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Apartment 3-G, 5/14/15

So Gabriella’s dead mom came back, turning Gabriella’s white hair black with shock, and told her … that her house was evil, or maybe Diane told her, who can say, but the important thing is that Martin’s reaction to this news is 100% hilarious. First of all, Martin’s profession, as near as I can tell, is “generic rich businessman,” so his assurance that he personally inspected their home is not particularly reassuring. “I inspected every inch of that house myself, Gabby. There are no wasteful structural redundancies or safety features that I could see. It’s extremely cost-efficient!” Then there’s his smug expression in panel two. “Heh heh, seems my beloved fiancée has been whipped into a terrified anxiety frenzy. There’s no way this won’t be a laugh riot! I gotta see this in person!”

Mark Trail, 5/14/15

So, yes, the chain of problem-solving so far has been very simple: we get fire to get rid of the beetles, and then we get the helicopters to get rid of the fire, and then we get the geese to get rid of the helicopters. Who are we going to get to get rid of the geese, though? Beavers? Do beavers eat geese?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/14/15

Yes, Sarah is an amoral creepazoid child-adult, but she’s just so cheerful about everything that I have a hard time really disliking her. “Oh, know that! I also write about how pictures make you happy or sad. Feelings, right? Feelings are things that the humans have?”

Mary Worth, 5/14/15

Today’s unsung Mary Worth hero is the guy staring down into the basket of this hot air balloon. “Christ, what a mess! I can’t believe they left this for me to clean up. What did those two do up there?”

Family Circus, 5/14/15

Thanks to all those pamphlets Daddy keeps leaving around the house, Dolly knows that fiat money inflates away the wealth of industrious savers, while specie retains its value!

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Slylock Fox, 5/11/15

It’s more than a little sad, really, that even after the animals achieved sapience, even after they adopted the worst aspects of the mostly vanished human race — wearing their clothes, living in their emptied buildings, stealing from and lying to each other, going to museums to gawk at the detritus of the dead — they still retain some dim memory of, and yearing for, their previous state. The government that employs Slylock may be based in the garbage-strewn cities that humanity left behind, but they still think of themselves as forest dwellers, and so their national museum is still the Forest Museum, even though there isn’t a tree in sight. Perhaps the state’s figurehead ruler lives in the forest part time, for ceremonial reasons, but the animals are civilized now, as disquieting as they find that fact. Those rats, though — those brutal, grim-faced enforcers Slylock’s brought in to show the security guard what happens to lawmen who turn — those rats have never seen a forest in their lives. They’re city folk through and through.

Mary Worth, 5/11/15

“Curiously excited!” is a really specific emotion, Toby, so congrats on your ability to distinguish it at a distance on the faces of people you don’t know very well. I guess they were curiously excited about seeing how Adam would do in the first of the several tests Terry is posing to him during his trial period to see if he’s worthy of her love. Can Adam operate a hot air balloon in what appears to be the absence of a certified balloonist? Or will he send the two of them careening to their deaths on the rocky, forbidding mountains that surround Santa Royale?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/11/15

I love that “working hard” for Rex means drinking coffee and reading the newspaper and answering his daughter’s questions in as few syllables as possible. Also, I’ve come to accept the idea that creepy adult-child Sarah is an artistic prodigy, but if she manages to settle the age-old philosophical question “What is art?” while she’s still in kindergarten, I’m gonna be pretty pissed.

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Funky Winkerbean, 5/5/15

I vaguely remembered that this “band box” business has been in the strip before, though I’ve apparently never discussed it on my site. A little Google searching to try to find out more led to a pretty horrifying discovery, though: Luigi’s is a real pizza place in Akron, Ohio, and it’s not only the model for Montoni’s but actually boasts about that on its web site. Luigi’s mentions the band box on its site, but for a picture, you need to go to the Funky Winkerbean Wikipedia page, where it’s under the “comic book connections” heading, for some reason. Anyway, the band box presumably plays old-timey music, and it’s probably gotten more and more wobbly and off key over the years as Funky has desperately tried to keep its archaic mechanisms functioning. Just imagine its tinny, irritating background music adding another layer of unpleasantness to your visit to Westview’s Only Viable Business™! Do you think Funky can get it to play mariachi music for people to listen to while they eat their Cinco de Mayo pizza special? (The Cinco de Mayo pizza special is a pepperoni pizza with a jar of store-brand salsa dumped on top of it, or maybe a jar of store-brand mayonnaise.)

Mary Worth, 5/5/15

“I must’ve seemed like a stalker! You know, the way I tracked you down, years after our relationship ended acrimoniously, once I decided to win you back at all costs, and then I found out where you lived without asking you, and then rented an apartment there, and showed up right outside your door with no warning! Just doing the sort of things that stalkers do! I must’ve really seemed like one! I didn’t plan on coming on so strong! It was just a powerful reaction that I couldn’t or wouldn’t control!”

“And I didn’t plan on being so emotional! I should’ve been more rational. Methodical. Say, let’s drive far into the woods where nobody can hear you scream, shall we?”

Archie, 5/5/15

How are you celebrating National Cartoonists Day, everybody? Cartoonists are celebrating National Cartoonists Day by drawing their favorite characters having hot three-way makeouts. Some of them are even getting those drawings published!