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Funky Winkerbean, 6/26/15

Oh, look, it’s “jack-and-jill (v)”, another made-up phrase that nobody will ever use from the strip that brought you “Lewis-and-Clarking,” “Nordic,” and “solo car date!” This one really ups the ante, in the sense that a character is summoned forth from the narrative ether and brought on-panel to say it after having terribly injured himself.

Crock, 6/26/15

Attention cartoonists everywhere: the era when a sentence could be deemed a punchline just because it included the phrase “cell phone” was extremely brief and ended more than a decade ago! Please make a note of it.

Heathcliff, 6/26/15

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize this isn’t just garden-variety Heathcliff irritating whimsy, but a terrible play on words: the genie created jeans, get it? Get it? GET IT??? Based on the numb expression on the genie’s face, he’s as disgusted by it as I am.

Marvin, 6/26/15

“Yes, that’s right lady,” thinks Marvin’s mom slyly in panel three, “my husband is completely unfuckable.”

Crankshaft, 6/26/15

YES

CRANKSHAFT AND HIS BUDDIES ARE GOING TO BE ARRESTED FOR POLITICAL CRIMES AND CONVICTED IN A PUBLIC SHOW TRIAL

THIS IS WHAT I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR MY WHOLE LIIIIIFE

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Mary Worth, 6/17/15

Hey, fellas, just so you know, when you suddenly and abruptly move into your ex’s apartment building and announce that the two of you are getting back together, and she flees in terror shouting “I can’t do this!”, it’s not that she doesn’t love you or that she’s afraid of you or anything. It’s just that she loves you so much that she couldn’t handle it if you ever broke up again. So keep wooing her! Persistence is key! Make sure she knows that the two of you will be together always, until one of you is dead!

Beetle Bailey, 6/17/15

“Why would we ever attempt to lab-grow fleshy, disease-prone bio-bodies for our sexual needs,” thinks Spc. Gizmo wearily to himself, “when we could be fucking clean, efficient robots?”

Marvin, 6/17/15

I find panel three here, in which Marvin stares directly into the reader’s eyes, extremely chilling. “Go ahead, comics blogger, make fun of the endless poop jokes,” he seems to be saying. “But poop jokes are what people want. Poop jokes, for lack of a better word, are good.”

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Panels from Beetle Bailey, 5/24/15

Usually the best thing you can say about the art in Beetle Bailey is that it’s serviceably cartoonish, but I think something subtle and interesting is going on here today’s strip, which invades the dreams of a number of Camp Swampy denizens. General Halftrack imagines receiving an award from some generic civilian dignitary; though the achievement is obviously above his real-world capabilities, his dream-self remains identical to what we know of reality. In Lt. Fuzz’s dream, though, he’s being given an award from — who? We all know that Halftrack is the lucky focus of his monomaniacal sycophancy, so we have to assume that this figure represents the General. But his mustache is less fluffy, his face more dignified. Does Fuzz dream not just of recognition from his boss, but recognition from a better version of his boss? Is his world so sad that he can’t conceive of a Halftrack-less life, and at best can imagine only incremental improvements?

Marvin, 5/24/15

If some member of the Miller clan were to be the ultimate cause of humanity’s fiery atomic extinction, I would’ve assumed that it’d be Marvin. But as long as the hated hell-infant is vaporized by dozens of converging Russian ICBMs, I’m not really going to quibble about the process.