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Apartment 3-G, 2/18/12

Nina appears to be trying an advanced variation on the “smoke yourself thin” technique. Remember, everyone, a low baby birth weight means fewer stretch marks and shorter labor for you! And a host of health problems and cognitive deficits for the baby, but, whatever, let’s focus on the important things here.

Mary Worth, 2/18/12

Ha ha, Toby’s eyes are little pinpoints of rage and disbelief in the second panel. “‘Unhappy childhood?’ Are you fucking kidding me? I’ve spent most of my adulthood married to Ian Cameron, but you give me a 20-minute lecture if I use the wrong fork.”

Pluggers, 2/18/12

Pluggers know that dwelling on how old you are is no way to steer the conversation to a desperate drunken hookup that might stave away the loneliness for a little while.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/16/12

Vegan advocacy groups should probably just plaster an enormous version of this cartoon on all available surfaces. The look on Ol’ Bessie’s face as she realizes that, with the well empty, she’ll be required to produce enough fluid to slake the Smifs’ thirst is truly harrowing. It probably shouldn’t come as surprise that our rustics don’t have a firm enough grasp on biology to understand where the liquid in the cow-juice comes from, but it’s pretty clear that once they drain the poor thing dry, they’ll presumably move on to their neighbors’ livestock, and then to their neighbors.

Mary Worth, 2/16/12

Here’s a fun game to play! The next time an acquaintance boasts to you that he or she has bedded a new ladyfriend for the first time, show an interest by asking “How did it go? Was it unpleasant? Did she boast about her successes?” This will guarantee that you won’t have to hear about anybody’s sex life ever again.

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Judge Parker, 2/14/12

Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody! Did you ask for a sexy, sinister assassitrix from your Valentine, the syndicated continuity strip Judge Parker? Well, you got it! Monique Zatari will almost certainly be the villain in the current confusing Judge Parker whodunnit; her character exists not only to stir America’s most erotic fears about Middle Easterners, but also to right a four-year-old wrong. Remember the last time the good white people of Spencer-Parkerburg were menaced by a lady of Islamic extraction? Remember how we never got a sense of the size or shapeliness of her breasts? Well, you won’t be able to say that about Monique Zatari, by God.

Crankshaft, 2/14/12

I know I’m on the record as publicly not caring about the chronological inconsistencies that arise from the various time jump shenanigans in the Funkyverse, i.e., why did everyone in Funky Winkerbean discontinuously get 10 years older but their world is still contemporary with ours, did Crankshaft jump forward with Funky Winkerbean, etc. But I do find a different kind of time-problem interesting: namely, when a strip’s essentially timeless nature (i.e., it’s always happening now, no matter how long it’s been running with the characters the same age) runs up against decisions to fix important bits of character development to real points in history. If Crankshaft really was a minor league player in 1940 whose career was cut short by the outbreak of World War II, that makes him at minimum 88 years old now. Which means he … probably shouldn’t be working as a school bus driver? I’m sure that there are 88-year-olds out there now who do a fine job of driving large commercial vehicles, but they’re few and far between. Kudos to the strip for sticking to its guns, I guess, but maybe a quiet retrofitting of Crankshaft’s service to Korea might be in order?

Mary Worth, 2/14/12

Soooo … much as I’ve enjoyed Mary’s Dinner With The Moral Abyss That Is Nola so far, it is starting to get a bit repetitive! And Mary’s offer of advice reminds us that Nola arranged this meeting to get Mary’s thoughts on whether her boyfriend is cheating on her; of course, Mary would have no real way to offer an informed opinion on the matter, since Nola hasn’t supplied any details but instead has gone off on a long discursis on how awesome it is to have sex with other people’s husbands and not care about anybody’s opinions about anything. I’m beginning to think that maybe Nola is just stalling Mary while her accomplices are kidnapping Dr. Jeff or clearing out Mary’s safe deposit box or something. You might not approve of that, but Nola only has it all because she’s determined not to let anything stop her!