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B.C., 4/12/13

Poetry is in essence an auditory medium, meant to be heard, and if that means that sometimes you have to sacrifice ease of comprehension to euphony, so be it! In unrelated news, the poem that Wiley is writing in today’s B.C. is confusing and also sounds stupid when you read it aloud. Anyway, ladies, don’t look get all uppity and dress too sexy at the gym, or you’re a whore who’ll lose your boyfriend, I guess? You don’t want to lose your boyfriend! He sounds like a real prize, what with all his opinions about your sexy gymwear.

Shoe, 4/12/13

See, because “carbon footprint” is a thing, but what if it were … carbon buttprint, eh? Wouldn’t that be funnier? Because of butts? I actually am enjoying Shoe’s violent temper tantrum, so it pains me to point out that any joke about “carbon buttprints” that doesn’t involve farts is garbage.

Spider-Man, 4/12/13

Kingpin is a busy CEO who doesn’t have time to travel to every dark alley in the city to personally taunt every superhero dosed with his terrifying mind-control gas. That’s why he turned to Cisco’s range of innovative telepresence solutions! Cisco’s Autonomous Hovering TerrorScreen® will navigate city streets along with your henchmen, beaming video and audio over encrypted private networks to your office/lair. You’ll be able to issue commands to your new willing slave and then get back to managing the rest of your diverse enterprise — all without stepping outside. Cisco: Tomorrow Starts Here™!

Funky Winkerbean, 4/12/13

Ha ha, Les got a big check because his sad book about his dead wife is going to be turned into a movie on basic cable, and then he got a boner! This plot is already so much more traumatizing than I could have possibly imagined.

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Mark Trail, 4/1/13

“On behalf of tournament officials, we’d like to apologize to you, Mark … apologize that your beloved ward was kidnapped and almost killed by one of our contestants! Ha ha, just kidding, we don’t feel responsible for that at all, and it doesn’t seem like you were that worried about it anyway, so why should we care? We do feel bad about the cheating, though, as that will make us look bad to your readers, who don’t give a rat’s ass about children but are passionate about the integrity of fishing tournaments.”

“Don’t worry, you do a good job … most of the contestants are honest fishermen — guys like Rod are the exception! When it comes to cheating at fishing, I mean. Rod’s pretty typical when it comes to kidnapping little kids. I don’t know what it is, but fisherman just can’t get enough of luring children into their vans. ‘Landfish,’ they call them. And Rusty wonders why I don’t take him fishing more often! Ha ha!”

Crankshaft, 4/1/13

As sad as “Crankshaft replies angrily to the punning TV newscaster” makes me, I think that “Crankshaft sullenly gets in on the punning TV newscaster’s pun-theme” is much, much worse.

Shoe, 4/1/13

“Get it, because burnt food gets all black and crispy? No, but seriously, Roz sells burned and expired food to the poor and desperately hungry, in defiance of local health department regulations and consumer safety laws.”

Family Circus, 4/1/13

Boy, Billy sure is angry at a pagan nature spirit! Nyaaah, where’s your omnipotent patriarchal creator deity now, Billy?

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Shoe and B.C., 3/26/13

Elementary school test questions as setups to jokes in comic strips: most played out cliché on the comics page, or mostest played out cliché on the comics page? I guess I shouldn’t complain about accuracy when the students being tested are anthropomorphic bird-people and/or sentient ants, but I do question the quality of instruction in the bird and ant educational systems. In Shoe, Skyler’s cynical, heavy-lidded expression in panel two shows that he understands what a bizarrely open-ended and unanswerable question he’s been presented with, presumably by whatever over-eager art teacher also thought that art puns based on a catchphrase from a 17-year-old movie would get elementary school kids enthusiastic about learning. The ant-child, meanwhile, in an act of defiance over what appears to be a test of his knowledge of old sayings that are actively incorrect, fills in the blanks with a plea for death. Frankly, these questions are both making a good case for a uniform, standardized testing regime with questions developed by government bureaucrats, if these are the locally-directed alternatives.

Mark Trail, 3/26/13

Maybe Mark does love Rusty after all? In order to perpetrate his completely misguided rescue scheme, he’s been forced to not verbalize a sentence he’s formed in his mind and confine it to a thought balloon instead, in what must be a superhuman effort on his part.

Spider-Man, 3/26/13

DAREDEVIL: “And that’s where attorney Matt Murdock comes in!”

SPIDER-MAN: “Wow! This I gotta see!”

[SEVEN HOURS AND HUNDREDS OF LEXISNEXIS SEARCHES LATER]

SPIDER-MAN: “Oh, man, was I ever wrong about this.”