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Gil Thorp, 5/18/07

Gil Thorp continues to be unspeakably filthy. In panel one, Brynna “mishandles” Lisa’s “sinker,” if you know what I mean (and I think you do); as a result of that “collision,” her shoulder is sore the next day. Fortunately, she still has use of her right arm.

Hi and Lois, 5/18/07

Young Chip Flagston, sittin’ in a tree
down-load-ing porn-o-graph-y.

Mary Worth, 5/18/07

Mary loves her pithy little bits of advice, but there has to be some kind of internal house rule that a pearl of wisdom, once used, can never be repeated; that explains why, after 67 years in the meddling business, her sayings have gone from the helpful to the platitudinous to something at odds with everything we know about how time and space work. I don’t care how at peace you are with the past, people: you cannot astrally project yourself back in time and change what happened. Mary Worth is right in that white doctors shouldn’t trouble themselves with charity work in filthy foreign countries, but she’s off-base here.

Slylock Fox, 5/18/07

To me, the look on the dog’s face doesn’t say “lazy” so much as “has lost the will to live.”

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Heart of the City, 5/14/07

Heart’s worries are all too well-founded. When I was in sixth grade, I spilled a pot of boiling chicken soup on my foot while I was stirring it and had to go to the emergency room; I ended up with bandages around my foot for some weeks. My plan was to refer to the cause of my injury as “boiling water,” but I made the mistake of telling someone the real deal and was “noodle foot” for the remainder of the school year. What I’m trying to say, Heart, is that I only wish I had hurt myself doing something cool, like cheerleading practice.

Wait, I think that might have come out wrong.

Slylock Fox, 5/14/07

Ever felonious? Try ever sextaculous! Seriously, if Slylock Fox is part of some secret long-term plan to make kids more open and accepting of the lifestyle of furry fetishists, I’d say it’s scoring another point every time Cassandra Cat appears, especially if she keeps showing up in paradoxically prim-yet-sexy outfits like the turtleneck sweater/tartan combo she’s got on here.

The amount of time our fox/mouse detective duo spend tailing (ha ha, see what I did there?) Miss Cat probably indicates their forbidden lust for her more than their desire for justice. Max Mouse’s infatuation with the sinister feline is well known, so it should come as no surprise that he’s checking out a Krazy Kat collection, since that feature revolved around a cat in love with a cruel mouse tormentor — no doubt the reversal of the real-life situation soothes his tiny besotted bowler-covered brain. Slylock’s appearance here reminds me of another episode from my misspent youth: when I was in high school, I worked in the local branch of the public library, and one day a patron appeared who was apparently notorious for exposing himself in the reading room, and I was assigned to keep an eye on him and kick him out if he did anything funny. He mostly just sat there with the newspaper in his lap, though not with the disturbing look of preternatural alertness that Slylock is sporting here.

Mary Worth, 5/14/07

I can’t even begin to explain to you what the hell is going in the second panel. Is Mary about to demand a horsey ride from Vera? A horsey ride of meddling? In panel one, Vera is following the lesson she learned from hard experience — “be ever vigilant in guarding your crotch” — so Mary may have had no choice in going for the backside attack. But since Vera appears to still be sitting on the bench, what in God’s name has Mary done with her legs?

Gil Thorp, 5/14/07

If Clambake isn’t giving down-home, country-style prostate exams by the end of the week, I for one will be very disappointed.

Ziggy, 5/14/07

Ziggy is going to die from some kind of venereal disease.

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Blondie, 5/13/07

The saddest thing is that the central joke of this strip — that Blondie has been utterly charmed into an aroused frenzy by her pampering, and is eager to discovery what other surprises her husband has prepared for her, while Dagwood has one foot out the door as he’s planning to head out for a “men’s foursome” — is so in keeping with the well-established dynamic of the Bumstead marriage that I barely noticed it. The thing that really disturbed me is the heart that’s drifted up into Blondie’s word balloon in the final panel. I have no idea what it’s supposed to represent semantically. I suppose it could be “love” as a noun and term of endearment, rather than “love” as a verb, which it usually stands for — but then it ought to have a comma after it. Really, the fact that it’s sitting after a comma just makes it all the more anomalous to me. Mostly I’m worried that Dag and Blondie have ingested some kind of potent hallucinogen and now believe themselves to be conversing using abstract symbols rather than normal human speech.

Family Circus, 5/13/07

This strip is a subtle but powerful reminder of the strict laws of patriarchy that govern the Family Circus. Note that Dolly wonders who their mother would be if her parents hadn’t met, not who their father would be. On Mother’s Day, she assumes that her mother is just an interchangeable womb who could have been replaced by any number of other females from other times and places and their family would have remained pretty much the same.

I really enjoy the fact that all the other comics moms in Billy’s thought balloon are just sort of idly looking off into the distance, except for one. FBOFW’s Elly is looking straight at the eldest Keane boy in goggle-eyed horror, as if contemplating how excruciating it would have been to pass that enormous melonhead through her birth canal.

Doodles by Mac & Sack, 5/13/07

Someone’s kind of fixated on the idea of being crushed to death by a boa constrictor, and it makes me uncomfortable. I’m also disturbed the puffed-out cheeks of “the Doughboy” in the Doodle Zoo: they clearly indicate that he’s dying horribly as the smart-ass little koala cracks wise. I am kind of amused that the Doughboy seems to have lost his “Pillsbury” moniker at the last minute due to trademark infringement concerns, though it does bring to mind the notion of an American infantryman, having survived the hell of combat in the trenches against the Hun’s forces on the Western Front, being felled by an unexpected snake attack.

Panels from Dennis the Menace, 5/13/07

I’m not showing you the rest of this strip, because these panels perfectly set up the Dennis the Menace strip we’d all like to see, the one where Mr. Wilson murders Dennis with a pair of garden shears.

Panel from Mary Worth, 5/13/07

Since Vera’s so angry at Von, it’s ironic that she’s remembering him at the height of his glory: all decked out in his yellow suit, shirt, and facepaint, standing in front of that blue door, and disco dancing like nobody’s business.