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Dennis the Menace, 7/5/11

After years of biding his time, Dennis has finally decided to go into environmental menacing. “Once those mountains have been leveled so we can get at the coal underneath them, and the forests have been stripped and replaced by endless cul-de-sacs filled with vulgar homes far too large for their lots, this will be a vista worth looking at, by God.”

Mary Worth, 7/5/11

It turns out the only thing Drew finds more unsettling than a lady claiming to be his girlfriend when she isn’t is any indication that not everyone considers a career in the healing arts to be the pinnacle of human achievement. “You mean … she left her medical job … to pursue a career as some kind of common peddler of trinkets? How gauche!”

Hi and Lois, 7/5/11

As the fireworks of America’s Independence Day holiday fade, it’s up to each of us to ask in seriousness: What does freedom mean? To Trixie, clearly freedom denotes the ability to void one’s bladder or bowels without having to worry about minutes or hours spent sitting in a soiled diaper. Babies are disgusting, in other words.

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Slylock Fox, 7/4/11

Maybe our neighborhood spawns unusually well-behaved and/or athletically skilled children, but I’ve never actually had to deal with this stereotypical scenario. Still, I’d like to think that if I did, I wouldn’t be so focused on figuring out which specific child damaged my property. I mean, surely if a foursome of young athletes were engaging in sporting pastimes dangerously close to breakable parts of my home, shouldn’t they all be considered more or less equally culpable for the resulting damage, rather than blame settling solely on the last person to touch the ball before it went on its rampage? In fact, the art in this strip reinforces this view, with the dog, bear, and bird all staring forward with looks of guilt-ridden anxiety. Only the rabbit, with his dull, heavy-lidded expression, seems impervious to feelings of self-blame over the incident; indeed, he may be far too stoned to realize what all the fuss is about.

Mary Worth, 7/4/11

I’m not saying that Mary Worth is a murderer; I’m just saying that, if Mary Worth were to kill one of your enemies and subtly try to let you know a week later that you were now forever in her debt, this is pretty much how that conversation would go.

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Crock, 7/1/11

Do you think that the Crock creative team realizes that a timeshare is in fact a kind of real estate, and thus cannot be contained in a small box of the sort that our protagonist is attempting to offer to his desert god? It’s possible that the strip creators’ sense of time and space is permanently skewed: they may have long ago forgotten that the running gag about the hotboxes being spacious inside is indeed a running gag, and have come to believe that structures in the Crockiverse are simply dimensionally transcendental. This makes sense, as Crock is singularity from which no joy or humor can escape, and where the normal rules of existence simply don’t apply.

Mary Worth, 7/1/11

Mary Worth dialogue that bears no resemblance to any speech act that an even vaguely human creature would perpetrate is of course par for the course, but Liza’s line in panel two is really something else. Pretty much the only context I can imagine for “Despite what happened, I’m excited about my future for the first time!” is the end of a long televised show trial, right before the speaker, at whom a number of guns just off camera are pointing, is shipped off to a re-education camp.

Apartment 3-G, 7/1/11

“So I hope you’ll understand that I have to request that you and your brother Paul refrain from physical relations, as that would be disgusting.”