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Mary Worth, 5/7/14

Ten years ago (ten years ago!), Mary unleashed a magnificent act of passive aggression on poor Iris; after smelling Tommy’s weed-smoke drifting through the air vents, she dropped by to say hi to Irish and mention “whatever Tommy was smoking” all snide-like. Now, a decade later, she’s prepared to get semi-confrontational right to Tommy’s face! I’m not sure what I like better, her casual reference to “your history” or the idea that an ex-con will somehow magically have an easier time finding a job if only he reframes the process in his mind as some kind of redemption narrative.

Heathcliff, 5/7/14

So, I guess Heathcliff must occasionally seek legitimacy from the electorate to continue his reign as untouchable god-king? I’m assuming that this is just a Stalinist sham election with only a single name on the ballot: the campaign poster doesn’t even try to convey even the vaguest of political philosophies to entice the voter, but merely promotes a vision of Heathcliff as omnipresent and inevitable, which is of course its own sort of ideological stance.

Hi and Lois, 5/7/14

I’m not exactly sure why Hi and Lois decided to go with a featureless, inky black floor for their kitchen rather than a more traditional tile or linoleum pattern, but if they thought it wouldn’t show dirt or stains as vividly, they were clearly very much mistaken.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 5/7/14

Grimm is panhandling for money to see what appears to be a porno version of Spider-Man.

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Mark Trail, 4/5/14

Kinda sad Mark is ENDING THIS today, though it’s hard to see how anything could have topped the first panel of today’s strip, as Mark forcibly tackles Marlin into the shallow waters where sea turtles will now be able to frolic without fear of having their eggs poached. I certainly hope that the copter-borne police got a good look at that squirming mass of bejeaned legs, protruding from the lake like some kind of denim-clad sea anemone.

Judge Parker, 4/5/14

At first glance, this seems like a touching conversation between the fathers of two young people who are about to get married — until you find out that what they’ve been talking about over the course of this week’s strips is that April’s dad wronged some Romanian arms dealers, who are even now bearing down on this heavily armed jungle compound in a helicopter gunship, determined to kill everyone. Alan wants to know even more, though! What sort of ordinance do their enemies carry? How many civil wars has April’s dad helped perpetuate through his arms-dealing business, and how profitable has that been over the years? Has the ability to manufacture powerful weapons relatively cheaply ended the nation-state’s monopoly on violence forever?

B.C., 4/5/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because Secret Service agents have repeatedly gotten in trouble for paying for sex over the past few years! This is the sort of thing that angry parents would be writing into papers about demanding to know “How am I supposed to explain this to my children?” if anyone young enough to have young children still got a newspaper delivered at home. Anyway, in related news, Secret Service agents are very much not in the military.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 4/5/14

Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm is about how life is an endless series of bland, mind-numbing experiences that we undertake to stave off death, which honestly makes me nostalgic for the jokes about piano-fucking.

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Dennis the Menace, 3/27/14

You know, I make jokey-jokes about the relative menace level in various Dennis the Menace cartoons but this … this is genuinely disturbing. “Mrs. Mitchell, your son displays great leadership, to the extent that he convinces other children to do things that are in violation of school rules and that sometimes even threathen their own safety. It’s almost as if he’s been building a sort of ‘cult’ among the student body, based largely on his own personality. After a series of violent incidents, we’ve begun isolating him from other students for most of the school day, but there’s been a new unsettling development: we can’t leave an individual teacher to guard him for too long, because if we do, we eventually find them dazed and glassy-eyed, with the door open and Dennis long gone. Anyway, long story short, your son is in a cage made of a special nonconducting alloy right now, and we recommend that you neither look directly at him nor listen to him speak for more than 45 seconds or so.”

Mother Goose and Grimm, 3/27/14

I know I don’t talk about Mother Goose and Grimm very often, but hey, here’s today’s Mother Goose and Grimm! It’s about how Pinocchio wants to fuck a piano.