Post Content

Beetle Bailey, 2/11/12

Fans of eroticized but poorly detailed sketch drawings everywhere know that Wednesdays are Miss Buxley Days over at Beetle Bailey! Similarly, we fans of vignettes of elderly marital misanthropy, alcoholism, and sadness (an admittedly much more exclusive fraternity) know that Saturdays are for General and Mrs. Halftrack to confront their rapidly failing bodies and their distaste for one another. For us, the sight of of General Halftrack staring sadly at a cereal bowl full of pills, unable to understand why medical science’s best efforts still can’t stop the pain, is much more exciting than a glimpse of Miss Buxley’s upper thighs.

Mary Worth, 2/11/12

The best part about today’s strip, in which Mary tries to figure out if she should come up with a name for Nola’s voracious appetite for sex and destruction and power or simply murder the woman now for the good of all, is that it’s Saturday and we’re still in mid-dinner. Could this mean that we’ll have another week of Nola’s Guide To Success In Life? What good deeds have we done to deserve such a gift?

Apartment 3-G, 2/11/12

Everyone who loved Nina for her cruelty and ability to strangle people with her mind, and who worried that becoming a mother would make her soft, have no fear: she’s only agreed to incubate this child so that she can make it the ultimate sacrifice to the dread god Moloch.

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 2/9/12

Guys, it’s all been fun and games watching the Mudlark basketball team defile their tender young flesh with heathen tattoos, but what about the lesson? It’s not a Gil Thorp plot without a lesson. Today, we learn that lesson: Unlike your dad, who couldn’t handle the fact that your mom made more money than him at her fancy bank job and ran off with the 19-year-old who works at the Arby’s out on Route 128, a tattoo will never leave you!

Shoe, 2/9/12

“That’s right! It took multiple painful experimental surgeries, but the mammalian cells have finally been successfully grafted onto my scalp and now I’m growing real hair, not just feathers like you! These few scraggly hairs mean everything to me! I’m a monstrous chimera, but I don’t care, do you hear me? I don’t care!”

Mary Worth, 2/9/12

I’m warning you right now: The temptation to just run, without comment of any kind, all the Mary Worth strips in which Nola gleefully describes her sexual depravity and Mary reels in horror is very, very strong, and I don’t know if I can resist it much longer.

Post Content

Garfield, 2/7/12

So, here’s an absolutely true thing: for years now, every time my wife manages to one-up me on something, I say “It’s not a contest” and she dramatically replies “Says the loser!” The first time we did it was spontaneous, and now it’s just one of the catchphrases in the long-running sitcom that our marriage (like, I assume, most long-term relationships) has become. So you can understand why we found this strip both hilarious and unsettling. Still, it’s extremely unnerving to see someone you love say “Obviously Jim Davis is spying on us” with a completely straight face.

Hi and Lois, 2/7/12

Let’s ignore for the moment the whole “who-moved-my-cookie” office-hijinks har-har. For me, the thing that really captures the banality of white-collar life is the poster hanging up in the second panel. I’m assuming that “FF” stands for “Foofram,” the name of Hi and Thirsty’s employer, which I’ve kind of come to love. Remember, nothing boosts workplace morale like printing your corporate logo and “QUALITY” onto an 8 1/2 by 11 inch sheet of paper and scotch-taping it to the wall of the break room.

Mary Worth, 2/7/12

Not to brag or anything, but it turns out I was 100% correct about Nola’s techniques for turning aside Mary’s meddling. Having volunteered with no prying whatsoever her penchant for nonconsensual nonmonogamy, she can now lean back and simply watch Mary’s head explode.

Mark Trail, 2/7/12

Hey, remember when Tommy told us like six times that he would just leave his jacket lying around in the middle of the woods and Butch the blind dog would stay near it, when for no readily apparent reason Tommy would leave Butch the blind dog out in the woods by himself, and you were all like, “Well, that doesn’t make any sense.” Jokes on you, suckers! This particular Chekhovian gun has fired nicely! I mean, you have to admit that Jeff the bank robber seems like the kind of dude who would just put on some gross old jacket he found lying around in the forest without really thinking about it that much.

Spider-Man, 2/7/12

Meanwhile, Spider-Man has decided to try out this whole “super-heroics” thing, with predictable results.