barfy and Sam to surrender their lives to Christ with a minimum of resistance, as the Keanes’ exorcism techniques have been known to destroy the body in order to save the soul.

(Speaking of the Family Circus, thanks to the many, many readers who sent me a link to this fabulous panel from the ’80s, in which Ma Keane imagines Dolly being hunted for sport.)

Mark Trail, 7/12/08

I admit to being strangely unmoved by the current Mark Trail storyline, despite the fact that it consists almost entirely of Kelly Welly being foolish again. But the prospect of a joint moose/megabeaver attack on Kelly’s hapless assistant, who will scream for help while Kelly snaps gruesome photo after gruesome photo for her new When Animals Kill column, does perk my interest up a bit. Don’t disappoint me, forest beasts! Do your worst!

Cleats, 7/12/08

I was moved to break my long silence on Cleats by the installment in which the genial children’s strip suddenly took a page from a nightmarish Harlan Ellison story. I assumed, naturally, that it couldn’t get any worse and I could get back to ignoring it, but that was before the hungry, sinister carrion eaters arrived, determined to begin picking the flesh off the still-living soccer ball as it lies roasting in the hot sun.