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Shoe, 10/9/13

So it looks like my earlier theory — that the Perfesser has covered his floor in newspapers because he’s a bird, and shitting on newspapers on the floor of their home is what birds do — was something of a reach. It turns out that he’s just a hoarder whose home has reached such a state of chaos that he’s desperate to escape it. If you’re want an insight into his increasingly glum mental state, note that in the months since that cartoon linked above, he’s devolved from eating chips to picking from a bag of mysterious “SNAX,” presumably because he self-loathingly thinks that a guy with empty pizza boxes and tires strewn around his living room doesn’t deserve better than ambiguous snack-like foodstuffs to eat.

Momma, 10/9/13

I’m not sure what this comic is supposed to be getting at in the context of Momma’s usual themes — maybe that the fly mistook Francis for a fellow loathsome pest? My preferred reading is that we’re being reminded that all creatures have a sense of self and will to survive, and that we perpetrate a thousand murderous tragedies a day without even realizing it.

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Slylock Fox, 10/6/13

There’s an awful lot of fun things going in today’s Slylock Fox — that “How To Draw” bull looks more exasperated than raging, for instance, and I’d dearly love to know what’s going on in the Six Differences, in which ordinary animals seem to be ganging up on a baffled Grimace-thing. But the best little detail is that Max Mouse is surreptitiously dialing 911 as Slylock outlines the ratiocination sequence that will convict Shady Shrew of larceny and assault. He knows Sly’s been pushed to the limits by Shady Shrew’s constant low-level criminality, and fears that this might be the day when, instead of handing Shady over to the owl-run justice system, the predator-detective will just grab the insectivore between his powerful jaws and shake him back and forth until his neck snaps. Even though they’re on different sides of the law, Max can’t stand to see his fellow small mammal go down like that.

Beetle Bailey, 10/6/13

Welp, Beetle Bailey is still fixated on sex robots, but at least this time they’re imagined as part of the camp’s chilly rationalist’s vision of a dystopian, dehumanized future, so I guess that’s progress?

Momma, 10/6/13

Haha, it’s funny because Thomas and Tina’s house is literally infested with vermin, augh augh augh augh

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Mark Trail, 10/1/13

Happy U.S. government shutdown day, everybody! In keeping with his tendency to say vaguely nice things to everybody and let his underlings take all the controversial stands, Senator Mason has decided that Washington, D.C., is an extremely unpleasant place right now and that he’d much rather head off on a little vacation. As a federal employee, Dusty Rhodes is now officially furloughed, but that’s OK; instead of being forced to tell the senator about all the stuff he’s not supposed to do on federal land, he can join Mark and the gang in shooting as many animals as they want, digging for oil at random, and burning down huge swaths of forest, for kicks. Who’s gonna stop them? The government? Hahahaha!

Heathcliff, 10/1/13

I don’t want to alarm you but it appears that the Garbage Ape has started to attract notice even beyond the readership of this blog. I’m all for Heathcliff’s brand of off-putting surrealism finding a wider audience, but I think creating a Robin to the Garbage Ape’s Batman in an attempt to cash in on the character’s growing renown is too precious by half.

Momma, 10/1/13

You can tell I’ve been reading Momma for far too long because what mainly irritated me about today’s strip on first read was the weird, awkward way Francis just looks at Momma in silence for two panels and not, say, the unspeakable Oedipal horror.