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Beetle Bailey, 9/25/13

Probably you were hoping that Spec. Gizmo’s sex robot would a be a shameful, one-off joke that would never reappear in the comics pages or on the Internet again. Well, too bad, because you don’t live in your perfect world! You live in this world of unrelenting horror, with the rest of us. Anyway, panel one reveals all sorts of unfortunate things. For instance, when Gizmo’s robot was first unveiled, nobody had bothered to drape human clothes over its square metallic chassis, yet now it appears to be wearing some kind of exaggeratedly girly dress with a crinoline skirt, further gendering the fembot and making it a slightly more acceptable target of Chip’s sexual lusts. The mere act of clothing it can be seen as akin to teaching it a shame-based code of sexual morality, much like the one Adam and Eve learned abruptly after eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The fembot’s rudimentary ethics may be limited to sexual matters, as it seems more than willing to use its inhuman strength to work violence against humans, though perhaps this is a sign that its advanced circuitry understands the concept of consent and believes that attempts to violate its structural integrity may legitimately be met with self-defense.

Anyway, I was going to do a close reading of panel two along these same lines, but then I read “He has to turn off the work switch and press the love button” and so I went and lied down for an hour instead.

Mary Worth, 9/25/13

OK, Mary Worth: I enjoy making endless jokes about Wilbur’s sandwich obsession as much as the next person who blogs about newspaper comic strips, but I like to do it on my terms. Frankly, if you’re going to include an entire panel of the sort of filthy talk that you might expect to hear when you dial 1-900-HOT-SANDWICH, I’m going to feel a little bit baited.

Herb and Jamaal, 9/25/13

I genuinely enjoy how insanely excited our nameless white-collar drone/Heart and Soul customer looks in the first couple of panels as he sets up his joke about how meetings make you doze off, ha ha, amiright people. He’s really going the extra mile here, and I appreciate it when people put effort into their sarcasm.

Phantom, 9/25/13

“Except for a period from the 1870s, when European powers began the wars of conquest referred to as the ‘Scramble for Africa,’ until the process of decolonization really took hold in the 1960s! I mean, the British, man! I couldn’t leave a skull mark on the chins of the entire British Empire, you know what I’m saying?”

Pluggers, 9/25/13

Pluggers remember a time, now thankfully in the distant past, when they had to engage in brief bouts of physical movement every half hour or so.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/5/13

Sorry I haven’t been keeping you up to date on the latest developments in the “everything comes too easy to Sarah Morgan and she’s wracked with ennui over it” plotline! Rather than questioning the circumstances of her existence (in which Morgans get everything they want with zero effort, just like the Spencers and Parkers and Drivers in the next universe over), she’s starting to question herself. Why is she different from other kids? Is it because of the way she was raised? Is it because of something inherent in her nature? Is she too different, too different from the other children? And since — let’s stop beating around the bush here — we’re using “different” to mean “better,” if she’s too different from her peers to function as one of them, isn’t she their natural leader? Shouldn’t she have an exalted social status — as a monarch, or a God? “Thanks, mom, this has been a good talk. Don’t worry, you’ll have a place of privilege in the coming Eternal Glorious Prosperous Sarah-Empire!”

Phantom, 9/5/13

I also haven’t been keeping you up to date on the action in the Phantom, which has involved, like, adventure and gunplay and punching and whatnot. Today we learn how tiring it can be taking on semi-competent criminal syndicates year after year. “Come on, guys, you need at least two people on guard duties at all time! Is this … is this just not going to be a challenge for me at all? Again?”

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Crankshaft, 6/27/13

When? America demands to know. When will we get Crankshaft making dickish puns about New York City, like we were promised? Well, it seems that after a week of Crankshaft being an asshole at the airport, we now have to deal with a week of Crankshaft being an asshole on a plane. Today’s strip actually nicely encapsulates what I frequently find off about the tone of this strip: this is a fairly zany gag, and an impossible one at that — you can’t actually open one of those doors in mid-flight by accident. It should be played pretty broadly. And yet everything about the art is actually pretty serious. Like, instead of just looking bored or wry or something, the flight attendant is actually running towards the back of the plane in panic. And Crankshaft’s face! That’s the face of a man who knows with absolute certainty that he’s about to die horribly, due to his own poor decisions. It’s the face I’ve wanted to see on Crankshaft for years, so I guess I’m not sure why I’m complaining so much about this.

Judge Parker, 6/27/13

Speaking of things that have been dragging on for two weeks against all expectations, Judge Parker Senior is still really mad about a bad review of his trashy mystery novel! The war criminal who dared disparage it is a professor at Princeton and Yale, which (a) isn’t a thing that happens, generally, but (b) should provide the Parker-Spencer-Drivers, who are fantastically wealthy and always get everything they want without putting forth any effort whatsoever, with a great opportunity to rail against “elitists.”

The Phantom, 6/27/13

UGH, the Phantom thinks World War I was still happening in 1919. Can we trust the veracity of any of the information from the Chronicle Chamber now?