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Slylock Fox, 4/20/08

I am really beginning to become concerned about the constant persecution of harmless eccentric Count Weirdly. After having been repeatedly detained and hassled by the cops for no reason, sitting in the tank again with only his faithful vulture for his companion, he’s at last decided that only a hunger strike can draw attention to the injustice of his plight. And how do the thuggish police react. “Oh, you’re not Weirdly, you’re probably a robot.” They’ve already denied his essential humanity by marginalizing him as a freak; this is just taking things to their logical conclusion. I’m surprised they didn’t just “test” to see if he was a machine by cutting him open to see if he’s full of wires and stuff.

Marvin, 4/20/08

True, this is yet another installment in Marvin’s intermittent and discomfort-making series on the sex lives of babies. But look on the bright side: “Wee Harmony” positively invites a urination joke that, thankfully, never comes.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/16/08

We’re still in the opening salvos of this Rex Morgan, M.D., storyline, so it’s all deliriously wonderful and such. Don’t worry, it’ll get boring and stupid soon enough, and then I’ll complain about it for a bit until I just start ignoring it completely; but when that day comes, I hope I’ll take some solace in the thought that any plot that contained both Rex’s snide complaint about the common people’s filthy, filthy noses and a bearded, vested man bellowing HOW ARE YOU GOING TO KILL IT can’t possibly have been all bad.

Spider-Man, 4/16/08

The “bad news” Peter Parker warned us about yesterday turns out to be even less superhero-related than usual for this strip. Still, since Peter continually (and some might say passive-aggressively) fails whenever he tries to leave the house to support MJ’s career, you’d think that he’d be pleased by this news. “You mean I can watch your movie right here at home, on the TV? Yes!”

Marvin, 4/16/08

Panel two of today’s Marvin may be the lowest point the art form of comics has achieved to date. It isn’t helped by the fact that the dogs are incongruously standing on their hind legs and towering over Marvin, making them look less like dogs and more like people in dog suits. Urine-soaked dog suits.

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Marvin, 3/27/08

Yesterday, several commentors noted that Marvin and Bitsy (yes, Marvin’s dumb dog is named “Bitsy”) were conversing not with their usual thought-balloon-based psychic powers, but in ordinary word balloons denoting normal audible speech — or as normal as any such speech can be when being uttered by a baby and a dog. Naturally, because this is Marvin, I assumed that it was a result of the strip’s general slapdash halfassery, rather than than some momentous change in the inner universe of the characters. But today, we see that Marvin can in fact speak aloud to adults in complete (and rather pompously phrased) sentences. Why? Who knows? Who cares? It’s Marvin. At least they’ve quietly dropped the stupid text speak.

For Better Or For Worse, 3/27/08

Gosh, Liz, I wonder why it doesn’t feel quite right? Maybe because this whole process has involved you letting go of your own hopes, dreams, ambitions, wants, and personality, and now are just being buffeted along by everyone else’s opinions? Or maybe you’re talking about the dress itself, with its built-in whalebone corset, which feels very much not right as it jabs into your ribs.

Gil Thorp, 3/27/08

Hey, everyone, would you like to get ready for taco casserole at home? It’s easy! Here’s how:

• Dump a dozen hard-shelled tacos, with your choice of cheese, ground beef, salsa, and vegetables, into a saucepan.
• Pour in four cans of cream of mushroom soup.
• Stir over medium heat until mixture becomes a more or less undifferentiated, vomit-like mass.
• Pour into possibly leaky brown paper bag; hold sideways.
• Never, ever eat again, because the process has been made forever repellent to you by your experience with “taco casserole.”

Sally Forth and Pearls Before Swine, 3/27/08

Hey everyone, it’s a Sally Forth-Pearls Before Swine crossover! There’s very little I can say that would be funnier than Sally Forth writer Ces Marciuliano’s original blog post on the subject, so you should just go check that out now.