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The Lockhorns, 8/18/17

While the Lockhorns occasionally demonstrate the strong emotions you might expect from a couple trapped in an endless, awful hell-marriage between two people who hate each other, more often their faces display only the icy, indifferent numbness that you might expect from people who try their best not to feel anything at all. Today’s panel is particularly grim in that regard: Leroy is of course unfazed as the house fills with thick, choking black smoke and his and Loretta’s murder-suicide pact finally goes into operation, but his friend, who appears to have dropped by to visit at exactly the wrong time, seems only mildly more concerned. I’m not sure if this is because the Lockhorns put out a force-field of ennui that snuffs out the energy of hapless passers-by, or if it’s just a result of carbon monoxide drowsiness.

Crankshaft, 8/18/17

Crankshaft looks a lot more proud and determined than usual in this panel. “That’s right,” he thinks. “We live in a world where an abundance-based economy is possible and nobody needs to go hungry. The hoarders and wreckers of the parastic food industry will have their plans ruined and capitalism itself will be shaken, by the power of my zucchini!”

Mary Worth, 8/18/17

Mary Worth is many, many delightful things, but one thing it is generally not is subtle about the future direction of its plotlines, and keeping that in mind I want to point out that the name of the fancy restaurant where this handsome divorced fortysomething doctor took a college-aged hospital admin temp on a date is French for “THE LOVE DOG.”

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Mary Worth, 8/17/17

Dawn is too young to legally drink alcohol, of course, but it’s nice of this fancy restaurant to pour her Diet Coke into a wine glass for her, to help her feel like a big girl. She’s adulting!

Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/17/17

I feel like a lot of people have seen the distinctive costumes from the The Handmaid’s Tale in posters and commercials and such and absorbed it as a pop cultural artifact without actually having watched the show or read the book, and, like … do you think they know it’s about state-sanctioned ceremonial rape, or what.

Beetle Bailey, 8/17/17

Today’s Beetle Bailey seems pretty strange if you take it literally, what with the awesome power and responsibility held by a general staff officer in the U.S. military, but it begins to make a lot more sense if you imagine that “this job” refers to, oh, just to take a profession totally at random, cartooning.

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Shoe, 8/15/17

Today’s Shoe takes us on a fairly baffling rollercoaster of the Perfesser’s emotions as he quickly cycles from grinning mania to dead-eyed ennui. Are we meant to believe that our love-starved protagonist is getting excited at the prospect of a companion that he can enjoy late-night strolls with, only to abruptly realize that the construct of an outgoing, active romantic partner he’s building for his dating profile is a web of hopeful lies? Or did he have this gag all plotted out, hoping to tickle this poor dating service employee’s funny bone if only briefly, but then realized halfway through it — too late to pull out — that it wasn’t funny and wasn’t going to make anybody laugh? If it’s the latter, then both depressed-looking characters truly represent all of us in that final panel.

Mary Worth, 8/15/17

Please clip ‘n’ save this second panel, as it I feel fairly certain this is going to be exactly as happy as Dawn will ever be in this medical love triangle scenario. Let’s just refer back to her gazing enraptured up into Dr. Ned’s calm, handsome face in six to twelve weeks after the dumping, or the murders, or the dumping-murders, or whatever we have in store for us.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/15/17

Ha ha, it’s funny because Hootin’ Holler is so impoverished that its citizens have to resort to robbing one another just to survive!

Hagar the Horrible, 8/15/17

Ha ha, it’s funny because this man’s job is to kill people one by one to enforce the brutal will of the state, and he is haunted by each and every one of their faces!