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Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/10/10

Wait a minute, there’s someone else in Morgantown practicing medicine, someone who isn’t an employee of Rex ’n’ June’s Medical Collective And Snake Oil Distribution Office? By the look on Rex’s face, that’s never sat well with him, and now this slip-up is the chance he needs to destroy the urologist, and then all those troubled penises will be his, all his.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, the leaker is the Mayor’s wife, who is worried that he won’t take care of himself properly if he stays in office. Just letting you know! I understand that feeling unexpected pangs of suspense while reading Rex Morgan can be irritating.

Marmaduke, 9/10/10

And the first thing you need to learn about Marmaduke is that he does eat it — whether “it” is organic matter, wood or plastic, live animals, or children. Oh, and souls. He also eats souls.

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Herb and Jamaal, 8/23/10

For years I have criticized Herb and Jamaal for being hilarious and ludicrously non-specific, but perhaps all this time I’ve been on the wrong track. Perhaps the strip is lousy with overlong descriptions of items and concepts not because of a horror of the concrete, but because of an aversion to brevity, with the author suffering from some strange compulsion to write each sentence in as many words as possible. Thus, Herb can’t just say “I hate the way women gossip”; he has to bump it up to “I hate the way this show typifies the way women gossip,” even though doing so makes it seem that Herb is really upset about misogynist representations of women’s communication styles in mass media, thus making him an inappropriate target for his wife’s righteous ire. I notice that there’s actually room for another line of text in that first-panel word balloon, so I’m surprised we didn’t take things out to another level of abstraction. Maybe we could have gotten into some metacognition, like “I’m really surprised by how strong my hateful reaction is to the way this show typifies the way women gossip” or something.

Marmaduke, 8/23/10

“Yes, nothing makes our evil dog hunger for human souls more than the mention of his greatest enemy, God. But since God is all-creating, He created Marmaduke; doesn’t this make Him unworthy of our worship?”

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Shoe, 8/16/10

Upon first glance, you probably found this Shoe comic pretty depressing! After all, it reveals the fact that our hero Cosmo is such a slob that he spilled enough spaghetti sauce on himself to soak through his clothes, or maybe that he simply sits around eating spaghetti with no shirt on, to make cleanup easier; furthermore, it appears that he was so numb to his own slovenliness that the resulting mess went unnoticed for hours or perhaps even days. However, I would argue that he still clings to a shred of dignity, in the form of that towel around his waist. Someone who had totally given up on life would just stand there in the nude while rambling to his doctor on his cell phone, but some feeble sense of modesty causes him to cover his lower bird bits, despite the fact that, given that he’s describing his symptoms verbally, he is presumably not speaking on some kind of advanced picture phone.

Crock, 8/16/10

I first saw this comic as a somewhat smaller graphic, and in that form the Desert Sage’s eyes looked sad to me, and the strip seemed quite poignant: the Sage knew he had to clear the bats from his sand-cave home, but he had grown to love them, and would thus do them one last kindness before euthanizing them. But in this larger version of the graphic, his eyes look downright sadistic, as if he’s cackling with delight at the prospect of drawing the bats’ last days out as long and as cruelly as possible. Then I realized the real tragedy, which was that I was trying mightily to discern human emotions from the meaningless scribbles that make up a typical Crock strip.

Marmaduke, 8/16/10

Ha ha, don’t be silly: nothing resembling “democracy” could possibly be happening in a pack of dogs surrounding by Marmaduke. No, those dogs are raising their paws because they’re pledging their allegiance to their Dark Lord, who will soon lead them in an assault on the poor townsfolk that will leave rivers of gore in its wake.