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Panel from Slylock Fox, 2/28/16

Let’s ignore this cute little geometry puzzle and focus on what Sly and Max are bringing with them to their “lakeside crime case.” A fishing pole? A ukelele? My guess is that the amount of “crime solving” they’re planning on doing up there is pretty minimal, but you can be sure that they’ll be charging all their expenses to whatever secret police service they work for.

Six Chix, 2/28/16

I’m glad to see that, while one worm has been anthropomorphized, the rest are depicted realistically, which is to say as a writhing mass of living tissue out of your most horrifying nightmares that serves as a prime example why we must all live in clean, sterile habitats shot into space.

Momma, 2/28/16

Today’s Momma is a cute, wordless vignette about that time Francis tried to go skiing and ended up freezing to death!

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Momma, 2/23/16

Say what you will about the art in Momma, but I actually appreciate the subtle shift in Francis’s facial expression between panels today. In the first, he seems genuinely excited about his new employment — sure, he hasn’t struck it rich, but it’s a job, and as perks go, free food is nothing to complain about. Everyone needs food! In the second panel, though, you can see he’s just absorbed his mother’s snarky comment, and his face is frozen in mid-smile. He’s disappointed her again. Oh, serving hamburgers isn’t good enough for Momma, huh? It’d be better if he were selling these … flat … things … seriously, what is that pile on the table? Pancakes? Has Francis rolled up a steaming hot pancake to eat with his hands? If so, I take everything I wrote above back, he deserves all the ridicule we can throw at him.

Heathcliff, 2/23/16

If there’s one character that epitomizes Heathcliff’s shift into increasingly aggressive whimsy, it’s the Garbage Ape. He started as a riff on one of the core assumptions of the Heathcliff universe — that real cats will eat things out of the trash sometimes, so it’d be funny if the cats of Heathcliff were really obsessed with garbage and city sanitation infrastructure, and even funnier if there were some kind of benevolent trash-related magical beast — a garbage ape, say, who delivered garbage, for whatever reason. This was … fine, not particularly funny per se, but not terrible either, but then the Garbage Ape started metastasizing, dressing up like a pilgrim, and now … this, transformed into a menacing mechanical walker, simultaneously terrifying and a violation of the intellectual property rights of Lucasfilm Ltd. LLC (a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios). Why? Why did it have to be this way? How did it get to this point, where someone might think this is an image that might legitimately tickle readers’ funny bone, rather than confusing and alarming them?

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Crankshaft, 2/14/16

Here’s today’s Crankshaft! It’s about a mom who thinks her son accidentally sending her a message of romantic love intended for a woman she’s never heard of is “just as good” as him sending her a message of her own on purpose.

Momma, 2/14/16

Here’s today’s Momma! It’s about a son who seems to loathe his mother and yet can’t stay apart from her, delivering a her a bouquet of flowers and declaring her his “best girl” in the privacy of his own thoughts, before scooting off to a date with some woman whose name we’ll never hear again. Look, he’s literally quivering with mingled eroticism and terror in the second panel!

Beetle Bailey, 2/14/16

Here’s today’s Beetle Bailey! It’s about Plato using the power of his very persuasive mind to convince his friend to go to sleep under a blanket of numbing snow, until he slips away into unconsciousness and then death without feeling any pain! You might think this is a little grim, but at least it’s not a Valentine Day strip about a dude’s relationship wth his mom.