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Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/11/13

All the top etiquette experts agree: If you gave one of your dinner guests a handjob in high school, it’s best to bring it up as early in the evening as possible, to get any potential awkwardness out of the way.

Gasoline Alley, 12/11/13

Ha ha, look at Slim’s horrified thousand-mile stare! “I never thought any of the children would do … that … on my lap, and yet it keeps happening — again, and again and again…”

Marvin, 12/11/13

Marvin is just now realizing that he’s a literal demon from hell.

Mary Worth, 12/11/13

“I could take a black and white picture of all these black and white pictures! It’d be ‘self-referential’ or ‘metatextual’ or whatever bullshit the kids are saying these days.”

Momma, 12/11/13

I’m preeeeettty sure that Francis has knocked some girl up.

Heathcliff, 12/11/13

BUT HEATHCLIFF

BIRDS DON’T HAVE ANY MONEY

THE ONLY FLAW IN YOUR PERFECT PLAN

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Slylock Fox, 12/9/13

I think “Bertha Bear broke out of prison” should go down among the great opening lines in the history of fiction, along with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” and “A screaming comes across the sky”. What was she in for, how long did she have left in her sentence, and how did she escape? Unfortunately, none of these questions are answered in today’s strip, although we do at least get an appropriately cluttered vision of an abandoned house in the Slylockverse. The two things I enjoy most about today’s mystery are (a) that the solution hinges not on some confirmable scientific fact about real bears in our universe, but rather anthropomorphic cartoon bears’ well-known predilection for carrying around large, well-labeled jars of honey, and (b) that Bertha Bear is right there, at the lower left, her head sticking out of the floorboards, looking pissed. “Yes, what, honey, are you kidding me? Just arrest me and take me back to the big house and get this over with already, Jesus Christ.”

Mary Worth, 12/9/13

The little dance Mary is doing here as she balances her lust and her status-seeking strikes me as extremely revealing about her character. On the one hand, she obviously finds Ken to be a very attractive slab of Broadwayman, and can’t resist bragging to Shelly that she’s about to be squired about New York on his sexy, sexy arm. On the other, the fact that the voice that made him famous is now no more is obviously a source of great embarrassment to her, because what’s the point of bragging about Ken Kensington’s attentions if he can’t even sing? “Less song in his voice” seems like an extremely minimizing way to say “botched surgery destroyed his career.” I look forward to the moment later in this plot when Shelly urges Ken to sing a few notes over dinner! The resulting social awkwardness should be excruciating for everyone involved.

Family Circus, 12/9/13

You know, I tend to scoff at people who get worked up about how there’s too much time today spent boosting kids’ self-esteem, but if a child as gross and unlikable as Jeffy thinks that a hug and a kiss from him represents of gift of any sort, maybe we have gone too far.

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Mary Worth, 12/2/13

As Mary Worth whines to Broadway has-been Ken Kensington about how she misses New York’s “former charm,” let’s do a little age-math, shall we? I have a strong memory (though I can’t find it now) of some official or semi-official King Features source describing Mary as “perpetually 60.” Maybe she’s a little older, but surely not past her mid-60s. Mary has said earlier in this storyline that she used to live in New York when she was a young woman; again the dates are fuzzy, but we can say with relatively certainty that this period in her life was somewhere between 30 and 40 years years ago. The years from 1973 to 1983 were, of course, the Taxi Driver/Bernie Goetz era in New York City, so you probably need to rethink whatever you were imagining when Mary wistfully recalled the city’s “former charm.” Presumably she’s one of those people who can’t go through Times Square without muttering about how it looks like a God-damn mall now that that asshole Giuliani shut down all the porn theaters. “After your experience with that mugger, it may be hard for you to agree!” “I’ll be okay, Ken. I’m shaken … shaken by how half-assed that mugging was. What self-respecting New York City thug would just give up when confronted by a portly actor? Why aren’t I lying dead in a puddle of my own blood right now?”

Heathcliff, 12/2/13

How exactly are those lids staying on the trash cans as the Garbage Ape swings them to and fro? Don’t those owls look like they were just cut and pasted from another drawing and plopped onto a picture of a pine tree without regards for what exactly might be holding them up? I hate to say it, but rampant Garbage Ape mania has upped the demand for this lovable/mysterious character so much that the strip is churning out some slapdash art to keep up.

Beetle Bailey, 12/2/13

Article 115 of the U.S. Military Code of Justice, “Malingering,” says that “Any person subject to this chapter who for the purpose of avoiding work, duty, or service feigns illness, physical disablement, mental lapse or derangement … shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.” So, good news for everyone who ever wanted to see Beetle Bailey locked up in a military prison. Camp Swampy is clearly not a “hostile fire pay zone” but I’m guessing that the military still considers us to be living “in time of war” for legal purposes, so he’s looking at three years of hard time!

Marmaduke, 12/2/13

Ha ha, look at how terrified that little blonde child is! “He’s heavy! So heavy! Heavier than anything alive from our space-time continuum has any right to be! You’ll die in agony, your bones crushed to powder under a pile of impossibly dense meat, all while he sleeps his ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep!”

Judge Parker, 12/2/13

“I don’t think it matters that we live in a world where mysterious, incredibly skilled black ops troops with no obvious allegiance to any nation-state can swoop into anywhere in the world, with tactical data gained from omnipresent and near-omniscient surveillance tech, and snatch up anyone they want, killing dozens of insurgents, criminals, and terrified bystanders in the process! Just don’t worry your pretty little head over the fact that unimaginable military power will protect you, so long as some member of the ultra-rich mega-elite takes a shine to you and orders your rescue on a whim! The important thing is that Ross is safe! You know, for now.”