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Mary Worth, 9/16/12

The “Dawn gets dumped and mopes and goes to Italy and is in a shipwreck but is rescued” storyline sure has had a lot of twists and turns and so far, but now we are truly seeing the 100% amazing payoff: Dawn is comparing an admittedly traumatic incident from which she emerged completely unscathed physically with a traumatic incident in which a young man whom she just met lost an arm. Her adventures over the past few weeks sure have provided her with some much-needed perspective about her troubles! Nevertheless, we already know that this will somehow work as a pickup technique, since an epigram from Anaïs Nin surely portends incipient sexytimes.

Mark Trail, 9/16/12

Mark, for a so-called naturalist, you have some funny ideas about our relationship with phylum Arthopoda! Nature is a rich, vibrant tapestry, and the idea that humans and spiders are allies in some kind of “war” against insects is simplistic and reductive. No, clearly both spiders and insects are mankind’s implacable enemies, seeing as they are gross disgusting creepy-crawlies; but their mutual hostility is a boon to us, and we must pit each against each other in order to keep both groups weak. A spider-insect alliance, particularly one with support from their centipede and millipede relatives, would surely overwhelm us, so must surreptitiously encourage intra-arthropod hostility at all costs.

Hi and Lois, 9/16/12

The most disturbing thing about Trixie’s school fantasy is that she apparently assumes that by the time she’s of school age there will be two of her. This may be the way her infant mind processes the existence of her twin siblings — perhaps she believes that Dot and Ditto were born as a single person but then split into two before the age of five. On the other hand, Trixie also seems to believe that she’ll be reading Tolstoy in kindergarten, which shows a certain degree of intellectual precocity.

Panels from Slylock Fox, 9/16/12

I love how upset the two construction workers at the bottom left of today’s Six Differences look. “Noooo, what are you doing? Your blundering, amateurish excavation techniques are ruining the integrity of the dig site! This is a priceless paleontological find, but we’re losing so much data as you drag the fossils out of the ground willy-nilly!”

Luann, 9/16/12

Mr. Fogarty would gladly give up the burdens of sentience if doing so meant that he’d never have to deal with any of the morons in this strip ever again.

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Zits, 9/14/12

My wife and I got married seven years ago this week, and we were together for three years before that, so yes, there is a certain amount of gas-passing that goes on in each other’s presence at this point in our relationship, and by “a certain amount” I mean “good lord it is a constant chemical warfare battle of the sort banned by the Geneva Conventions.” And yet I still have a certain amount of sympathy for what’s going on at the bottom left of the third panel. Walt’s just shoveling spoon after spoon of fart-fuel into his gaping maw, blithely assuring his son that someday he and his true love will be so confident in each other’s affections that they’ll go through life hand-in-hand, surrounded by an invisible self-generated cloud of noxious gas, their farts mingling and becoming one; but Connie’s face is a frozen mask, as she tries to hide the fact that her soul dies a little every time Walt toots audibly at the dinner table. I mean, there’s a bathroom right up the hall, you know? It even has a fan.

Mary Worth, 9/14/12

Well, it looks like Dawn is going to be living a more meaningful life, since she’s sure to imbue the fact that her new boyfriend (DO NOT DOUBT THAT HE WILL BE HER NEW BOYFRIEND) has but one arm with much more meaning than the situation deserves. (As about a million people pointed out in the comments, Jim’s disability was completely obvious in yesterday’s strip and yet I managed to not notice it at all, whoops.) Will Jim turn out to be a war hero, or even a semi-hero like Gil’s ex-student? Or is he just some guy who shouldn’t have reached so far into the garbage disposal? Whatever the case, we all know who the real hero is here: Wilbur, for inventing the Meat-Tart that Jim is enjoying with one-handed ease.

Dennis the Menace, 9/14/12

It appears that a shifty-eyed Dennis the Menace has decided on a new tactic in his war against society’s strictures: hard-line Calvinist theology. Isn’t the omnipotent God, who created the universe and predetermined our very ends before time began, the real menace here?

Momma, 9/14/12

“Francis, you have 17 of your friends on ‘speed dial,’ despite the fact that your phone appears to be a rotary-dial bakelite model of the sort not produced in more than 25 years. Why? And, more importantly, How?”

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/13/12

There’s definitely an interesting socioeconomic analysis to be done on the ways in which certain activities that were once deadly earnest attempts to gather food came, in an era of relative caloric abundance, to be luxury pastimes instead. But I’m hard-pressed to explain how Snuffy and Lukey, who never had any kind of job when times were flush, have had their lives affected by extra-Holler financial crises. Perhaps there’s less demand for chickens, Hootin’ Holler’s sole export, which means there are fewer chickens for the two old rascals to steal? More likely, “th’ economic downturn” refers not to anything that would affect us flatlanders, but rather to some apocalyptic event that severed the last tenuous economic tendril connecting Hootin’ Holler to the outside world, leaving its isolated residents with no option but to turn back to the forests and streams for sustenance. This crisis presumably happened decades ago, and so what we’re seeing here is a prequel strip showing the genesis of the Snuffy Smithiverse as we’ve come to know it.

Mary Worth, 9/13/12

Hey, remember when Dawn got dumped by her boyfriend and she was incredibly depressed and then her dad took her on a cruise and they almost died but then were rescued and it made Dawn re-evaluate everything and decide to live a more meaningful life? Well, in order to live that more meaningful life, she bowed to Mary’s demand that she volunteer at the hospital, and, oh look, she’s found a Dave-replacement — a similarly bland and blond fellow with a monosyllabic all-American name — on her very first day there. How efficient! I guess she can stop volunteering now, mission accomplished!

Herb and Jamaal, 9/13/12

Shorter Herb: “I only married my wife because she’s physically attractive, and now I can’t understand why she’s mad at me all the time.”