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Apartment 3-G, 3/12/12

“Come on in, Scott! I was just fixing supper. Care to join me?”

“Thanks, Margo. That looks great! I am of course talking about that ill-defined piece of brown vertical furniture behind you. I can’t see any food from where I’m standing.”

“Don’t worry, Scott, I’ll just wave my hand and the table with all the food on it will magically appear behind us! Obviously transporting matter across space like this has some dimension-warping properties, so you may feel some slight discomfort as our heads and limbs change size relative to the rest of our bodies. Don’t worry, the effect is purely temporary. Anyway, supper is just some pasta, spices, and veggies with a fresh loaf of artisanal bread! Even though I was planning on eating alone, I’ve spread all the dishes out across this enormous table because it makes me feel more dominant. Also, I’ll just be eating the pasta out of the pot so I don’t have to wash another dish.”

“I confess, I never pictured you cooking! Usually in my masturbatory fantasies you’re giving me specific orders on how to best service you sexually or just lounging around the house naked. I also confess that I never pictured you with a freaky, elongated neck, but that’s sort of turning me on.”

Pluggers, 3/12/12

It is of course not a surprise that every surface in a plugger’s house is covered with the various pills and salves that they need to live, but I’m a little surprised to see the strip name-check a particular pharmacy chain. Frankly, pluggers always struck me as too canny and cheap to have much brand loyalty. Do you suppose CVS paid for this product placement? If so, I dearly hope that whoever signed off on that decision was fired post-haste for extreme incompetence.

Mary Worth, 3/12/12

Is it possible that poor simple Toby is actually ahead of Mary here? That she knows that Nola is irredeemable, and now is only good for gossip? “Enough of your tiresome bourgeois morality, Mary, what did she divulge? Don’t spare a single juicy detail!”

Beetle Bailey, 3/12/12

Yawn, another Beetle Bailey about how Sarge likes to eat a lot and OH GOD OH GOD HIS MOUTH OH GOD HE IS COMING

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Family Circus, 3/11/12

The Keane Kids’ responsibility-dodging spirits vie with the Billy’s dotted-line trails for the title of the Family Circus’s most iconic gag. Still, while Ida Know and Not Me are fairly well known, I don’t think Nobody shows up so often, which may explain why I was so surprised and horrified by his creepy mustache. I mean, the mustache and the hat already combine to make him look like your slightly skeevy uncle, if your slightly skeevy uncle were three feet tall and a ghost; but, since he has no visible nose or mouth, the mustache is just a stripe of hair across a mostly featureless face, which is completely terrifying to me.

On the other hand, I approve of the way that the children and their daemons have been lined up against the wall, since it appears that Mommy has finally had enough and is just going to have them executed by firing squad for their dish-breaking crimes.

Crankshaft, 3/11/12

Longtime readers of the Funkyverse strips know that one of that fictional universe’s most prominent characteristics is the relentless and omnipresent punning. Today, however, we see that this behavior may in fact have an evolutionary advantage. The first three panels of the strip feature Jeff getting increasingly angry at yet another instance of injustice, looking like he’s about to strangle someone or at least suffer a major coronary event. But in the final panel, Pam’s terrible bit of wordplay seems to have flummoxed him, knocking him out of his rage-cycle and leaving him in a state of slant-mouthed confusion. How many lives were saved by her quick, corny thinking?

Dennis the Menace, 3/11/12

We spend a lot of time worrying about whether Dennis has lost his menacing vibe, but what of Mr. Wilson? One might worry that the lack of a worthy antagonist has caused the old man to lose his edge. But fear not, as today he manages to implant in Dennis that special shiver of existential terror we all get when we first realize that we, too, will grow old and die. I dearly hope that the otherwise unexplained photo of Dennis in the opening throwaway panel represents a Portrait of Dorian Grey-style magical object, which will wither and age while Dennis stays young, until it comes time for the Devil to reap his soul; that would be menacing indeed.

Panel from Mary Worth, 3/11/12

Well, Nola, if you won’t listen to good advice from John Lennon, maybe Jesus will talk some sense into you, hmm? If nothing else, the relative efficacy of these two quotes may resolve some longstanding debates.

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Mary Worth, 3/1/12

OK, Mary, I’m starting to get just a little bit tired of you repeatedly emitting lines of gobsmacked shock every time Nola informs you of her latest act of moral depravity. She lies, she cheats, she adulters! She always gets what she wants and she lets nothing get in her way! I think the reason Mary is so drawn to Nola is because she needs the jolt of adrenaline she gets every time the woman confesses another sin. Everyone else in Mary’s life is so terrified of her that they only think happy thoughts in her presence; when Nola smiles and describes her amoral adventures, Mary is relieved to discover that she can in fact still feel.

Archie, 3/1/12

Ha ha, Professor Flutesnoot’s heavy-lidded expression in panel two is terrifying. “Look, kid, they’ve tied my salary to the results of the No Child Left Behind test results, so if the Department of Education decides you need to know about Henry VIII, you’re going to learn about Henry VIII, capisce? Remember, your scores can’t bring down my average if you turn up dead in a dumpster the morning of the test, so how about you shut your yap and start memorizing the names of Henry’s various wives and coming up with a coherent four-sentence explanation of what the ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’ was.”

I was going to question the subject matter here because I’m pretty sure that Professor Flutesnoot actually teaches chemistry, but in a world where a teenager comes into school wearing a shirt adorned by two awkwardly placed playing cards, we can’t really expect anything to make sense.