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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/16/11

When I saw the first panel of this strip, I thought, “Wow, it’s a representative of the Hootin’ Holler law enforcement apparatus who isn’t Sheriff Tait! You almost never see them!” Then in the second panel I realized why. Sheriff Tait may have come to some sort of modus vivendi with the violent criminals who inhabit his jurisdiction, but those scofflaws won’t hesitate to murder one of Tait’s employees in cold blood when he tries to do the basics of his job.

Hagar the Horrible, 1/16/11

This wizened Viking chieftain may no longer be physically fit enough to join in on his murderous clan’s annual expeditions of rape and plunder, but he still has enough social standing to demand that the raiders bring him back the sex slaves that are his right.

Six Chix, 1/16/11

I may be revealing my failure as a plugged-in consumer of popular culture here, but I’ve never actually seen the Saturday Night Live “More Cowbell” sketch. My understanding is that it involves Christopher Walken as a music producer, demanding more cowbell over the course of recording a song? I don’t really see how that relates to the scene here, which makes me suspect that the reference was a last-minute nonsensical substitution for the original text, in which this beady-eyed cat expressed its contempt for and violent intentions towards its sleeping family in terms that simply could not be published in a family newspaper.

Panel from Mary Worth, 1/16/11

Oh, and hey, is Mary Worth using her recent kidnap-foiling to demand that everyone kiss her ass even harder than usual? You’d better believe it!

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Beetle Bailey, 1/15/11

This is another strip where the top row of throwaway panels — so called because they’re often discarded by newspapers to cram the strip into various arrangements — completely change the tenor of the strip. Without those first two panels, we have the story that we’ve always been sold about Beetle: that he’s smugly and pathologically lazy. But with those added strips, we see that he only spends as much time as possible in bed because he’s in constant physical pain, no doubt because of some combination of forced manual labor and the beatings he receives daily from Sarge. So too his final panel fantasy becomes much more poignant: it doesn’t represent some kind of apotheosis of sloth, but rather his dream of a job that helps alleviate his all-pervading agony.

Mary Worth, 1/15/11

So Mary Worth and this waitress have basically been congratulating themselves on saving Emily since about Tuesday, and you know how sometimes something irritating in small doses can become awesome in mass? That’s pretty much how I’m starting to feel about this. I’m hoping the two of them just keep saying this stuff back and forth for another week or two. “Do you think she’ll be OK?” “Hopefully! But the real important thing is that we saved her, together, as a team! We’re amazing!”

Panel from Slylock Fox, 1/15/11

I don’t know what I like best about this: that the sentient lobster is making a desperate bid for freedom to avoid being eaten by the sentient mouse, knowing that it’s either kill or be killed, or that Slylock finds the whole thing so amusing. “Ahh! Ahh! Ahh! It’s tearing my nose apart! For the love of God, Sly, why won’t you help me?” “Heh, heh, Max, looks like you’ve bitten off more than you can chew! Should have had your food-animal killed and slaughtered before you tried to eat it, like I did!”

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Apartment 3-G, 1/12/12

Welp, as I predicted on Sunday, Ruby is Lu Ann’s bio-mom (I don’t deserve much credit for this, as it was telegraphed fairly loudly). And now it’s all over but the copious weeping, and soul-searching, and family recriminations! Shouldn’t take more than a year or two. However, before we get started, I think it’s worth showing the panel from last Friday that started this hilarious and heart-breaking misunderstanding:

I dearly, dearly hope that Lu Ann’s comment is never explained again, just for confusing larfs. “Poor Lu Ann, it must be terrible to not understand one’s true heritage! Hmm, why is the name ‘Dr. Howard’ sticking in my mind? Is it important? Enh, probably not.”

This shocking revelation about Ruby this week has made me wonder if this whole thing was planned out from the moment she was introduced more the four years ago, which made me dip into my archives to see where my first mention of her was. All I can say is that I’m apparently pretty smart about this stuff.

Mary Worth, 1/12/12

Yes, Mary, we all know that your plan to bring Emily back to your hovel in the woods and bake her into a pie is finally coming to fruition, but perhaps you shouldn’t look so transparently gleeful about it?