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Apartment 3-G, 1/27/10

Poor Tommie! No human in the history of time has ever asked her to actually repeat one of her boring, forgettable actions; therefore she has no choice but to assume that Blaze is propositioning her with a request for some perverse French sex act.

Spider-Man, 1/27/10

Ha ha, it sure looks like MJ was looking forward to hanging around Miami in her industrial-grade unmentionables without her dopey husband stupiding things up, am I right? Presumably she fears that his sparkling wit (“See, the theater you’re performing in isn’t on Broadway, which is a street in Manhattan … so you might say you’re … wait for it …”) will alienate all of her theater buddies, while trips to the beach will only result in passersby recoiling in disgust from his freakishly oversized arms and nippleless torso.

Crankshaft, 1/27/10

Wow, Montoni’s must be in a more precarious position than I thought if its hated rival is a counter at the mall’s food court where the employees are forced to wear comical faux-ethnic garb. Still, it’s nice to see that Pam likes to spend time with her dad when he’s indulging in one of his favorite hobbies — insulting strangers — and that she still has visceral personal shame-spiral reactions when he lets loose with his unfocused misanthropy.

Mary Worth, 1/27/10

Whoah, it looks like today is one of the three designated days per year when someone in Mary Worth talks sense! Wilbur’s reaction implies to me that he doesn’t entirely understand how the proposed process works. “Kurt, I went to my doctor and I tested positive for paternity. Maybe you should get tested as well! You can never be too sure!”

Crock, 1/27/10

Hey, kids, remember “boom boxes”? They were like iPods, in the ’80s! As near as I can remember, they were covered with brown flesh and sparse hair and were physically attached to their owners, which explains Otis’s mistake.

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Cleats, 1/22/10

On those occasions when I think of Cleats, I think of “gentle (to the point of blandness) humor punctuated by bouts of unspeakable horror.’ This week’s installment, focusing on the whimsical subject of “Bigfoot football,” has mostly been on the gentle-to-the-point-of-blandness side, but only today did I notice that the Sasquatches are using the withered corpse of a beaver as their ball. So that’s something, I guess.

Family Circus, 1/22/10

Dolly, you panderer! The snowman and snowlady should not be left alone in the yard together until they’re married. This is exactly the sort of ideas you get from public schooling.

Hi and Lois, 1/22/10

Chip’s friend is wearing a little hat secured to his head with some sort of elastic chin strap, so, yeah, it’s probably a good idea that he’s reading Style magazine in the second panel.

The poster on the wall indicates that the boys are fans of Paul Butterfield Blues Band keyboardist Mark Naftalin, which is a little disappointing to me because at first glance I just thought they were proponents of free trade.

Mary Worth, 1/22/10

You’ve gotta feel bad for Dawn as she angrily swoops and dances around the nervous Mary. Not long ago her boyfriend cheated on her with another woman, and now she finds out that her father’s sperm cheated with another egg, before she was even born! I have to say that her withering “something” in the second panel is the piece of Mary Worth dialogue most loaded down with contempt since Mary threw “Capisce?” in Aldo’s face.

Spider-Man, 1/22/10

“He thinks I can point him to Wolverine! And he’ll keep attacking me until I do! Unless — I run away, like a coward! Yes, that’s it! Ha ha, can’t catch me, I have the proportional pusillanimity of a spider!”

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Blondie, 1/20/10

I haven’t compiled an elaborate spreadsheet charting the time of day that the action in Blondie takes place or anything — that will be the point when I officially slip into the comics-obsessive deep end, and you are all allowed to officially have me put away when that happens — but my gut tells me that we’ve been seeing more nighttime episodes of late. This is all good with me, as I find that it gives the strip a sort of poignant charm that it desperately needs. Take today’s installment, for instance, in which Dagwood and Herb wander the otherwise empty sidewalks of their soulless exurb. They’re in their work gear, but it’s a well-known fact that they car-pool in to their generic white-collar jobs, and they live in the American sprawl zone where you can’t get anywhere without a car anyway, so where exactly are they supposed to be walking to? My guess is that they were dropped off in front of their bland low-slung off-white homes and had some sort of midlife crisis à deux, and are now walking around their subdivision jabbering nonsense as they psych themselves up to abandon their families and launch themselves on a life-affirming adventure.

Mary Worth, 1/20/10

Say, let’s check out what’s going on in Mary WoAAAUUUGGGH DAWN’S FACE HER TERRIBLE TERRIBLE FACE